Why Lazy Entrepreneurs Earn More Money Than You

I've scaled 17 companies to over $10 million in sales. And I didn't do it by working harder than everyone else. I did it by being strategically lazy. Now, look, you probably know at least one entrepreneur who's dumber than you, lazier than you, and much, much less experienced than you, but somehow they've got a bigger business than you. How did you do it, Frank? Well, the reality is, because once you're past the startup phase, it's really not about how early you wake up or how hard you hustle. It's about one thing. And that one thing is leverage. And in this video, I'm going to show you why. Doing less on purpose is actually the secret to scaling more. Now, if you don't know me, my name is Ryan Deiss. My partners and I manage 17 companies across our $200 million holding group. So I've lived the late night, early morning hustle and grind, entrepreneurial lifestyle. And what I'm going to show you now is how to stop being your business's best employee and start being its most strategic asset by tapping into three sources of hidden leverage in your business. Let's get into it. Leverage can loosely be defined as the difference between what you put in and what you get out. The lower the input and the higher the output, the greater the leverage. Said another way, leverage is about doing less but achieving more. So that's the goal. And. And now I wanna give you three, with maybe a bonus fourth, tactical suggestions for how to do just that. Step one, commit to doing less and maintain a don't do list. Now, most people think of focus and prioritizing as choosing what to do. But in reality, focus is actually about what you choose not to do. Now, personally, I have never been more productive than the year I made the fewest commitments. Here's what happened. So the year was 2020. Maybe you remember it. It was the year that everything was shut down due to the COVID 19 pandemic. That year, I started 33 individual projects. What can I say? I guess I had a lot of extra time on my hands. But here's the kicker. When I looked back at the end of the year, I realized I had only managed to complete three of those 33 projects. Yep, just three. That's pretty pathetic. That's when I decided to impose my seven project rule. And the way that it works is simple. First, I can only commit to seven new projects for the entire year. Now, if you do the math, that's approximately one project every other month, which is still a lot. If you think about it. And more importantly, by limiting yourself to just seven projects, you're forced to prioritize impact over activity. Second, I can only work on three projects simultaneously and this discourages over commitment, especially early in the year when I'm at my most ambitious and it motivates me to actually finish a project so I can start another one. Third, and this is the biggie, I must maintain a don't do list that includes both the projects that are from my big seven list that I'm not yet working on, as well as any pet projects that I know might distract me from my core initiatives. Now, if I complete my big seven, I'm free to add more. And at any time I can swap one of the big seven projects for a new one as priorities and strategies within the business shift. I just can't have more than seven total projects and I can't start more than three at any given time. And I need to keep and review a list of the projects I'm committed to not taking on at this time. And it's really this do not do list that, believe it or not, is the most powerful aspect of this system. Because again, choosing what not to do is as important as choosing what to do. Now. After making this commitment at the start of 2021, something pretty magical happened. By the end of the first quarter, I had already completed five of my seven projects. And these weren't little projects either. These were major company shifting initiatives. That's the power of strategic laziness, also known as focus. By the end of the second quarter, I had completed the final two projects plus two more that I added. I basically took most of the third quarter off. But by the end of the year, I had racked up 12 completed projects. That was four times what I had completed the previous year. And I wound up having my best year in over a decade. Today I wound up repeating this process every year. And the results have been the same in both really good years and frankly in less than ideal years. And this is the real power of focus. Step 2 Shift from doing tasks to building assets. So we're talking about leverage. And leverage is all about return on investment or roi. Now normally when we think about roi, we obviously think about money. But the I in ROI doesn't just have to stand for a monetary investment. It could just as easily be defined as ROE or return on effort. The point is, if you want more leverage, you need to optimize your return on the effort that you are putting into your daily tasks. And, and to do that, we need to shift from task doing to asset building. Here's what I mean. