Most Business Owners Never Escape Their Own Business (Here's The Fix)

Welcome back to the Brand Builders Podcast.

Today I'm on vacation and I want to ask you this one question. Have you ever been on a vacation or a trip where you're supposed to not be working and you ended up being on Slack or answering emails or phone calls the entire time instead of spending time with your family, which is the whole reason that you started a business in the first place? Today we're going to be talking about exactly that. How preparation creates freedom within your life and especially within your business to allow you to do things that you actually want to do instead of having to work your entire life away. And so, um, I have some frameworks I want to share with you guys because this is something that's been my goal. Like, one of the whole reasons that I started a business, started a podcast is because I wanted to be able to do what I wanted when I wanted. Time freedom. If I wanted to go to the beach for a week, I want to be able to go to the beach for a week. And so right now we still have things going out and work getting done, but I'm able to go on vacation with my family while the things that I have delegated out are still going up and still going out, which is one of the biggest goals. And I've only recently been able to achieve this. And so, um, that's what we're going to be talking about today. This framework is going to be called the PREP framework. So we have first, produce ahead. Number 2, remove yourself. Number 3, establish expectations. And number 4, protect your presence. And then I have a few challenging questions to ask you for at the end of this episode. And so let's start with the big idea. The goal It's not to stop working entirely. I hear a lot of times like people want to retire young. They want to use the FIRE method to go and be able to retire at a young age. And the idea is cool, but whenever you start thinking about it, we are created and designed by God to work. And so if you're not working towards something, If you're not spending your time fulfilling a passion of yours or building something or creating something with your hands, and you're just retiring for the sole fact that you can go and be selfish for yourself on a beach or to buy a Lamborghini or to do no work the rest of your life, I think you're kind of missing the point. And I want to challenge some of those thoughts today.

