The 4 P's For Building a Lasting Business

Do you have a plan? Is it written down? Is it on a wall? Is it executable? Don't keep thinking, oh, I just need to keep learning. I need to keep learning. Put a plan in place, make a decision. What's the offers, when are we going to launch them? What's the evergreen? What's going to be running? Like one or two serious decisions today about your plan changes everything. I thought I'd spend some today talking about what I'm hearing out on the road and maybe giving a little framework because I feel like I had to give this framework to like five or six people on the road in our industry who are struggling and they're struggling with burnout first and foremost. They're struggling with like having a business like this and they're frustrated with it. And even people who are having big wins, they're kind of upset about the episodic nature of their business. And right now what you don't want is an episodic business, right? When you're going into a difficult economic time where it's not, you know, the boom years, the last 15 years, you want to make sure that you got something pretty steady going, right? And so if you're just launch mode, you know, it's like, launch crash, launch crash, launch crash, launch crash. That's a pretty good recipe for ill mental health, you know. That is not something you want coming into this next, you know, season in the economy. And so I'll share a simple framework. I don't know if I've ever taught you guys this before. I call it the four P's. It's not the four pricing P's that you learn in your Business 101 classes. It's, it's, it's a little bit different. First, Pete, you already know, but common sense, not always common practice. I'm going to challenge you guys right now to be honest on this one. Each of these four Ps, I'm going to ask you to rate yourself on a score of one to ten. Just like the positive, you know, sentiment. One is not good. Ten is okay, ten is great. Okay, first P is your plan? Do you have a plan? Is it written down? Is it on a wall? Is it executable? Is it a plan that serves your business growth goals, but also your lifestyle, your life goals? What happened is this person, you know, is an eight figure type person in the industry, you know, launching, doing great launches, and I'll just share it with you. Very unhappy and their team, very unhappy. Their sentiment. That's why I started with that, their positive sentiment in the business was so low. Even though they're, like, cranking winning launches one after another, but the whole team, the whole vibe, the positive sentiment was low. And coaches in the room, you got to remember, you're always listening for that. You're always listening for energy. Always, like, you want to create a great connection with people, start with energy. So it's how I always get to the root of something with somebody, or I notice something right off the bat is just where their energy is at. And that, for me, often guides the conversation. So I noticed positive sentiment move this person, their key person, then two other marketers that they had. I was talking with them all, and it was just like a negative sentiment. There was a sense of frustration and burnout, and they were all just kind of tired of up and down, up and down, up and down. Busy not, Busy not. And for those who run teams before, you know what was happening with it was always like, what's the next launch? What's the next launch? They were also burning through team members who didn't enjoy what was happening there because they didn't know what was going on. There was like, no plan. There was no rhythm, as we'll talk about. And so if you think about the next six months of your business again, which is your super bowl in our industry, like, what's your plan? What's your plan this month, next month, the month after that, the month after that? Get together a plan. If you don't have a plan yet, you're still like, I don't know what I'm going to offer, or I'll figure out my new offer next month. You're cheating yourself and you're going to fall into a lower sentiment. You're going to experience less progress. Don't keep thinking, oh, I just need to keep learning. I need to keep learning. Put a plan in place, make a decision. What's the offers? When are we going to launch them? What's the evergreen? What's going to be running? Like, one or two serious decisions today about your plan changes everything. The benefit that many of you have, as my friend does, is they have money. You know, they have sufficient money to survive, sufficient money to have abundance or give something kids. And what I found over and over and over in this space, specifically, people with money more often than anyone else, fails to make a plan because they don't have to. And this is a, you know, a transition. They're transitioning from one thing into another. They're in a moment of transition, and so they're like, you know what, I'm comfortable, I'm safe. I actually don't have to do anything. You know, I'll just keep learning, I'll keep engaging. I like the learning. But at some point they never make the plan. And that cheats them from the progress, that cheats them from