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you wake up and you dive straight into that to do list. The problem is, more times than not, everything on that list is a one and done task for you and only you to do. Now, if you don't believe me, just pause this video and look at your own to do list. More than likely, it includes tasks like write that important email, fix that broken inventory system, call that angry client. The items on your list are best characterized as verbs, meaning they're things that you have to do. So if you complete these tasks, you'll have a momentary sense of pride and relief. But the next day, there's just going to be another important email to write. Another broken system to fix. Send another grumpy client that needs to talk to you. There are always going to be more verbs on your to do list that you need to do. That's why I want you to flip the script. Specifically, I want you to change the verbs on your to do list into nouns by transforming them from an action that you do a verb into an asset that you create a noun. So instead of starting your day asking what tasks do I need to get done today? I want you instead to start your day by asking what assets can I create today that will ensure I never have to perform this task ever again? In other words, we want to turn your to do task list into a to build asset list. Now, these assets might be something like a documented standard operating procedure, an email automation sequence, a repeatable hiring process, a sales script that anyone can use. So instead of writing that important email, what if you crafted an email template that someone else can customize and draft the next time? And instead of fixing that broken system, what if you recorded a loom video showing how you fixed it so someone else can fix it next time? And finally, instead of getting on the phone with a grumpy client, what if you documented a talk track so that anyone in your company could de escalate that situation? Or even better, what if you took a moment to look upstream at what made the client grumpy in the first place and built a system that ensured something like that never happened again? These are things that work without you, because assets nouns work when you don't. And if you build enough of them, that's when you get to be strategically lazy and still watch your business grow. Step 3 Stop rewarding task completion and start rewarding asset creation. Now, as a general rule, we hire people to do tasks and then we praise the people who work hard and who go above and beyond, which usually means just working more hours. But that's not how you build a high leverage, high output team. Instead, I want you to reward your team for being strategically lazy. In other words, reward the ones who build, not just the ones who do so. For example, a salesperson who builds a sales playbook for the team, that's leverage. A marketing assistant who automates a weekly report, that's leverage. A project manager who builds templates instead of just finishing a checklist, that is leverage. And this is how you shift from a culture of martyrs to a culture of builders. Now, to really make this point, we instituted two policies at one of my companies. First, we began paying cash bonuses anytime a team member created a system or playbook that was added to the company operating system. Now, just to be clear, they had to get manager approval first because we didn't want a team member just wasting time building out systems and processes that no one needed just so they could earn an extra little bonus. But once we put out the call, we saw our asset list explode and we watched our productivity skyrocket. Second, and this is the biggie, we established a rule that everyone had to be out of the office by 6:00pm no exceptions. Now, this simple change suddenly shifted the mindset from working late is a good thing to working late means you're kind of inefficient and likely not very good at your job. And you know what? It worked. The team was happier and productivity actually went up. But there was just one problem. After a couple of weeks, things got busy and so, well, I started working late. Yep, I started violating our own rule. And since I decided the rule didn't apply to me, my team began ignoring it too. And what do you know? People started working late, and what do you know? Productivity went down again. And it wasn't until I owned up to the fact that I had violated my own rule and apologized to the team that things went back to our new normal. And we never looked back. Alright, so I said that I was going to give you three steps, but here's a bonus fourth that I think is really going to institutionalize this behavior. And that is, I want you to start measuring revenue per employee. And the reason is, I believe that revenue per employee is the ultimate leverage metric because it forces you to ask much better questions. Instead of who can we hire to do this? How can we get more people to do this stuff? Instead, we ask, what systems can we build so that no one has to do this at all? And if Your revenue per employee goes up, that's a sign that you're adding leverage, not just headcount. To calculate your revenue per employee, just take a trailing 12 month sales and then divide it by your current full time employee count. That is your RPE or revenue per employee. What I want you to do, don't worry about what the number is, just benchmark it now and then make a commitment to beating it next quarter. And obviously there's two ways you could beat it. You could always raise sales, or you could reduce headcount. See if you can beat it by simply raising sales with the team that you have. That is the ultimate sign of leverage. And remember, the more valuable that you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. And let's see if we can apply this to everyone in the organization too. That's what this strategic laziness concept is all about. And that is why it is such a powerful concept. But look, don't misunderstand me. Strategic laziness is not about doing nothing. It's about first choosing what not to do, then choosing what to do specifically the right things that you're gonna do once that work forever, and that work even when you don't. Alright, if this resonated with you, be sure to check out the link in the description that breaks down how we build and install custom scalable operating systems. Which really is what makes this whole strategic laziness thing possible at scale. Go ahead, check it out and I'll see you over there.