Work Smart and Hard

The difference between those who talk about lifestyle businesses and true entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs have a passion to maximize their impact. They're not looking for a shortcut to say I don't want to work at all. They're looking at ways to say, how do I maximize my impact? Are we trying to build something that maximizes the impact or are we trying to build something that just makes life easy and we hope for the best? Nobody has the perfect ride. But let's continue to work smart, optimize our time, focus on key, key strategic initiatives so that we can move the needle to the next level. Good day and welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Bob Govreau, I am your host. I'm excited that you are here with me today. I'm going to get a little bit passionate today about entrepreneurs and I think some misguidance that is out there. But before I want to remind you that this is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success from mindset and, and leadership to profits and revenue. This episode's gonna be called Work Smart and Hard. It's not Work smarter and less hard. It's Work smarter and continue to work hard. Okay? And what I wanna say is, you know, there's a lot of misinformation out there. And I can tell you from working with thousands of entrepreneurs every single year, me continuing to build my own business and having success. You know, people always say, oh, Bob, you work so hard. I'm like, yeah, I do. I think, you know, the difference between those people who talk about lifestyle businesses and true entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs have a passion to maximize their impact. They're not looking for a shortcut to say I don't want to work at all. They're looking at ways to say, how do I maximize my impact? If it requires more work and more energy, they'll give it to it. Now, I'm not advocating for a hundred hour weeks, I'm not advocating for 60 hour weeks. But what I'm saying is, is that if we're working 40 to 50 hour weeks, which is normal, that's not unreasonable to work a 40 to 50 hour week as an entrepreneur. What I'm saying is, yes, let's find efficiencies, but let's not use those efficiencies as an excuse to take our foot off the gas. Because I can tell you, working less, it does not create the outcomes that we're looking for. Trying to work less and delegating it sounds appealing and yes, we can delegate and there's smart ways to do that. I'm not saying that's not the right way, but when we're thinking about this, it does sound appealing. But it often leads to stagnation in your business. It often leads to loss of control. It leads to missed opportunities. And so, like if I didn't say this already, it's not about working less. 20 hours a week is not going to build a legacy. It's not going to maximize your impact. Right. If you can get down to 20 hours a week and then reinvest 20 hours in building and finding the next new best thing for your business to maximize their impact, you know, that's what we want to continue to do. So again, it's not about creating a lifestyle business. Yes, you should be able to take your time to spend with your family. I'm not saying don't do that. You should be able to take your vacations. I'm not saying that. But if you're consistently focusing on in your business, trying to eliminate as much of your contribution as possible with not being smart and contributing hard, you're likely not the entrepreneur that, that needs to be looking at focusing on impact. You're just looking at pulling away. Now, there's a book out there, Four Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is a legend, without question, but he's what he essentially says, you don't have to work endlessly. Instead, focus on leveraging automation, outsourcing and efficiency to design a life that will prioritize time, mobility and experience over traditional career paths. It's not saying get your work down to 20 hours. It's saying, let's use automation, outsourcing and efficiency to really build a business that you can focus on the valuable components of it, which is amazing. So. And he also talks about how you can create a business where you can work from anywhere. Right. But he's not saying to not work. And again, I, I know that there's a lot of people who promote lifestyle businesses where they say, oh, you just, you know, you put in this little effort or you just contribute to this program and we'll show you exactly how to make this money without working ever again. And you just enjoy this for the rest of your life. Like, unless it's a lottery ticket or it's cash for life, it's, that's not how this works. And I know my wife says to me all the time, she says, you've got more and more employees. You know, we're approaching 200 employees this year in 2025. And she says, You've got all these employees. Why are you working harder than ever? Well, truthfully, if you take your foot off the gas, you do lead to stagnation. You do lead to missed opportunities. And I gotta tell you guys, as a business, like, if you're not reinvesting in growth and energy and growing right, you're gonna miss out on those opportunities. But your one thing is guaranteed, your costs are going to continue to go up. Right. Unless you're cutting your business down, you're eliminating, you know, wasted expenses for sure, you're going to get to a point where you can't cut expenses anymore without removing services or, or products or offers. You know, you need to continue to focus on continuing to grow your business, your ideas, your opportunities. It's not about taking your foot off the gas completely. So, Tim Ferriss, four Hour Workweek. Let's talk about how we continue to automate, outsource, create efficiency. Absolutely. You know, my friend Dan Martel wrote a great book, Buy Back youk Time, which he essentially says this is the framework for eliminating some of the stale administrative tasks in your business. And I think it's called his ladder concept, where essentially he says start with the administrative side and work your way up to the higher value items until you've, you know, you've hired a, hired an EA to begin all the way up to hiring a COO to manage the operations of the business. And yes, you know, at that