What Is The Quickest Way To Become A Business Expert?

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and on this week's podcast, our guest is somebody that's kind of near and dear to my ambitiously lazy heart. But before we talk to him, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host. You know him, you love him. The brain, the professor, your flight school sherpa. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com learn anything about anything. Investor ninjas.com Scott Todd how are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm great. I want to learn how to fire myself. Do you want to learn how to fire yourself?

I thought you already fired yourself.

I did fire myself, but I want to learn how to do it even better.

You want to fire yourself, hire yourself and refire yourself.

Exactly.

Okay.

Exactly. I'm going to start my, I'm going to start my own reality show and I'm just gonna fire myself at the end of the show because I look at what I'm doing. Okay, so let's talk to our guest. Frank Berea is the author of Scalable Consulting. Use a high ticket program to transform your six figure practice into a seven figure enterprise. He's the founder of High Ticket Program and the go to authority on scalable program design and execution, having helped thousands of entrepreneurs design and execute their high ticket programs. He started in the financial tech sector, launching several tech startups. Now he works with B2B service businesses and consultants to create an offer that saves him time, helps more clients, ensures their clients get the results they promised. And Frank is the host of the six to seven figure show podcast. Frank Bria, welcome.

Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Honor being on the show.

So Frank, let's just rewind the tape and kind of tell us like, how did you become this business growth expert?

Yeah, so I definitely would. I kind of call myself a recovering consultant. So if There was a 12 step program for consultants, I would be leading it right now and showing up and raising my hand. There is something about that business model which is really attractive for people who have experience and they've done some, some really interesting work. It's easy to get into. You know, you got a Rolodex, you got a couple of people, you know, and suddenly you're charging, you know, more than you thought you would earn. And then you think to yourself, why am I working for this schlub of a boss I've got? I should be Doing this myself. The problem is, is that you've really just traded one job for another. You just don't know it yet. And as I found out, I am my worst own boss. Like I, I, my expectation level is off the chart. I have no boundaries between work and life. I have, you know, if I've got to do the work, you know, I'm committed to my clients and so I'm.

Going to do it.

And that doesn't make me a great employee or boss of myself. So that business model is just fundamentally broken. But you know, for me, I was, you know, I had a really good consulting practice. I. Right on the heels of a couple of tech startups that we sold off and had contacts all over the world. I was the hey Frank, we need Ginger Hannesberg in three guy, three days guy. And that is not as fun as it sounds. It is exhausting. And one day I was in Kiev actually for a meeting and everyone had flown in from Eastern Europe to listen to me give a presentation on the stuff that I was doing for them. And I got a text message that basically said that member of my family had just gone into the hospital for emergency surgery and my teenage kids were going to be home alone for a couple of days until I got back because there was no one to watch them. So they weren't little kids. I mean, they could be home for a couple hours, but not for a couple of days. So I did the unthinkable. You know, the thing that you imagine you never would have to do in a meeting. You stand up in front of everyone and say, I'm sorry you all flew here, but I've got to leave. I've got to get to the airport right now. And as you can imagine, there's not exactly a direct flight from Kiev to Phoenix. So you take the long way and 36 hours of thinking about my choices in life and whether they really got me where I wanted to go. And that put me on a different path. I realized that, you know, even though I thought I was really successful as a consultant, I really hadn't built a business. I had just created the absolute worst job in the world for myself.

Yeah, I mean, I, I can totally relate. When I first started, when I quit my investment banking job and started becoming a full time land investor, I was doing everything.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, this is great, I'm making money, I can make my own hours. But the hours never stopped.

Right.

There was no boundaries essentially, and, and I wasn't free. I just, you know, nothing Got done. Unless I did it. Scott Todd, when you first started in land investing, did you have a similar struggle?

I mean, okay, so like when I, when I got going, I was building VAs and systems to kind of help me through that transition, right? I needed to, in order for me to get out of my corporate gig, I needed to have bas and systems in place to multiply more time for myself. I had to manufacture time. So I had a little bit of advantage there because I was already doing that. But then what happened was when I had like, you know, when I was out of my corporate gig and this was my full time job, all of a sudden I felt like I needed to manufacture more work for myself because I felt guilty, right? Like, and I call it today survivor's guilt. Because ultimately what happens is you look at it and you go, oh, well, everybody else in the world is working and they're productive and I'm not doing anything, so I must be lazy. I mean, that's the way that I was feeling. So then I was manufacturing work for myself. And you know, all of a sudden you're like, okay, now I'm working more hours on my own business and it's a trap. It is a trap. And I think that, I think that you really have to have dedication to say, I'm just not going to do this anymore. Right? Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go down that trap. I'm gonna let myself be truly free and enjoy life and be come that business owner and not the entrepreneur. And there's a difference. I think there's a real difference there.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Frank, what do you say to people that come to you and say, hey, look, I just started my own consulting gig or I've got this SaaS business I'm launching. And Frank, honestly, the cheapest person I can hire is myself. I'm on a shoestring budget. What you're pushing me to do to scale makes me really uncomfortable. I can't stand looking at the bank, seeing money go out and not enough money coming in. How do you handle that?

