Scaling Success with Systems and Processes with Alex Charfen

I go through the attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type, and when you look at society in general, we have a bias for figuring out what's wrong with human beings and figuring out what's bad, what's wrong, what's disordered, what's disabled, and it's a survival bias. I think one of the biggest issues for us as entrepreneurs is that we've always felt isolated and always. And so many of us have felt like a party of one at the different stages of an entrepreneurial journey. We are learning and evolving and understanding different parts of who we are. I think the one constant is that we always have to have a clear outcome, and the one constant is that we are always in the hunt for this elusive feeling called momentum.

So, Alex, I am so excited to have you here. Listen, man, I feel like it's been a good decade that I've had the pleasure of hearing you, feeling your positive energy and learning from you in different communities in different areas all over the world, which has been super insightful. In fact, I'm a proud member of your program, which we're going to hear a little bit more about here shortly. But I want to hit you right out of the gates here. Let's. You know, one of the most inspiring things that you talk to me about, and I think our listeners need to hear this, is this concept of the entrepreneurial personality type. I would love to hear. And before you jump into that, just a quick little plug, guys, here. I got Alex's book here, the Entrepreneurial Personality Type. Fantastic read. Every single listener should be having this book. We'll make sure that you have the links in order to get that. But, Alex, tell us what this entrepreneurial personality type is all about.

Bobby, you know, to explain the ept, it's kind of, it's easier to explain the origin story about how that book came about. You know, probably now it's eight or nine years ago. I was going through some, some shifts and changes in my business. I was writing a book that was meant for entrepreneurs, and I was given the task of writing a book proposal. And in a book proposal, one of the things you do is you outline your market and you tell, you know, you explain your market. And I think the limitation I was given was 300 words. And I was having this, like, existential crisis trying to explain entrepreneurs in 300 words for real. Like, I, I, I'm like, I don't know how to do this. Like, I can't, you know, I was, I was stuck. I had, like, that crazy writer's block. I switched from the computer to paper. Nothing was working. I got up, I went for a walk, I talked to my wife, went for another walk, and then I came back and I'm like, okay, the challenge that I'm having here is this 300 word limit. So I'm going to remove the limitation of 300 words and I'm just going to start writing and we can edit everything out later. And that was on a Saturday morning. And by Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening, I think I had written and dictated somewhere around 20,000 words and. And it became that book.

Close. You were close to the limit. Yeah. 300. Yeah.

I'm like, my, my book proposal section literally became the book. And you know, Bob, here's why I think. It was so hard for me to write, and here's, here's why I think this stuff came out. You know, I was always a very different kid. I didn't get along socially with other kids. I had trouble with teachers. Thank God there was four or five teachers throughout my childhood. Really, probably three or four teachers throughout my childhood. They kind of saved my life. They understood me. But I. I always felt fundamentally misunderstood and confused by the world. And as a kid, I wanted to figure out this thing called success. You know, my father was entrepreneur, not a hugely successful one in my lifetime, but before I was born, he was. I saw people who were successful around me and I had this feeling like I was the furthest thing from success that you could. You could have. And I remember being with my mom at a garage sale one day. That's where we got most of our stuff. When I was a kid. We were. We were like hanging on to the lowest limb of, of upper middle or lower middle class. And we were at a garage sale and a guy had this box full of tapes, like audio tapes. The ones that had real, real tape, which a lot of people are probably.

I remember those.

Yeah, a lot of people are like, what is he talking about? And it had some books in it and it had a $100 price tag. And I, I was just. I was pitching my mom on buying this thing because I felt like, man, there's, there's books in there. I want. I know who they are. There's Tony Robbins, bander and grindler, Dr. Wayne Dyer. Some like, really influential personal development stuff. And so as we're walking around this garage sale, I'm telling my mom, hey, I really need to see this. I want this, you know? And I'm like telling her all the reasons why I need it. And as we were leaving because there was no way my mom was going to spend $100. Our budget for a weekend garage sale trip was probably 10 to $20. And the guy who was running the garage sale walked around from the table he was sitting at, grabbed the box, walked over as we're leaving, and he said, hey, you probably need this more than anybody I've ever met. And if I give you these, do you promise you'll read them and listen to them? And I said, yes. And it was incredible. But by the way, if I wasn't awkward before starting to listen to Tony Robbins and Banner and Grindler and, you know, Wayne Dyer, like, it boosted the awkwardness. Here I am, a kid in like second or third grade, and the teacher's like, we're going to write an essay. And I'm like, yes, but what's our intention? How does it connect us to the source?