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That's not the goal. The goal, I believe, is to be able to do these things and work and build income and revenue while it's on your terms, to be able to pick and choose kind of when you want to work and how you want to do so. I think, um, We aren't designed to be controlled by work. It's an aspect of life that we have to do in order to provide for our families, of course. But God did not call us to strictly just work. He called us to do many different things. And so, uh, think about that. And we're not designed to be controlled by our work. And so let's get into the framework. The first P is going to be produce ahead. So you want to get ready. If you have to make content for the following week, if you have to delegate things or edit things in advance or schedule meetings for either before or after the vacation or move things around, you have to do that. You have to prep your clients, prep your teams, prep your meetings so that when you leave, everybody's on the same page. I, we were letting our clients know because it was me and one of our team members were out of town this entire week, which is why I'm filming this remote. And we'll talk about that here in a little bit. But we have to prepare our team and our clients in advance because without good preparation, there's going to be poor performance. And so we told them like, hey, we're going to be out of the studio. We're going to be out of office for this week. We let them know a few weeks in advance, like, hey, if we need to get something recorded, we need to do it before then. Or if you're good for waiting till after, we can do that as well. Same thing with the editing that we have going. We were— we still have an editor back in the office that's been editing all week, um, but like, in order to prepare for these things and let everybody know, hey, we're going to be out of office, you have to let them know. Delegate and get ahead. Any meetings that you have, move them to either before or after your trip. Obviously this stuff sounds very simple and straightforward, but it is an option as a business owner to control whenever you do these things, which is one of the biggest benefits. And if you're able to do that, then consider it probably the biggest blessing of the current season of your life. Let's go to the next one. R is going to be remove yourself. So You got to delegate things, automate things, simplify things, and stop being the bottleneck of your business. And this is— this takes time. This isn't just going to be able to be done completely overnight. This takes time. So over the next year, if you're planning on going on a vacation or a trip or traveling next summer, then the time to start is right now. Because if you can work on getting the right teams and people in place to delegate things to. And you can use Teams, you can use AI for a lot of things. When it comes to social media, you can use AI editing platforms and they all have like built-in schedulers so you can just schedule posts to go out. Um, it's really becoming ridiculously easy to get ahead on content. These platforms are making it easier and easier to do. So remove yourself the best that you possibly can Delegate things. If you're going to be gone and something has to be done, you need to have at least one other person that can help you fulfill or get that thing done while you're gone, who knows the business almost as good as you, if not better than you. Um, simplify things. You want to make sure your processes are simple enough to be able to delegate in the first place. That's one thing that I'm working on constantly, is figuring out how to create jobs that are so ridiculously simple that anybody can come in, read a piece of paper, we do on-the-job training for a day or two, and, and have a great understanding of that job. Some jobs are going to be different, some employees are going to require a little bit more, which is okay. Just make sure to prepare in advance, like the first step that I talked about. Prepare in advance to make sure that they are ready for whenever you are gone and out of town. Um, establish expectations is the next one. Make sure your clients know that you're going to be gone. Um, I heard a great story just setting expectations in general, not even just for like whenever you're going to be gone, but there was a, there was a guy who signed up with like a business consultant and coach, and it was not a cheap coaching program. It was probably like $25,000 to get started with this guy. And right up front, he set the client expectations of, hey, you— we can hop on a call from between this time, 1 PM and 4 PM on Mondays every week. If it's outside of those hours, I'm not going to be able to answer you. So even though he paid a lot of money, he's setting the expectations so that way whenever the time comes for that person to book a call or book a consulting meeting, whatever that looks like. They know exactly when they're supposed to do it, how they're supposed to do it, and when they're not supposed to do it, more importantly. And if they try to book on another day, you can be like, hey, like refer back to this message or this email, this onboarding call or whatever, and you can see that I was letting you know, like, I'm not going to be able to do that. And so set the expectations. On everything that you do. That comes with team members, that comes with working with clients, that comes with yourself. Set expectations for yourself. And the last, um, point is going to be protect your presence. So this is the last one to spell out the word PREP. Um, whenever you're on the trip, 1 to 2 phone calls max. I would have only taken one phone call this trip, and I want to share this story real quick. It's just really cool to see. So this guy, we've, we worked on— actually, me and him haven't worked on any projects before. We've talked a couple times in the past. I don't really know him super well, but he knows me super well. He, as soon as he called me, I answered the phone. Haven't talked to him in about a year. He's like, dude, first of all, I appreciate you and the content that you're putting out and how consistent you're being. Like, I respect the grind. Like, the content's great, it looks great, the value is there 100%. Like, I've been watching all of your stuff, including the podcast. Thank you for doing that. And I was like, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, he wasn't even calling about this. He was calling me to get a quote for some podcast stuff. And I hadn't even said anything other than hello, but he goes off and immediately, like, he has such a good perspective and a good idea on what it is that we do. And he already trusts me because he's obviously calling me to get a quote and he's like, okay, you're the guy. For this project. Like, we need to go through you because he's been following me for so long now. It's just cool to see, like, let your content do the heavy lifting for your brand and your sales. Because 9 times out of 10, I'll get on a call with a random person. They'll be like, oh, I've been watching your stuff for about 6 months to a year, sometimes longer. And they already know what we do. They know what to expect. I'm not a fake person on camera, so they know who I am. They feel comfortable with me because they feel like they've had conversations with me through the podcast and hours. This is like hours of content of building trust and authority. And so by the time they get to me, all they want to know is, hey, what does this cost to do XYZ? Can they afford it? If they can, it's sold. If they can't, then I help them figure out a way to do it. So it makes, it makes a lot of the pressure go away because you're subconsciously pre-selling through your content every single time you post something. And so with all that being said, the last piece, protect your presence. Let's, let's bring it back around. 1 to 2 calls max per trip. You can check your emails once. Do it early in the morning before your wife and kids wake up. Your family wakes up. Do it before all of that. There's a great saying, is be where your feet are, and I have been trying to practice that a lot more recently. Um, it can be a lot harder than you would think as a business owner because you have people texting you, calling you, but if you prepare in advance, that's the cheat code in order to making this thing run and work how you want it on your terms. You got to prepare.