Yeah. So there's three key elements here that people usually get wrong. The first one is that scaling is the first thing you should do. Obviously, if you're just starting out and you don't have and you're moving forward, you know you're going to do some of that work yourself. That's the way it goes. Scaling. There is a time to start bringing those people in. I tell people, if you don't have the money to hire Somebody, it's not time for you to be doing that yet. That means there's work you have to do still first. Now, the second mistake, it's this related to the second mistake that a lot of people make is they think that the business model they have is the business model they're stuck with. Typically, the reason why people don't ever get to that point of scaling is they're not thinking about the fact that they have to scale on day one. So even though you're not going to scale on day one, you should be thinking about scaling on day one. And that will change everything. That will change how you design how things get done. That's going to change whether or not you're going to take on certain clients. You're going to be asking yourself, okay, is this going to be able to support me in having a scalable business model, or is this just another custom project or another custom deal that I have to bring in to, you know, to pay the bills? And so you should be thinking about that every single time, because it's not a false choice. It's not like, do I pay the bills or do I get a good business model? A good business model supports you. You know, it pays you enough to pay yourself and to pay the people to do it. That's profit. A lot of times we forget. And this is the third point. The third point is you've got to have profit in a business. Now, we think profit is just the money we pay ourselves, but that's not accurate at all. If you think about any other business, they're paying you a salary to do a job, right? If you're an employee, maybe they throw you something in your 401k, maybe they throw you some profit share, whatever. But the profit is taken out by the investors, right? So there's money that goes to pay the people who do the work, and then there's money for the business owners, right? So if I'm the business owner and I'm doing the work, there should be both. There should be both money to pay me to do the job and money which is the profit in the business because I'm the business owner. And if there's not both, then something's wrong with the business model. You do not have a profitable business model, right? So again, a lot of solopreneurs think what I take out of the business is my salary. Now, I'm not talking about tax. Go talk to your CPA about what to tell the irs. That's a different story altogether. But the money that comes to you to, to pay you for the work you do should be different than profit. So those three things are the first things we have to get right. First, understand where it comes into play. Second, make sure you've got a business model that supports it. And three, make sure the money that's coming in supports an actual profitable business, which means salary and profit.

Okay, so let me reframe the question then. So now I've got a model that is profitable and shows, you know, market demand and, you know, but I'm doing all the work. Yeah. And I still am uncomfortable with letting go because at the end of the day, Frank, look, no one can do this part of the business, right, better than me, or I can't trust somebody, or it only takes me five minutes to do Right. It's just faster for me to do it than train somebody. How do you help somebody move out of that mindset?

Yeah, this is probably the most important question because as I see it, this is the number one barrier for entrepreneurs to be able to break free of their own work, and that is letting go. So first of all, you need to go into this with the mindset of a CEO. Right? Now, CEO is brought in from the outside, typically to a large organization. I spent my, my early career consulting with large organizations. Fortune 500 multinationals. That CEO does not believe that they are the best person to do the job of the, of the work underneath them. Right. They bring in people, really good CEOs, bringing people smarter than them, better than them. Right. So we have to, as the entrepreneur, first get, get under the mindset that it is not my job to do this, I am only doing it because I have to, or I'm only doing it because we're getting started or there's no one else. But if we think that we're the best and we're going to stay the best, we are going to have a small business mentality and we're going to get stuck there. So the first thing we have to get through is I need to bring in people better than me, smarter than me, and surround myself with them and let them do their thing. Let them help me get rich. That's the idea, bringing those smarter folks. So that's the first thing. Second thing is when you first bring in someone and start to train them, they may not do it as well as you the first time. You know, it may take you five minutes, it may take them an hour. That's absolutely normal. And this is essentially the investment we make in our own business in order for it to grow. This is very similar to the same argument that I have with a lot of founders of companies when it's time for a venture capitalist to come in and invest in their business, right? So the venture capitalist comes in and says, hey, you've got a, you know, we want to put $5 million in your business and we're going to take 50% ownership. If they're lucky, usually it's 51%, but let's just say it's 50%. So the entrepreneur says, no way. There's no way I'm giving away 50% of my company for $5 million. Now sometimes that's the right move, but usually the mindset is, no, I have to hold on to this like it's mine. But the thing is, by bringing that $5 million in, the business is growing. So instead of having 100% of a small piece of a pie, they now have 50% of a bigger piece of a piece of. And so that's exactly the same kind of mindset we have to have as we start bringing people in. Sure. On day one, it's going to take a little bit longer. We're going to be giving a little bit more money away, right. We're going to be investing in other people to do stuff. But if we hire correctly and train correctly, then those people are helping us build a bigger pie. And so of course, it's never going to stay an hour. When they get better at it, it'll get closer and closer. Will it ever get to your five minutes? Nah, probably not. You know, you invented the task right, as the entrepreneur, but it will get close. And the good news is, is that you won't have to do it anymore. So Instead of your five minutes, you know, it's 20 other people's 10 minutes. And it doesn't take your time anymore. And now you've got 20 people doing what you were only doing once. So that's, those are the things we have to think about as entrepreneurs. It's a long term play. Growth is a long term investment in your future, Scott.