You know what? You know? Oh, yeah, you went straight weird.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I was weird and that was just like the T booster. And, and so I started reading some personal development. And what happened was very quickly personal development started to conflict with each other. And so I, I, I, I got frustrated with it and I started reading the stories of successful people. And it started this lifelong obsession of trying to understand what creates a successful human being. And so I started reading biographies and autobiographies and third party accounts and articles and anything I could get my hands on of the people who matter to be, remember, remembered, the people who we remember. And what happened was the more I read, the more I thought I was going to find people who were nothing like me. And I found the opposite. You know, Thomas Edison was sent home from school at 5 years old for being too slow and never went had a formal education. Thomas or Einstein failed algebra. It was so great. I remember reading that story right around the time I was failing algebra. I'm like, mom, I'm good. Einstein failed and look at who he is, you know, and, and what I found was the more you read about the people who change the world, the more you understand just how fundamentally different they are and how they're just wired differently and my the entrepreneurial personality type. The book was a manifesto, you know, the subtitle is your guide to the most important and misunderstood of people among us. And, and it's my manifesto on why the people who change the world are the ones who are different. And, you know, what's interesting is society has this equation and it's so present today and it's so triggering and frustrating for me. I Talk to parents all the time who are going through this. You know, we have this belief system that the people who don't look like everyone else and learn like everyone else and talk like everyone else and show up like everyone else are broken. We need to diagnose them often, we need to medicate them, we need to put them in a box, we need to put a label on them. And if you look at history, there is definitive proof that the people who don't look like everyone else, talk like everyone else, learn like everyone else, show up like everyone else, are exactly the people who change the world. And so I came up with this concept, the entrepreneurial personality type. And you know, my belief is we are that tiny percentage of the population that gets up every morning, goes into the future, creates a new reality, comes back to the present, and demand it becomes real. And entrepreneurial personality types, the people who are hardwired like you and I, the people who are judged by the rest of the world, the people who feel awkward. Awkward. The people who feel different are exactly the ones who throughout history have changed the world. And recently, one of my neighbors whose son was diagnosed with ADHD and high functioning autism, told me she read the entrepreneurial personality type and she started a support group with other parents so that they could just talk about what's going on with their kids. And they use this book as the basis. And you know, when I, when I hear stories like that, when I hear feedback like that, like it, it just reminds me I'm on this mission that I think I've been gifted because the way that this book was written came out so easily and came out so fast. And by the way, it was 22,000 words in a weekend. Getting the book actually published took like two years. But.

Not that easy, right?

No, no, the beginning was easy, and then, then it definitely was a lot of work. But on that same, you know, at the same time, I just, I feel this calling, this compulsion, this motivation to help entrepreneurs understand themselves better. Because I think there are so many of us that feel judged and different and misunderstood, and we start accepting the labels that society thrusts on us. And the reality is it doesn't matter what you're going through, what challenges you have, what diagnosis you've gotten, what issue you're facing, someone just like us has been there and gone on to change the world. And I think we all need to remember that.

Yeah, dude, that is so powerful. And I, I guarantee you every listener who's out there right now is going, oh, maybe I'm not broken right because there's always a feeling like, man, people just don't get me. You know, people don't understand what I'm going through. The way that I see the world, the way that things change, people just don't get me. And people look at us like we're broken, but we're not broken to your point. You know, these are the people, we are the people as entrepreneurs who are going out and making a change or an impact in the world greater than, you know, like David Neagle talks about middle class society of just being that middle class mindset of let's not, you know, move too far out of the normal. Because that's where we're supposed to be, right here. We're not supposed to say things we shouldn't say. You know, we get in trouble at school, we get in trouble at home. You know, we're just supposed to work hard. We're not supposed to think outside the box. We're supposed to just be like everybody else. Where, you know, these are the people, the Einstein's of the world who, yes, they've been judged and, and criticized, but those are the people who make a massive impact on the world. And I think you've defined it so wonderfully in this book.

Thank you, Bob. Thanks, I appreciate it. You know, I think when you look at society and you know, I just want to, I want to just speak to that feeling of being broken. I have this, this statement in the book, there's nothing wrong with you and you're not alone. And the reason I use that as a mantra for us as entrepreneurs is because so many of us has, have been convinced that we are in that place that is broken, that we are dysfunctional or disordered, or there's some issue that we have. And you know, when I, in the book, I go through the attributes of the entrepreneurial personality type and when you look at society in general, we have a bias for figuring out what's wrong with human beings and figuring out what's, what's bad, what's wrong, what's disordered, what's disabled. And it's a survival bias. You know, if you're going into war, you want to know the guy who has one eye because he's going to be a handicap, or you want to know the person who's injured because it's going to be a handicap. So this survival bias we have towards discovering what is wrong with you is massive. And so when you look at society in general, there's this entire engine propelled by, you know, the psychiatric industry. And really by the pharmaceutical industry and big food and creating more and more labels of what's wrong with you and what's different and what's. What's. You know, what do we need to correct, what do we need to medicate? And if, if you really look at it for us as entrepreneurial personality types, the same attributes that make us look like we are disordered and not okay and need help when we lower pressure and noise in our lives, when we eliminate the distraction in our lives, those same attributes make us look gifted. I'll just, I'll share one really quick. You know, one of my favorites is high Sensitivity and awareness. There's 10 in the book. But one of my favorites is high sensitivity and Awareness because I have this, you know. Do you relate to high sensitivity and awareness, Bob?

100%, yeah.

So for me, when I was a kid, high sensitivity manifested as if I was in a class and I leaned my head back and I looked at the fluorescent lights, I would see black spots and it would make me have a panic attack. And if I was in a class and there was noise anywhere, I went to a school that was like an open format, worst idea ever. But I would hear the class, two teachers over, and I would be listening to that lecture, not the lecture I was in front of. So, like, that high sensitivity awareness, when there was high pressure and noise, the entire world got loud. You know, it's funny, I'll share this in front of crowds and I'll say, how many of you relate to this? And like, a bunch of hands go up, some don't. And I'm like, okay, well, just remember the next time you're looking for an address and, and you turn down the radio, that pressure and noise, so you can't see, you know, and on the contrary, when we lower pressure and noise in our lives, when we take care of ourselves, when we're fully hydrated, when we're eating the right foods, when we're moving in a way that is productive. That high sensitivity and awareness is how we see opportunity. It's how we see things other people don't see. It's how, you know, we. We create the world around us. And so when I look at it, a lot of those things that have been labeled as. As disorders and disabilities are actually the strengths that we have. And there's this coin flip that happens where when you lower pressure and noise, that same thing that is attacking you and making you look like you're not a good student or making it look like you're not a good Team member or whatever it is, you lower the noise. And that's the exact same thing that really leads to massive success.