the impact. And then their sentiment goes down. Even if they're in the right group or they got the good business or they do know how to help people, they just never made a plan and executed it. And people like you, in a group like this, there is a high achievement mindset that needs to know that you are executing against a plan. This is what happens when people retire. They had a plan in their career, they had work plans and teams. And then they retire and they forget to make a plan. And a month goes by, they're all right, maybe even a year, maybe even two years of decompression. But at some point they kind of could start not just going stir crazy. They lose self esteem, their mental health goes down. Humans are goal driven, human people. We have to have a goal, a plan and be moving towards it to sense, to sense that we are activating our potential. Our sense of our potential is often tied to having a plan. Does that make sense? Your sense, your children's sense of their potential is often tied to having a plan. There's a lot of kids in college as an example, great capabilities, great potential, but they don't feel like it because they're just stirring through classes all the time. They're stirring through social situation. There's no plan in place, which sometimes feels great. You're in transition, you're seeking something new. You want a little more spontaneity, wonderful. But in business, it kills your progress. In business, your team gets the hell out of there. In business, you lose the drive. So please be honest with yourself about the quality of your plan over these next couple months. And if you haven't just taken the time to make one, make one you don't need. Well, I need to go watch a YouTube video on how to make a plan. No, you need a piece of paper and write the top P, L, A, N and just write out your plan. That's it. You don't need anything more in your life to make a plan today. No more podcasts, no more instruction. You don't need to log into Total Product Blueprint. No, no, no. What's the plan? Make it up. Just make the decision. Get going. I promise it will serve you. Okay? I promise it will serve you. And that's what this person was really struggling with was a plan. Once you have the plan, well now you have to have the process for manifesting it. The second P process in our world. You hear me? Relevant. Bring it up tons, tons of times as, as rhythm. Having that rhythm. And I know you guys hear that all the time, but let me give you the tangible example here. What happened with my friend, because their launch. Up, down, up, down, up, down with launch. The craziest thing was happening. Their team was miserable because they would burn themselves so hard to launch. Then they'd crash after the launch, try to catch up and serve everybody. But then listen to this. There was always a two to three or four month lullaby down period between the big launches. And the thing is, no one had a rhythm between those things. So what ends up happening is, you know, they've staffed up, but then between the launches, everyone's kind of looking around like, what do we do here? And so what do they do? They play on the Internet. What do they do? They go out for three hour lunches. What do they do? They start spending plenty of time looking at other jobs, other cities. See, as a leader, you have to be very, very thoughtful about process and what everybody in your company is doing. And I don't pretend to be a master at this, but what I have learned is if there's not a rhythm of what just people are doing and a rhythm of leads coming in and a rhythm of, you know, of predictability between all the big promotions, people kind of go crazy and they go idle. It doesn't mean you can always maintain the volume for the perfect number of your team. Right? There's plenty of times in my career, or plenty of times between our launches or something, our team's idle. You know, factor goes up or down, that's, that's normal. But if it goes to zero, the people hate it. You got too many people on your team who are idle between things and they start talking smack. There's no plan here. There's no process. What are we even doing here? Why am I even spending my time here? Why am I? They start saying, why am I wasting my time? Five people on this person's team told me that same phrase. Just feels like we're wasting time. Why am I wasting my time here? And when anyone ever says that it has nothing to do usually with the purpose because they took the job, the purpose was there. They got detached from it because there was no manifestation of the purpose through the plan and the process. Now, some of you as solopreneurs, you Got a plan. But what is your process? When do you work? What do you do when you work? I was with Michael Phelps two nights ago. He's the all time winningest Olympian and really great guy. And he was speaking an event and we were both there and they brought him in, they kind of interviewed him. So I did a big keynote, then he did an interview. Then he and I did a, like a private Q and a with their VIPs. And it was awesome to hear somebody at that caliber talk about process over and over and over. I mean, he must have