point, could you exit more? Absolutely. But do you not want to be side by side with the operations person and maximize the impact? Like you can focus on strategy and new innovative concepts and ideas and really build something world class. So, so Dan Martell, buy back your time. Fantastic book, fantastic resource. And it talks about eliminating those, those lower value items so that you can focus on higher value items. Same with James Clear. He wrote a book called Atomic Habits, another great book where he talks about, you know, creating and completing action and putting little habits in there so they just become part of your regular day versus those things not happening at all. And all of a sudden you know, you've, you've lost out on the opportunity. One specific example he used in his book was making sure that when you come home from work, you don't get out of your work clothes and put on your comfy clothes. You put on your gym clothes because you won't go sit on the couch all night in your gym clothes or at least you won't do it for an extended period of time that you'll put your gym clothes on. And that'll be like, oh, man, I guess I gotta go do this gym. If you put your comfy clothes on, you're not gonna go do your gym workout. And I think James Clear also says not going and doing your exercise one day, that's no problem. It happens. But when you decide to do it two times in a row, that's a new habit being formed. So, you know the idea of lifestyle, business, eliminating the work, not putting in the effort. Well, if you consistently don't put in the effort, that's creating a new habit of not putting effort into your business. And that leads back to stagnation, loss of control, and missed opportunities. So. So I don't. I don't think that's what it is that entrepreneurs are truly looking for. Then you've got people on the opposite side. You've got David Goggins, you got Robin Sharma, you've got Gary Vee, who are like, let's put in the work. Let's go. And I really do like David Goggins. He's not for everybody. But the idea of working hard or outworking everybody, if you're able to outsmart everybody and add in that work ethic, nobody's going to be able to stop you. Right? Are we trying to build something that maximizes the impact, or are we trying to build something that just makes life easy and we hope for the best? You know, I think truthfully, entrepreneurs are looking to be working smart and hard, and building a team comes with costs, consistent increases in expenses. You've got to grow to sustain. You know, my wife says this all the time. She's like, why do you continue to grow? Because if I don't grow, then I'm dying. Truthfully, if I'm not growing my revenue, my expenses are growing. So if I'm not growing my revenue and my expenses continue to creep up, retention isn't always going to be 100%. So you need to replenish that. You need to increase your prices. You need to get more leads in to continue to create new opportunity and growth because your expenses will catch up. I got to tell you as well, you've got employees that are part of your business that if you're not going to create new opportunity for them, they want to continue to grow as well. They want more money. They want to continue to be challenged to live the best version of themselves. And if you know your organization is stale, not growing revenue, they'll see a ceiling and they'll likely look for somewhere where there's more opportunity. So if you take your foot off the gas, things will start to fall apart. And it's not about trying to work your minimum amount. It's about reducing the unnecessary time or the low value tasks and focusing on strategic and big items. There's another great book out there called Thinking Time and this was my, my good buddy Keith Cunningham. Back when I worked with Tony Robbins. I had some time to spend with Keith and what a fantastic resource, very successful guy who's built and lost and built and lost. And you know what, what a fundamental knowledge of how to build that he has because he's pushed the limits, he's taken risks and has been very successful over his career. So it's not about him saying, hey, I'm not gonna take these chances, I'm not gonna work hard. He's, he continues to work hard, we all need to continue to work hard. But again, continuing to focus on more strategic big items. And you know, I, I, a lot of people have talked about work life balance and saying, throw that out. I agree, it's not a balance, it's an integration. It's a work life integration. So I think what it all comes down to is creating goals. You know, are you looking to spend the most time not working and doing leisure activities, then you're probably, you probably should be set for looking at getting a job somewhere, to be honest, one that's maybe part time. Or are you looking at creating something that has the maximum impact, creates a legacy, creates something that you're proud of, you know, that is, if you can work smart and hard, that's the true ideal plan in order to get there. And you know what, there's a lot of information out there that says it. If you start outsourcing too early, right? You start delegating tasks too early, you know, sometimes you just gotta roll up your sleeves and do it. And if you delegate too early where you haven't truly mastered it so that you can teach someone how to master it, it leads to organizational mediocrity. And you know, if you wanna create something that maximizes impact and is as smooth sailing as possible, mediocrity is not it. You're gonna get turnover in your employees because they're going to be frustrated because their customers are upset. And your customers are going to be upset and you're going to lose them. So now you've got to go back in and grow because you're ultimately losing on the back end. The holes in the bucket are too big, you're losing all your water. So if you focus on rolling up your sleeves, doing the Work, mastering and then bringing in the delegation, the outsource, you know, so that you can train people how to do it. That's when you get to a point where you can move on to other things that are focusing on growth and innovation. And truthfully, if you're not looking to consistently grow, a competitor will pass you. Let's think of the competitive