Absolutely. I. And I got a question for you, and I want to almost follow this or entrepreneurial personality type up to the level of success from being judged and criticized for being different to the point where that difference in, you know, approach to life has created some form of success. We go to the other side, you know, and I don't know if this is maybe a Covid related issue, but for sure, it seemed heightened to me. You know, when somebody has some form of success in their business as an entrepreneur, all of a sudden that becomes a negative as well. Like how lucky people are that, you know, like, I've heard that so often, oh, how nice it must be for you that you get to go to your daughter's soccer game. I'm like, huh, I just worked 22 hours today. But I did. I was able to hit my daughter's soccer game. So, you know, what's your take on that? And maybe how can we as individuals help eliminate that noise of other people and that judgment and that criticism for even finding a level of success that's just different from somebody else?

Yeah, I love that you brought that up, Bob, because I think one of the biggest issues for us as entrepreneurs is that we've always felt isolated and alone. Always. And so many of us. I know I have and I. And so many of us have felt like a party of one. It's like, oh, there's this group over there and they all fit and there's this group over there and they all fit. And like, I don't have that group. And it's not until we get a little older. It's not until we get some exposure. It's not until we get out there, when we get around other people who are entrepreneurs, it's like nervous system regulation. And we are literally with our tribe, with the people we should be. You know, and I think back 10,000 years ago, and I look at the human tribe and, you know, there's. There's these classifications of people that I see like today. But I look at it evolutionarily. You know, there's this huge group of people that are caretakers, people who love to take care of other people and they want to. Want to make other people feel good. And, you know, when I talk to groups of entrepreneurs, I'll often ask, like, how many of you think you're a caretaker? And a bunch of hands go up. And then I ask the question, how many of you like to change bedpans and the hands all go down and it's because we have caretaker tendencies. But man, Bob, there are people out there who really love changing bedpans. I've talked to them. I always am sitting there thinking, no, me neither, me neither. Like, if I'm changing a bedpan, I want to know why I didn't write a check and you know, and get out of that. And then there's this other group of people. They're the, their communicators. They love to talk, they love to express themselves, they love to like, be in conversation with people. And you know, my, my qualification question for communicator is do you enjoy small talk? And you know, I'll ask that same question. Bunch of hands goes up, oh yeah, I love to communicate.

Small talk.

Not a chance. You know, whenever I get into a small talk conversation, I'm like, do I fake a heart attack or stab myself in the leg to get out of this? You know, it's, it's one of the most difficult things, right? And, but communicators will have a 45 minute discussion about a 30 minute TV show. And I can't even, like, I, I can't even hook in. Like, I, even if I'm, if I'm standing next to him, my mind's in a hundred different places. And the third group of people that I see out there is the coordinators. They're the people who love contracts. Not because there's a deal on the other side, but they love the contract and they love the details and red tape and like rules and structure. Entrepreneurs do not often think that they're one of these, but when you look at it, there's a huge population of people out there and we need them. And my qualification question for that is, you know, do you like being on committees? And entrepreneurs will always put their hands down. And if you look at our evolutionary tribe, we have these caretakers and coordinators and communicators. What's missing, the way I look at it is it's the evolutionary hunter. It's the person who, 10,000 years ago, you, me and the other people just like us on the tribe would gather up sticks and stones in the morning and go out and make sure the human tribe survives and go out and kill something and bring it back. And when I look at why so many of us feel broken as entrepreneurs, it's because there's no hunt anymore. You know, there's, there's the, the energy that we have in our body, the millennia of programming that we need to get up every day, go on the hunt, and make the human tribe survive is what causes that restless agitation that. That we feel, that anxiety, that feeling that everything has to happen all at once and right away. And when I look at that, that equation as entrepreneurs, if we understand that about ourselves and we understand that's who we are, and we get clear on where we're going, and we have perspective as to whether we're being successful or not, like some type of a scoreboard, and we have clarity as to what our accountability is. And the people around us, we can get out of that feeling of being broken and go out and change the world. And that, you know, when. Whenever something happens in the world, when there's a crisis, when there's an issue, during COVID During the mortgage crisis, whatever it is, I tell people the same thing. Look, you know, here's what's going to happen. Somebody just like you and me is going to figure out a solution. They're going to get it into momentum, they're going to take the world with us, and we're going to get past this because we always have. And the more we understand that about ourselves as entrepreneurs, as evolutionary hunters, the more we stay in that place where we're on the hunt. And, you know, here's what's interesting for people with our personality type, when we set a goal or an outcome, when we say, hey, here's what we're going to hunt, as we cross that finish line, it loses importance to us, and we need to reset the bar. And I feel like that's a survival mechanism that has kept human beings alive for thousands of years.

Yeah. And I can so relate to that. You know, you. You set an expectation or, you know, a budget in your business, where here's the bar that you want to accomplish, and as you approach it, you feel demotivated.

Yeah, right.