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A couple more points I want to touch on before we wrap up this episode is in order to stay consistent, and I wanted to prove this by bringing along my camera. I could have just as easily used my iPhone 15 Pro. But since I already have access to these professional cameras from my business, then I wanted to just go ahead and utilize it here. But you don't have to have a fancy setup. You don't have to have anything crazy to stay consistent. So if you're wanting to show up every day on social media, if you're wanting to show up to a podcast every week, like, do whatever it takes to eliminate as much friction as possible to make it happen. One camera is enough. iPhone is plenty for good content. And at the end of the day, value of the content beats the production value of the content. And so what is it that you're saying? Are you providing something that's going to be extremely valuable to the listener? Because you could have the best camera in the world, like this setup would not matter if I had crappy things to say or useless things to say that nobody's going to find helpful. And so if you prepare correctly and create a truly valuable experience for the user and the viewer, that's where you're going to win. It doesn't matter what camera, what lens, what microphone you have, especially when you're out traveling on the road, like just being consistent. Now, obviously, make sure they can hear you and make sure they can see you, because if you don't have these basic things, they're not going to stick around and watch. And quality also determines brand value perception. And so there's a mix between, hey, do you want this person watching this to perceive your thing, your service, your business as high quality and valuable and premium? Or do you want the viewer to perceive your brand as just barely getting by, just doing the bare minimum? Because that also speaks volumes as well. So I'm going to let you make that call, but those are your two routes that you have. And if you need help, send me a DM. Let's talk. But like, those are the things that I think about whenever eliminating friction and doing things consistently even while you're traveling. That's the glorious thing about podcasting and social media. You can do it from anywhere that you want. And so today, like I said, I have one camera. I'm probably not going to edit this at all other than— yeah, I'm not going to edit this. This is just going straight up to YouTube. And since I've prepared beforehand, it's easier for me to go and do that because there's going to be no editing or anything. And this stuff I can talk about all day long. So I just wanted to prove a point through, through today's episode is you don't need the fanciest setup. I'm literally sitting at a picnic table in a field. Like, you don't need the fanciest setup, you don't need the fanciest gear. As long as you just show up, that speaks volumes in itself. Um, but I'm really not even recording necessarily being consistent online right now. For me, this has turned into a personal challenge of how long can I go and how long can I withstand the challenges of putting out a podcast every single week. And I've successfully done that. I think I've only missed one week out of the last year so far, and we're about to come up on— I think this might be the 40th episode, which is Absolutely insane. If you've been on the podcast, thank you. If you want to be on the podcast, check out the link in the description of this video. But thanks to everybody who has supported. Thank you to all the guests who have come on. If you haven't checked out the other videos, go check those out because those, those, those conversations are crazy. We have people running 6-figure businesses, 7-figure, even 8-figure businesses. All for an hour long, whatever the time is. And we have tons more coming, so make sure to go subscribe to the channel if you don't want to miss those. Um, to challenge you, I want to leave you with some questions. Could you leave 7 days in a row in your business tomorrow? If you're like, hey, I want to leave for a whole week, I want to go to Italy— I love Italy, I want to go to Italy so bad, I've never been— But say, like, I want to go to Italy for 7 days. I'm leaving tomorrow. Could your business survive and could it continue? If it can, great. If it can't, what do we need to do in order to get there?

Reverse engineer it.

Say, this is my goal. These are the steps that I need to be able to accomplish this goal. And so, yeah, work backwards. Figure out what would you need What things would break? Would there be systems that don't necessarily work within your business? Um, and then whatever breaks, whatever you find, hey, we need to struggle in, figure out a system that does actually work.

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So those are the challenging questions that I have for you, and then I want to leave you with a piece of encouraging advice if you're watching this and you're self-employed. I saw an Instagram reel talking about this yesterday. If you are running a business and you're paying your bills of the business and of your personal life, even if you're not making $1 million a month, you don't have to make $1 million a month to be successful. Everybody's version And definition of success is different. But if you are paying your bills, you're putting food on the table, you're getting it done, then you have successfully won the entrepreneur game because that's what everybody's trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do is be able to do this in a way where I can control my time and have more time freedom. And so. Whenever you get on social media, you see all these people making millions of dollars. And so I just, I want you to be encouraged by the fact that you're doing the thing and you don't have to make $1 million a month in order for it to be considered successful. If you're spending time with your family, if you're able to go on a trip across the country or across the state for multiple days in a row and there's still things getting done and you can still pay your bills and put food on the table, you have won. You've won the entrepreneur game. In my opinion, you've won the rat race. And so keep it up, keep grinding, keep building, um, keep praying and studying and see what the Lord has for you because his plans are greater than your plans. And, um, yeah, man, let's build this thing together. Let's continue to grow. And if anything, like, I want this to be a community of people who are building things and can go to each other and and work alongside each other and have partnerships and community. Community is the biggest thing I feel like entrepreneurs lack is once you work a certain amount, it's pretty lonely at the top whenever you are just doing a regular building a business. Like you have to have community. I find that through church and local connections and I'm looking to build that more. Through local connections, um, of with other people who are building things as well. And so anyways, with that being said, thanks for watching today's episode. I hope you found some value out of it, and I hope you were encouraged a little bit to start making sure those systems are bulletproof, because we can always be better. And, um, whenever you get there, it's very nice. This is the first trip that I've been able to take where everything's still getting done and I'm not having to do every single thing. And so I feel like we're on a trend upward where we're leveling up. And hopefully in a year from now I can do another one of these podcasts and it could be completely different and I can have new revelations for you and share the experience and the journey with you as well. So make sure to subscribe, make sure to follow along, and we'll see you guys in the next episode. Peace.