said the word 2,000 times between his interview and then our VIP. And, you know, I'm sitting next to him and I start hearing him as he's saying process, how important that word was for him. And, you know, it was like, there's plenty of days he didn't want to swim. Plenty of days he told his coach, I, I hate this, why I'm even here. He talked about a, a time in his career where for six months he was just trying to beat this one number in the pool. For six months. By the way, he swims every day at this point in his career, he's swimming every single day. And for six months, all he's trying to do is beat this one number that he has beaten several times before. So it's not like he's trying to do a personal record. He's actually just trying to get back to a personal record and beat it even just by 1/100. Even just 1/100th. He'd be happy to beat it. And he's talking about how he's telling his, his, his coach. I just, why am I even here? This is stupid. We're not doing it. And the coaches said, trust the process. Get in the pool every day. Trust the process. Get in the pool. And you know, he had no idea when he was going to break or hit that record again. He had no clue. Trust the process. Get in the pool, right? Everyone's like, brendan, how are you so consistent in your content? Well, plenty of it's not that good, but I showed up and I made it that day for 15 years. Just the process, right? There's a lot of mornings like this morning. Believe me, after that trip, I did not want to get up and do what I had to do this morning, right? Which is the same thing I do every morning. My morning routine, you know, reading, movement, planning, making my four posts every single day and then come out, send the reminder emails, get the studio turned on, get ready. Nope. This is one of those Mornings, I was like, I'd rather I'm in home in two weeks. I'd love to go on a long walk with Denise. I'll do that tonight. But I was like, trust this product. Go through the motions, Brennan. Just get in there. And then I found myself right before we got on this thing. I was hyped to see you guys hyped three hours ago. I was like, ah, okay. Make it fun, make it efficient. Let's go, Brendan. Trust the process. Get in the pool. My friends, if your sentiment is low, it's because your process is random. See, when we sense progress, our sentiment goes up. When there's not progress, we don't. But see, we have to be okay with the fits and the starts of that progress. Again, I know so many of you already know all this stuff. I'm just making sure that you're checking in because just like Phelps going to his, you know, Olympics, you're going into your Olympics these next four months. For people in our industry, this is when we 3 and 4x everything. Like, this is an unbelievable. This is like the greatest time to be serving people in thought leadership is always the season. I just want to make sure you're checking yourself. Okay. The third thing my friend was struggling with. First, he didn't have a plan, and his team didn't know have a plan. No one knew a plan. No one was on a rhythm. He wasn't on a rhythm. He was just showing up and slaying dragons every day. Every day, show up, slay dragons. But no consistency in the day. No consistent blocks of time with himself for creativity. No consistent blocks of time for specific team members. No, just no consistency at all. They were just, okay, let's gather. Launch, slay dragons. Launch, slay dragons. Too much idle time in between. No plan, no process. Second, though, and this is our third. Third for you, this is really important. What are your practices? And this one are your personal practices for stress management? Personal practices to avoid burnout. Personal practices to enjoy life outside of work. This guy and most of his team, they hadn't had anything outside of work in their lives for almost three years now. They had no practices to avoid burnout. And the challenge is they're pulling it off financially. They're just miserable at it. And what are we all doing if our service feels stressful and miserable all the time? So you have to have your practices to avoid burnout, and you have to figure out what those are. I'll give you an example. Last night, all I want to do is go to bed. I'M gonna say, I just wanna go lay down and go to bed. I'm like, nope. You've been in plane, trains, automobiles. You're gonna do 20 minutes of yoga right now. I could barely keep my eyes open. I'm like, ugh, just go to bed. I'm like, but if I don't stretch and move my body and open it up a little bit and I go to bed, then tomorrow my hips are sore, my back is sore, my shoulder's sore, which makes it feel dreadful to be able to serve you guys. So I just do a little mobility work, nothing crazy. Literally just feel 15, 20 minutes rolling around on the ground, opening up my body, doing some yoga and flow. And all of a sudden I went to bed, passed out. Woke up this morning, felt just fine. If I hadn't done that this morning. Been rough. These personal practices, they take priority in your life. They have to. They have to. I have, you know, this morning I have like 72 messages on my phone I have to return. Right? These are ones