And you go, what do I do now? Where we should be going, and we should be hunting and continuing to. To evolve that. Now, you. I like how. And if you didn't talk about the evolutionary hunter, I was going to make sure you did, because I love that. But I think that one of the key words in there is the evolution. And I feel like, you know, some people may be relating to certain components of this right now, but I can tell you that I, you know, my evolution as a hunter has changed from when I started in 2008 to today. You know, my. My attention to detail was much higher back in 2008 because it had to be right, because somebody had to be paying attention to that detail. But now that you surround yourself and as you evolve and you build, you know, a team around you, you end up being that hunter that, you know, let's go find our kill. Right, Versus what's the detail? How do we get the sticks ready? You know, how do we plan this out? You know, maybe that was the initial stage because that's you had to go through to get to where you are. And, you know, I feel like there's a lot of people who may go. I don't necessarily feel one element or another, but it doesn't mean you can't evolve or change into that along your journey. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. I think, you know, at the different stages of an entrepreneurial journey, we are learning and evolving and understanding different parts of who we are. I think the one constant is that we always have to have a clear outcome, you know, and. And the one constant is that we are always in the hunt for this elusive feeling called momentum. You know, I've got a podcast called Momentum for the entrepreneurial personality type. The word momentum is one of those words that I don't just say it. I don't just read it. I feel it. You know, there's. There's a physiological feeling to say to saying, like, momentum, and. And. And am I moving forward? Am I making things happen? And I think for so many of us, what we don't realize is that's what we're chasing. We're not chasing the outcome. We're not just wanting to get to the goal. We want to get to the place where we feel like we are, or we want to stay in the place where we feel like we're in momentum. And, you know, when I ask people and I go out and speak and I say, like, what does it feel like for you to be in momentum? The answers I get are really interesting. Usually depends on what region or part of the country or. Or part of the world I'm in. But I get answers like, you know, it feels ecstatic. It feels amazing. It feels like being high, that's usually California or Colorado. You know, it feels like, you know, it feels like you're just. You're living on oxygen. And then finally someone will say, it feels like I'm alive. And for people like us, that feeling of being in momentum, where you're knocking down your outcomes, where you're making things happen, where the world is following in your wake, that is the feeling of actually being alive. And when we're out of momentum, when we're not in that place, it literally feels like we are dying. And so the recognition of that, the understanding of the fact that when there is high pressure and noise in our lives and we can't see the forest for the trees and we don't have clear outcomes and we're overwhelmed usually in some part by our own making, that's when we feel like we're not actually who we need to be and who we are. And that's when we look like we're broken. And when we get into that place of momentum, that's when we look like the most talented people in the world. And you see this, you know, you see this in, in the lives of, of extraordinarily successful people. You see periods of massive momentum and periods of self destruction. And it's like those things almost go hand in hand. But once we understand it, we can stay out of those periods of self destruction a lot more than we normally would.

Totally. And I, I agree with that so much. And you know, you and I are both continuous learners. I know we're reading constantly, you know, even the science of cognitive behavioral theory and, and momentum. Right. The science behind momentum. And one of the things that we obviously, you know, we're, we're financial experts with our team. One of the areas that we encourage people, you know, you talk about having a vision of, and goals and knowing where you're at and we focus a lot on that. You know, numbers don't lie. Let's make sure that we have a dashboard that's showing us exactly where we're at. But one of the, one of the elements of what we teach is that we should always be reflecting back on where we've come from. And there's a lot of science, obviously, you know, you're aware, related to, you know, shit, we're going to fall, you know, rate at our budget and our expectation. And we have this sense of demotivation because we're almost there. But if we look back and we see what we've accomplished over a short period of time, we feel re energized and remote motivated and feel in momentum. And it's almost like we have to trick ourselves to continuously be there because we will self destruct if we feel like we're not making progress.

Yeah. And it's so much worse today. You know, I feel like over. So I'm 50 and I've been running businesses for over 30 years and you know, I ran businesses before email, before the Internet. And so I know that dates me and makes me sound ancient, but I've seen a Lot of change. And when you look at the entrepreneurial environment today, we've created this fairyland of if you're not making a million dollars in 90 days, you're not successful. If you don't have a million followers, you're nobody. If you don't have, you know, there's all these comparisons that we can get into against other people. And I think in the past, that was there, but today you can't get away from it. And I think, you know, Bob, what you said is so poignant and so real. As entrepreneurs, if we can use other people for inspiration and we put the discipline in place of comparing ourselves to ourselves, where we've been and where we are now, we completely change the conditions for momentum in our lives if we stay in that place of comparison. You will never feel successful if you start comparing yourself to yourself and looking at the numbers and, you know, especially with what you do. I think one of the biggest issues for entrepreneurs is we want to stay in this state of flow and the state of momentum in the state of possibility. And we don't often look at scoreboards. We don't often look at real numbers and say, like, hey, what progress have we made here? And when we do, you know, it's one of the things we focus on in our program at Simple Operations, you know, we. We help visionaries start really looking at the right things to understand just how much progress they've made and, and what ends up happening is they go from this place of dissatisfaction and frustration and almost a level of irritation with themselves to this place of, hey, I've really come a long way, and if I did this in the last year, what can I do in the next year? And if I did that in the next year, what could I do in 10 years? And suddenly we see businesses go from being plateaued and stalled and frustrating and not growing to exploding.

Absolutely. And you know what? This ties into something that I know we wanted to talk about again. I'm a proud member of Simple Operations and the systemization that, you know, we've learned and how to implement that and how to create what you coin as a boring business. And, you know, it was something. When you said that to me, it resonated because I think us as entrepreneurs, we're always, you know, catching butterflies and reaching for what's the next idea. But, you know, in our last sort of in person session, you talked about, you know, the intention here for entrepreneurs is to almost have a reality check here and say we don't need to constantly change everything every Moment stability is good. And creating a boring business is exactly the intention of what we should be looking towards. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Absolutely. You know, in our last in person session, I'll just, I'll bring everybody into the conversation we were having. There was a lot of talk of wanting to execute projects immediately and needing everything done all at once and right away. And you know, one of the things that I teach and I talk about and I point out to entrepreneurs is that if we're willing to delay gratification, it's a superpower because we have this. The. The only timing that's acceptable to the majority of us is all at once and right away, and it just doesn't work all at once and right away.