markets, right? If, if there's a business model out there, and this is back to the lifestyle business, if there's a lifestyle business out there where you make $200,000 a year, you don't have to do anything. You can be on the beach, you can be traveling, you can, you know, there's zero effort. You put in 10 hours a week. If that is like, again, think of the, the competitiveness of the marketplace. If you're making $200,000 a year working 10 hours a week, do you not think that there's going to be people coming in here who are going to go, I'm going to work 11 hours a week and I'm going to take over their business. I'm going to work 12 hours, I'm going to work 13? Right. Because it's such a discount, people are going to take advantage of it and it's going to be saturated. You're, you're going to lose your market share and your opportunity. If that were to exist, that lifestyle business, it will get taken over quickly because the competition will be flooded because everybody's making money and not having to do anything about it. That's just how, you know, the marketplace works. So if you're not constantly improving, a competitor will pass you. They will come in, say this too easy, we're going to work a little bit harder, take all their market share. That's what competition does for us. So, once again, the idea of a lifestyle business, I feel like is untrue. And I really, my message to you guys as entrepreneurs today is, yes, it's tough. You know, sometimes we have to put in the work. And I would argue that we always have to put in the work. Yes, we take our vacations, we spend time with our family, we do the things that we need to and that we desire outside of work, but we still have to be there to put in the time and the energy to continue to grow this thing. And I actually just had my local university, Trent University, a bunch of their business students came in today, and I was talking about some of the skills that are required. And I've talked about this before, but resilience is certainly a key to being successful. As an entrepreneur, and I can tell you it's a lot harder to be resilient when you have no dedication to your craft. You know, working 10 hours a week, it's hard to be resilient because you're going to get run over and people, again, the marketplace is going to be super competitive, and someone's going to come in here and want it more. And that's where, you know, the David Goggins of the world just says, no one is going to outwork me. Right? You hear the Rock say, no one is going to outwork me. Right? And you know that the most successful people in the world are. Are saying that they're so committed to their passion that they're willing to die getting there. And not that you have to take that literally, but, you know, the idea is that nobody's gonna take this away because something is so important to you about maximizing this impact that regardless of anybody saying, oh, well, you know, if you just do this, and you would only have to work half the amount, you go, great, how do I learn from that so that the other half I can put in and take this thing to a whole nother level. So entrepreneurs who are feeling frustrated that there's successful people out there who don't put in the work, it's false. It doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it will exist for a short period because the marketplace and competition will eliminate that. Because you can't just get everything and doing nothing. If you truly want to create something, it's going to require effort. So my message for you, Work smart and hard. Not just smart. Let's continue to focus on putting all of our energy into maximizing our impact. Because, as you'll remember, my passion is to ensure that entrepreneurs have the financial confidence to make informed decisions so that you guys can change the world, and we can do that together. And so if I give you all of the financial confidence to make informed decisions, you got to back that up with energy and hard work, right? Let's continue to make a positive change in the world together. And it's not going to be building a lifestyle business. So, guys, hopefully, you know, if there's been any part of you that's like, oh, how come it seems so easy for everybody else? It's not. It's not. Sometimes people make it look that way because they're only sharing, you know, the positive parts. People don't tend to share, you know, the negative parts of entrepreneurship. The parts that, you know, are defeating that are emotionally challenging. They focus on the Positives and people sometimes make it look easy. But I guarantee you, if they're maximizing their impact and you're seeing growth and progress, they're not working 20 hours a week. They're working a lot more than that because they believe in it and they're passionate about it. So, yes, nobody has the perfect ride. But let's continue to work smart, optimize our time to focus on key strategic initiatives so that we can really move the needle to the next level. Listen, I believe in you. I believe in us as an entrepreneurial group that we can continue to change the world. But it's not going to be working 20 hours a week. It's not about working less. 20 hours a week will not build a legacy. Guys, my name is Bob Govreau. I hope you have enjoyed this work smart and hard. Please leave a comment below, make sure you hit follow. Would love to see you here next week. This was just something today that I wanted to chat about because I don't want people to feel defeated because other people seem to be doing it with very little effort. If they're building something that's, you know, attracting you or you're seeing the growth and the impact that someone else is having, they're also putting in the time or, or energy or they have and they're now just realizing the benefits of all of their hard work. If you feel like somebody needs to hear this, grab this link, share it with them. Again, we're on the mission to empower entrepreneurs with the information they need to make informed decisions and ultimately change the world. This has been the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, Bob Govreau. Thanks for being here. Look forward to seeing you and hearing from you in the future. And we'll see you next week on the next episode. Launch.