team can't do, spouse can't do. Like, I got to handle 72. Well, last night I thought, I'll just bang through those. I started banging some through. No, I'm not going to bang those through. I'm going to do my practice to avoid burnout. I'm going to do some mobility work right now. Now that's a prioritization, right? Some of those 72 are my family. Like, literally my family. And it was like, yeah, I could take that 20 minutes with my family right now, but I can also talk to him on Sunday. Like, right now I got to do some self care. And so do you have your practices to avoid burnout right now? If you're feeling tired, stressed, discouraged, burnt out, unmotivated, not even, like, excited to look at your goals, you're probably just tired. You need to start doing more resets throughout the day. Back to the Phelps story. Somebody asked him about it. He's like, don't you ever get tired just going to swim every day, you know, for decades? And he's like, yeah. And I brought up the sort of the metaphor of the pit stop, which I'm always talking with you guys about, about, you know, not burning and then once a weekend, like, taking an hour off. But no, how do you find time in every hour to do a reset, release tension, set intention. Anyway, we got on that track and he shared how. He's like, oh, yeah. He's like, people would be surprised. He's like, I don't know, probably two, three Times a day I just go behind my office and I have a couch there and I take a nap or I just lay down with my eyes closed. Like two, three times a day he's just going, laying down, right? It's like, and this is literally one of the most successful humans alive in athletics ever. And it's not something he just started. He always did that. And you could say, yeah, yeah, it's because he's tired. It's like, no, because he still does it now as a two time retired Olympian, you know, here, here he's like trying to start his business. He has goals, he's trying to earn more so he can buy a new place for him and his family that they're looking at. Just like all of us has goals. But he's talking about how, yeah, he still knows he has to go take a break practices to avoid burnout. Okay. So by the way, you have to make sure your team has that. That's the hard thing as a leader, like, you just think, ah, they'll take care of it. They won't. You have to talk about wellness with your team. You have to help them understand because remember phase two, which is where most of the world is, they're still just in coping mode and you got to make sure that that's handling. Remember, phase two is not something we avoid. It's like we still have to help people cope, manage their wellness. But then as we move into phase three, if they haven't done that work, they're going to burn out so fast in the phase three. Right. I think everyone thinks there's so much burnout right now. Like, wait till you see February with the economy going where it's going. If you think burnout is real now, I'm like, not even close where we're heading most of the world, I mean, it's still astounding to me. Most people in phase two did not develop practices. They tried new things to adjust to the stress, to adapt, but they never developed the habits, the practices. So most of the world just dabbled a really long time in wellness, right? They downloaded the meditation app, but they don't have a meditation practice. They learned some mobility or yoga or something. They tried it, they dabbled, but there's no practice there. So now as the world heats up on responsibility, obligation, demand, it gets more expensive and more challenging. Those who didn't grab a practice, they're going to be burned out in quarter one next year. Which for me, with all due respect, while I, I am, you know, I feel the empathy of that. And I feel sad about that as a business person, like sweet. This is the time of separation. I love it. You know what it's like if you're on a race car track and you start pulling past everybody, you kind of feel bad cause they're your friends and they're not going as fast as you. But you're also like, put them, let's go. I have empathy and I'm pumped to out compete them. And I don't think my out competing actually has anything to do with just the plan or the pras or the process. It's that I've given the plan and the process to the whole world for 10 years and my practices allow me to do them longer with more joy and more efficiency than the average person's. So the average persons have the same plan, the same process, they're doing the same thing, but they can't maintain it. The high performance isn't there because there's no practices there. So just a reminder, how are your practices? Fourth, big idea today. So simple people. You gotta have the right people on the bus. You, you ought to have the right support team. You got to have the people around you, your family, the kids, your spouse, your partners. They got to be clear about the plan, understanding about the process, part of the practice and in it with you. And for those who haven't got support or you keep thinking you're going to hire or whatever it's like, and you've heard me say this all year, you got to get the support, you got