That's me. That's me.

Me too. By the way. This is a discipline. You know, I often call this coaching inception. As I'm talking and coaching somebody else, I'm like, oh, dude, you need to listen to yourself. You know, I look at every. Every time I'm coaching, every time I'm helping somebody as, and, and I think, how. What part of this do I need? Because this is just as much an opportunity for me. And in that session, I asked everybody, like, why did you get into entrepreneurship? And I wrote them on a board and, and the words that we got were things like freedom time, freedom, income, possibility, being able to do whatever I want, being able to travel, time with family, time for health, all these different things. Impact, contribution. Nowhere on the board did it say, I want to launch a new project every day. And I let everybody finish. You know, I let everyone in the room completely finish. And I said, okay, so now let's take a step back and let's look at this board. How do we get here? We get here by building a business that is predictable. We get here by building a business that is stable. We get here, and I, like, I always hesitate to say it, but we get here by building a boring business. And here's what I mean by that. A boring business is one where all the customers are taken care of and you're not putting out fires. A boring business is one where there's process, structure, and routine that runs the business, not personality that runs the business. And a boring business is one where everybody understands what they're doing and they do it every day. And you know, so many entrepreneurs come to me and they have, whatever size business they have, if they're in the six figures, they always want to go to multiple seven figures. If they're already there, they want to go to eight figures. If they're already at eight figures, they want to go to multiple eight figures. When entrepreneurs commit to a stable, predictable, process run business, that's when they get into those numbers. And we have this track record. You know, we've worked with over 400 businesses at Simple Operations. And it, you know, that's, that's a, that's a good number, but it's a very small population in the entrepreneurial world. But the percentage of those businesses that have gone from one tier to another is like 70, 80%. Either six figures to seven or seven to multiple sevens or seven to eight. I mean, we have dozens of businesses that have gone from seven to eight. And when you look at the numbers in the world that just doesn't exist, how'd they get there? Through this thing that we fight as entrepreneurs, we fight process, we fight structure, we fight routine. But if you're willing to accept a minimum effective dose of that into your life, that's when you really start making the contribution, the impact and let's get real, the income that we all want for sure.

And now I'm going to just share my personal story in here too. So we joined Simple Operations and Alex and his team back in, I think may. And part of it was, and guys, you've probably felt this, and Alex, I'm going to get you to talk about this in a minute. Which is the different stages of growth and the evolution of a business and the different challenges people face. But what I can tell you as a synopsis from my perspective is the bigger you get right now our team is around 90 plus people right now. The bigger you get, the more important those systems are. Because I remember back in, I'm going to even say 2015, 2016, we had 15 or 20 people as part of our team. So things have changed. But at 15 to 20 people, I could still put everybody on my back and go, okay guys, here we go. We're going to go across this finish line. But when you start growing beyond, you know, the capability of you pushing everybody across the line, it can't happen anymore. People have to come with you and they have to, you know, make their own contribution to it. So as we joined, you know, we're learning about the implementation of some key systems and, and some operational aspects that are helping make our business a little bit more boring. But even after this session, even after this in person session, I know we had, and I can't remember whether it was a meeting with Alex or Katie and I brought my CEO Derek and Derek, I hope you listen to this because this is me admitting fault. And it, it happens often. But I just want to tell you this. So I'm like, derek, I think we can get all of this implemented by August 31st, and we're ready to go for September. And, yeah, let's go. Let's change all these things. And then we're in high growth mode and we, you know, hit 20, 24 in a big way. And. And Derek's like, bob, it's just not that easy. We have to take our time with this. We have to get it right. I'm like, of course get it right, but do it faster, you know, like. And I was like, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go meet with Alex and Katie and they're going to tell you that you need to go faster. And I remember we walked in, while we didn't walk in. It was a zoom call. But we get into the zoom call, and I was like, okay, so how quickly can we get this done? And it was like, holy, okay, you've got 90 people to go through this. You're at least, you know, seven, eight months to get through the majority of this. And I was like, huh? So as the, you know, as the entrepreneur, we're always wanting to push that limit. But I guess my point of this, Alex, is can we talk about, you know, managing the expectations of growth as an entrepreneur? Right. I know for me, I'm always constantly looking at growth for a few reasons. One, we want to help more people, right? And I'm constantly reinvesting, hiring team members so that we can help more people, because really, you know, at some point, the money isn't as important as everything else. It's like, how do we really make a drastic change here? And as we help more people, you know, we continue to evolve our team. And I want to continue to provide opportunity for my team so that they can continue to evolve and develop and become the best version of themselves. So I need to continue to have growth, otherwise I'll lose those people because there's not enough opportunity for everybody. So I'm constantly going, let's go 100 miles an hour here, please and thank you. And then, you know, the reality sets in to say, listen, we want to create a boring business because that's what's going to help the most amount of people. It's going to give the most clarity to your team so they know exactly what they're responsible for so that you guys can continue to evolve the way that you're meant to thoughts concerns on that. Alex that fair?

100%. So this is all psychological conditioning for us as entrepreneurs. Bob, when we go back to when you started your business and you, I think you said it was 2008, right?

2008, yep.

2008. Great time to start a business by the way. Way to go.

Yeah, no big deal.

I means everything. So when you go back to the time that any entrepreneur started their business, the vast majority like and let me qualify this, I work with bootstrapped entrepreneurs. Very few people I've ever worked with have taken on funding of any kind. Sometimes I do have like small friends and family investments. But I don't work with the people that go out and get $10 million to grow a business. For the most part I work with bootstrapped companies like, you know, and that doesn't mean they can't become billion dollar or 100 million dollar companies like Alex and Layla Hormozi created a business that's going to pay them nine figures over time in their exit. Russell Brunson like again, probably a billion dollar valuation at this point, but no, no investment at all throughout the whole thing. And when you go back to the origins of any company for an entrepreneur, here's the reality. This isn't, this isn't conjecture, this isn't guessing. I can tell you that in 100% of cases the entrepreneur is doing everything and we do everything as fast as we can and then we start to experience some success and then we go as as fast as we can and we experience more success and as fast as we can and more success comes out of it. And then what happens is this psychological conditioning gets us in a trap of two things. Doing everything and going as fast as we possibly can. And speed. There's a point in a business where speed to execution is crucially important. But speed does not equal growth. In fact, in a lot of cases, when we create the right expectations, especially with a larger population on a team, when we create the right expectations, when we're willing to slow down and do things right, when we're willing to have proper change management throughout a whole population of people, when those things are allowed to develop over time, that's when we see companies go from stuck in between 1 and 2 million to literally. I mean, I'm thinking of Daniel Rosen right now with credit repair cloud stuck in between 1 and 2 million for almost a decade and put some structure, put systems in place, changed expectation, was willing to slow down and really like create some bigger outcomes. Goes from 1 to 2 million to over 30 million in three years. And the reason that you see that change is that when you have a larger population on a company, when you have more people that you're working with slowing down to go fast, it sounds like, you know, it's this metaphor that freaks entrepreneurs out. It's like, don't ever tell me to slow down. But it's. The reality is when we're willing to slow down, when we're willing to delay gratification, oftentimes we delay gratification for an outcome that we think is really important, but then we delay out a gratification, and we get an outcome two or three times what we. We thought it would be because we're willing to put the target out further. We're willing to give ourselves more time. We're willing to do things in a way that's controlled and done right the first time or minimal mistakes the first time. And I think when you look at the general entrepreneur world, you can make the definitive statement that for the majority of entrepreneurs, one of the major reasons their business isn't growing is they're trying to do everything all at once and right away way. And when we're willing to prioritize, you know, if you're doing everything else all at once and wide, right away, you have no prioritization. And when somebody says, I've got six priorities, I'm like, wait a second. You have one priority, and then another one and another one and another one. So let's figure out what those are in order. And when we start to prioritize, when we analyze what's going on in our business, prioritize what we should do, commit to it, go execute that, then come back and analyze again. Suddenly the business starts exploding.

Yeah. And I don't want to give away all of your secrets in your program, because I think everybody who's at a. At a point in their business where they're looking at scaling and building a team, you should be working with Alex and his team at Simple Operations. But it's interesting, you know, and again, I teach some of this stuff, too, and have been. But like you said, it's funny. You teach it and you go, why the hell don't I listen to my own advice? This is so dumb. But one. One of the things that you talk about in your quarterly planning, and we talk about quarterly planning as well. One thing that stuck out for me was that, you know, you guys preach that when you build your quarterly planning out, it's like, okay, now don't stray from this Too much. Don't create a bunch of other initiatives in that period of time. Set that for the following quarter so that, you know, that is part of the boring business. It's see things through, guys, because we don't need to continue to create more initiatives that are causing disruption and chaos so that we're not doing everything. Well, you know, I think part of what you guys are teaching when you're saying, you know, let's not do this. One, create the boring business, but two, let's see it through and do it the right way and then take on the initiative the following time. Because it's not just about us, you know, it's about the team that's with us in building this, and if we continue to create, you know, stress and disruption and everything they do, yeah, sometimes it's fun, but at some points, people just like some stability. And my wife, I know my wife, she thinks I'm chaotic all the time. Alex, I'm sure you can relate to that, too, to a certain extent. But, you know, even just talking about interest rates, I'm like, no, we're variable rate always, which is not winning right now. I'll tell you that. It did for years, but it's not winning right now where she's like, well, no, you know, you do your business in however you want to do it, but I want a fixed mortgage rate for my home so that we know what our payment's going to be. And, you know, it's. It's similar to how we plan out our business, that we need some of that stability. Yeah. You know, us as entrepreneurs, we want to be off thinking about the next initiative, but maybe let's push that to the next quarter and not disrupt our team as much as sometimes we do. Right. And I. That was a big takeaway for me.