to get the team, got to get the A players. We have, I don't like, we have four new people starting at growth day this month in October. Four new people. And it's just like, okay. And some of them really, we're hiring for the future there, really hiring for the future there. With all four roles. We, we've been chugging along without those four roles. But it's like, okay, looking out in the plan, longer term process, thinking in mind, making sure not going to burn out the team. Let's bring these people on. Even though we've been succeeding without them. It's that thinking always about your plan and your process and your people so that you can support them. And many of you, the greatest gift you're going to give yourself is finally somebody to help you. You know, the holidays are coming up. Invest in your team. The holidays are coming up. Buy yourself an executive assistant versus buying yourself, you know, some new wheels. You know, I meet so many entrepreneurs, they keep buying new cars, but they still haven't bought an assistant. I'm like, help me understand this. You know, I think it's. I'm not a car guy, you know, I'm not a. I'm not a thing person. I don't have a lot of things, believe it or not. So I'm like, what is going on? That you'll buy material items but not support to help you serve more people? You'll buy material items but not support so you have more time with your family to enjoy the material items. You'll buy material items but not support to help you reach more people in a more meaningful way and keep customers more happy. Like, I think the consumerism thing is just absolutely trouncing people's ability to get progress. And I think it's. Personally, I've just seen it get worse and worse and worse, and I'm not sure where that comes from. But I think consumerism has taken people's brains from thinking about how to actually enjoy life. And they think the material is going to bring them that. And often it's actually the relationships. Like, you know, don't. I remember when Denise and I were just starting out, I really wanted to buy a laser printer. I know this is a stupid story, but I really like laser printers. Back then, they were no joke. They were like $1,500. Anyone remember these times? Like, I don't even know what they cost now, but I remember it was gonna be my first multicolor laser printer. It was $1,500, and I wanted that thing so bad. Instead, I had this stupid, beat up Hewlett Packard. And if you've ever bought a Hewlett Packard printer, you already know life sucks. You know, it's like one of the worst product categories of all time. They could care less. Like, how hard can we make it to set up one of these things, right? So I wanted this stupid printer is $1,500. And I went to buy it, and I was like, oh, my gosh. And I heard myself say on the way to buy the printer, I don't even have time to go buy this stupid printer. I heard myself say it. My brain goes, I don't have time to go buy the stupid printer. But I had the fun. I finally had the fun to go buy the super printer. I pulled over on the road, I heard myself say it. I grabbed my phone, I typed it in. I don't even have time to buy the stupid printer. I took the next off ramp, turned right back home, and hired an assistant. I'm like, wait a minute. If I don't have time to buy a printer. Well, an assistant. I could get an assistant at that time, 500, 1000, 1500 bucks. So I think I end up getting assistant for like 700 bucks or something like that a month. And I was like the time that person saved me alone, right. Just that month mattered more than buying a new printer that I didn't really need. I just wanted. I know that's so simple, but a lot of people make business decisions. I got a new laptop. Everyone thinks I got to buy the brand new laptop and the brand new phone. I'm like, buy the assistant, buy the salesperson, buy the marketer. Get the support there. That's what I'm talking about when I say people. And why do I say this? Because guess where I was meeting my friend in this fancy new office and I was like, wow, this is a nice office, man. And I thought about it and I was like, there's two ways. Hey, sometimes you hire an office because you're hiring the people and all goes together. But his was broken. He had over invested in the office, but not actually hiring people in it. And so it's like, yo, this. You're struggling to keep your life together. How much did that stupid sink over there cost? And I literally put. He's like, what? I said that kitchenette, how much was that kitchenette? He's like, well that was like $45,000. I'm like $45,000. 45. That's two assistants. You can have two people helping you do all of your social media, all of your videos, all of your blog, all of your YouTube for that two people. But you bought a kitchenette and the. And it looks stupid. It was the wrong colored countertop. But anyway, I could go on. I hope this is resonating some way for you guys. I hope it's hitting for you the four Ps Plan, Process, Practices, people. If you can get your head around some of this, you can make your journey more positive, more joyful and more efficient. 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