Yeah. Bob, I'm. I'm cool with talking about any aspect of our program, ensuring as much as we can. I mean, I want to be able to help people as much as possible. And when what I. What I think you're referring. You know, what you're referring to is we teach this quarterly planning process where on a quarterly basis, you select what you should be doing as a team. And here's what happens when we bring somebody into our program. You know, we onboard them, they go through the system, they create that first quarterly plan, and somewhere between 10 minutes and probably about 10 days, once the plan is published, once they've committed to it, once they're ready to execute, they want to change it, they want to add something, they have an idea, they go to an event, they figure out something else somebody else is doing. And the way that, that I describe that to people is that as entrepreneurs, we have been programmed to be addicted to change and program to accept failure. And that addiction to change comes from those early days of the business where we're like, hey, I need to, you know, it's like a squirrel looking for a nut. I need to figure it out. I need to figure it out. I need to figure it out. And you do that by changing things all the time, and then you finally create some consistency. But what happens is once we've planned with a team, once we've told the team where we're going, once the team understands what we're doing, if we can wait 90 days and let that team execute, there's this cascade of incredible benefits that come out of it. Like one, you build trust with your team. You know, I want discretionary effort from my team. Here's what that means. I want my team to be so excited about our business and so excited about what we're doing that when they're showering or jogging or driving or working out, they're thinking about the company, that discretionary time. They can't help but think about the momentum they're creating as leaders. When we tell somebody here's the outcome and we immediately change it, you know what happens? They stop trusting us. And when we leave that plan in place and allow for execution, we create trust. Not only do we create trust, we start to actually have a real gauge of what our team is capable of, and we create confidence in our team. In most companies, there is a tradition of losing. Most entrepreneurial businesses with a team. And when I say most, I mean like over 80% have created a tradition of losing. And here's what I mean by that. Entrepreneurs set outcomes that are way too high. You know, I've got a million dollar business and we want to be at 10 million by the end of the year. I've seen it happen, but it's so rare. It's like a lightning strike. And if I ask a hundred entrepreneurs with a million dollar business, what's your goal for the year? I'm gonna get 80 answers of 10 million. You know, and when we set these massive outcomes and we tell our team that's what we're gonna do, and we've all been told that we need to have these big, hairy, audacious goals and like, what is the number of, you know, cross it out and double it, all those things. But what we're really Doing is we're teaching our team that goals don't mean anything and that if we miss something, it's just part of how we do business. And so we, we do these two things. We become addicted to change and program to accept failure. And then we start putting that on our team. And our. When we share the next goal with our team, they go, ah, yeah, well, we tried this last year. It didn't really work. You know, and so often I have people come into our program who are in that place of being plateaued. And for years, they've had the outcome of 5x or 10x what they're doing, because that's what the market has told them they should do. And we, we have this concept. Let's pull the target closer. Let's create an outcome that we can see from where you are. If you're at 1 million, let's aim at 1.2, let's aim at 1.4, let's aim at 1.6. And so often they pull the target closer, they're aiming at 1.2, they end up at 2. The next year they aim at 2.4, they end up at 4. The next year they end up at 4.5, they end up at 7. And I mean, a good example of that is Rachel Rogers, who came into our program. She started at 2 million. The next year she was at 4. The next year she was 8. And the last year she was at 13. And. But the goals were not those numbers. The goals were way more modest than those. And so when we create real outcomes that our team can see, we remove that conditioning of being a losing team, and we get way more discretionary effort out of our team.

Yeah. And I love that. And I can relate as well. You know, thinking back to, you know, you're talking about how this has been like a learned behavior within organizations, you know, learning to fail, but early on in organizations, and this is maybe a lead into talking about different stages of a business and the different challenges we have at different stages. But, you know, when you're. I remember my first year, I think we did $220,000 of revenue. That was my 2008 number. And I think, you know, we did 250 in 2009. So we've, we've transitioned quite a bit from there. But again, not a great time to start. Alex. Growth was a little bit of a challenge in 2008, by the way.

The fact that you grew it all was a big deal back then.

Exactly. And it felt great at the time, to be honest. But you know, I think we went from, you know, 250 to 450. It's easier when, you know, you're smaller to get higher percentage growth rates because again, you, as one individual are pushing it across the line. You can accomplish more in short periods. But, you know, the expectation isn't that you can continue to double every year. You know, it's not, you know, we're, we're at about a 10 million dollar business right now. The expectation for me to have 100 growth next year is zero. You know, we have to realize that. We have to. You know, but versus 2008, I was like, yeah, no, we should be able to get 100 growth just based on having boots on the ground and networking and shaking hands and kissing babies. In 2008, you know, that was an opportunity for us to do that. Now it's not a reality. So let's maybe shift into talking about. And I know you do this better than anyone I've seen talking about the different challenges that business owners face at different phases of their business life cycle.

The, the challenge is that as business owners at each new stage of growth of our business, the requirement is that we change behavior. And one of the hardest things for us to do as entrepreneurs is behavioral change. And you know, I said this earlier. I think the reason why so many businesses in the United States stay small, so many entrepreneurial businesses that have opportunity, don't grow, is there's a lack of behavioral change. There's a lack of like, I'm going to go from everything all once and right away to prioritizing, to putting outcomes out there, to pulling the target closer and really getting this team to work together. And Bob, what I see all the time in the scenario you painted of like, we have a $10 million business, we're putting structure in place, we're creating realistic goals. I mean, there's been more than once where I've seen a business at that level double in a year, but the goal was 11, you know, and it's because we're, we're doing the right things to make that happen. And so when you look at the general stages of growth, I have this framework called Billionaire Code. And it's the nine levels. We go from zero to 100 million. You can download it on billionaire code.com it'll give you kind of an outline of like the true path to business growth. But to, I don't want to go through all nine levels. We don't have time right now. But if we just look at some generalities in the early stages of business, it's all about you. It's about how much can you do, it's about how grounded are you. It's about what decisions you make. It's about you literally being the most important person in the business. You will always be the most important person, but in the early stages, you are the entire growth engine of that business. So it's about process and morning routines and setting outcomes and taking care of yourself and staying hydrated and sleeping well. You know, sleep is an entrepreneurial, like, it's a, it's a gateway drug to success and so many of us don't even understand that. And then as the business starts to grow and you have a team now, it's about you being able to permanently delegate to that team, to getting people to take things off of what you're doing so that you get your time back so that you can do more important things. And then as the team grows, it goes from this skill of delegation to this skill of leadership. Being able to lead the entire organization and create outcomes for the organization. And like you, the, the example you gave earlier was so good, Bob. You know, I have this concept that we need to go from personality run businesses to process run businesses. Personality is when we show up every day, tell everyone what to do, check that it got done, tell them what to do again. And by the way, you can grow a pretty successful business doing that. It's also exhausting. And when we have a process run business, we create clear outcomes, we coach success along the way, and we get massively leveraged results. Our people grow, our company grows, we have more, more contribution to the people that we're working with. We have a way bigger impact. And when we go from, from personality to process, it's this shift that is so hard from entrepreneurs because it goes from me to we because now it goes from how can my team get me ahead to how do I get my team ahead, how do I coach them, how do I help them? You know, there is a point in running an entrepreneurial business where your ability to lead, grow and manage a team is your ability to create success, especially sustained success. And you know, those, those shifts are not easy for us to make and they require process, structure and routine, which as entrepreneurs we fight process, structure and routine. And you know, I, I, I want to share why I think that is. Because I think sometimes when entrepreneurs hear this, they go, oh, maybe I need to really think about this and stop fighting this. Here's what it was for me growing up and throughout my life, every system, every Process every structure I was a part of, I was either gaming the system or surviving the system. But I never felt like it was built for me. Never. And so when somebody says process, structure and routine, it's like I'm running from it. I'm running from the school schedule, I'm running from getting picked up by the bus. I'm running from working in an organization where I wasn't seen or I wasn't heard. And when we realized that process, structure and routine is literally the key to freedom for us as entrepreneurs and we can create our own process, structure and routine as entrepreneurs. We are that small percentage of the population that gets up to make up the rules for our own game. Let's make up rules where we win. And process, structure and routine is the key to freedom for us.

Absolutely. And I can say even from my own journey too, you can fight that as long as you want, but at some point you're going to get hit with it where like you said, it is very hard. You know, you, it's exhausting fighting it and at some point we need to embrace it. That is going to be our pathway to achieving that long term sustained success. It's also going to give us some emotional relief because fighting the system, guys, I, I know I, I've been there, you know, even currently still sitting in there to a certain extent where we fight that system and we want to, you know, break the rules and we want to continue to manipulate the system and find those outcomes outside and, you know, manipulate everything we possibly can just to continue to make progress and continue to feel that momentum. But it's really just fighting what needs to happen, which is that systemization and creating processes and building that boring business. Because you know, to Alex's point and even some of his case studies, seeing the success of people who have finally got these systems in, it takes this relief off. Now the team is, is unpacked and is really powerful without it being all on one individual. And you know, the expectations of what your growth are have to be pulled back, pulled closer like Alex talks about, but doesn't mean that you can't surpass them. But making your business boring and implementing these systems is really a key to hitting that next level. And I know for myself, you know, this past year, increasing our numbers of people and team members, you know, it's impossible to move forward without having those systems and processes in, forward story in place. If we don't have those, we're not going to be able to continue to grow. Because the fight for me, every single Day is just how do we continue to survive at this stage? And, you know, it's so important and, you know, again, simple operations with Alex and his team has definitely opened my eyes to. To what's possible from a systems and a process standpoint. Alex, this has been amazing. I want to just throw out one last thing, you know, any last pieces of advice that you would love for, you know, that entrepreneurial small business to hear from you as we end this, this episode.

Yeah. You know, I think that as entrepreneurial personality types and as people who want to go out and change the world, so much of what happens to us is the expectations of the world around us and the expectations created by the world around us. But when we take a step back and we're willing to compare ourselves to ourselves, we're willing to look at where we've come from, when we're willing to understand what we've achieved so far, that's when we create the massive momentum that we've always wanted. And I think that we live in a world today, like I said earlier, where if you want to live in a world of comparison, you can take yourself out of momentum every day over and over again, use other people for inspiration, use yourself for the comparison to understand if you're creating success. And just remember what I said earlier, you know, it doesn't matter what's going on for you, what challenges you have, what diagnosis, disorder, what issue. Don't let those things defeat you. In my study of successful people, it blew me away how often the people that were least likely to do anything were the ones who actually changed the world. Helen Keller was born unable to hear, speak, or see, and she went on ahead to change the world for people who are disabled, like anybody. Anything you're going through, somebody just like us has been there and overcome it and gone on and been able to change the world. And just remember, when I say there's nothing wrong with you and you are not alone, there's nothing wrong with you. You can overcome anything that you need to as an entrepreneurial personality type. That's who we are. That's what we do. And you are not alone. There's a world of entrepreneurs out there that if you're talking to people who are discouraging you or telling you you can't do it or telling you you shouldn't do it or telling you you're too much or you need to sit down, slow down, and stop making everybody else uncomfortable. Get around your tribe and everything will change for you. And we'd love to have you in our our organization. And you can come to our events like Bob did, and be surrounded by people who will understand you, will support you, will validate you. And if you're not part of a community, I would suggest you find one that you are.

Absolutely. Alex Sheriff and entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial personality type. Let's get that in focus there. The billionaire. The billionaire code, simple operations. Alex, thank you so much, my man. Always thrilled to have a conversation with you. You continue to inspire me and so many people. So thank you for what you do. Guys, if you like this episode, make sure you leave a comment. Follow us Follow Alex. Check out his Momentum podcast as well. It's incredible. It's definitely on my list. Thank you, Alex. I appreciate you so much.

Thanks, Bob.