Todd. I know.

Yeah. I mean, I would just say, look, okay, let's just, let's just say hypothetically, right? I want to put some, some logic behind what Frank just said though too. Right? Like, okay, if it takes me five minutes to do it, it's five minutes of my time, right? And if it takes someone else 10 minutes to do it, it's 10 minutes of someone else's time. And someone might say, well, that's double the time. True, it is double the time. But guess what? If your time is worth $100 an hour and their time is worth $10 an hour, well, it's costing you more to do it in five minutes than it's costing you to pay someone to do it in 10. Like, that's a mindset shift that someone might need to go back and, like, literally write down what I just said and do the math themselves. Because again, If I make $100 an hour, $100 an hour divided by 12, that's a five minute task. Okay, Whatever that is. But if I pay someone, you know, $10 an hour, and it takes them 10 minutes, take that 10 hours and divide it by six, boom. All of a sudden there's a big price difference there, and you're killing yourself doing $10 an hour work when you could be making $100 an hour, and you might say, well, Scott, I don't have the work to go do the $100 an hour. It's like my dad. My dad was a Frank. My dad was a photographer, right? Like, my dad was a photographer. And like, this was his. This was his retirement gig, okay? He opened up a photography studio and everything. And he would tell me, like, I'm just. I don't have the business.

Like, I don't.

I don't get the people. And I get used to telling. I used to say, dad, listen, if it were me, like, go out there, like, do some. Some Groupon work or something. He's like, well, I would only make $30 an hour doing that. But if I go out and do it on my own, I'm making fourteen hundred dollars, you know, an hour. And I'm like, but, dad, if you. 1400 times zero is zero, right? And yeah, you can go do the cheaper work. But see, the whole thing is, what is your time worth? Because, Frank, you. I mean, I mean, you're not advocating that someone fire themselves and then what, go play golf all the time? Unless that's what they want to do, Right? Right. Like, what do you got with the found time? Right?

You. You leverage it. I mean, right? The CEO, the reason. You know, lots of people complain about CEO salaries, right? There's lots of. Lots of complaints all over the place about it. But the reason that they make what they make is because their time is spent strategically creating value, right? And so that's what we become. So instead of sitting around on our computer trying to find some lost Excel document, which is whatever we're doing in our own business, we are drawing on the whiteboard and creating a new Strategy, or we're buying a new business, or we are investing cash in other growth opportunities. Right. We're doing something with bigger leverage. It's so funny, Scott, that you mentioned that story, because it reminded me early in my career, I was working with a federal contractor that was working. Doing some work with the Air Force. It worked the Air Force. And the guy who ran the local office is the program manager. One day I walked in and he's up on a ladder in the ceiling tiles of the office space. Like, what are you doing up there? And he goes, I'm running cable across for the new phone system between offices. And I'm like, doesn't. Doesn't the phone company do that? And he's like, yeah, but they charge us 75 bucks an hour to do that. And I go, what's your billing rate? And he slowly came down off the ladder. Question.

The other thing that you said, which I think is pretty. I want to pull out that point that you said, and not to brush over, but one of the things that you said earlier is that oftentimes, like, a CEO will come into the company and he'll hire somebody that's better than him, smarter than him, or whatever. And, you know, oftentimes entrepreneurs, they look at this and they go, well, that's me. And I talked to land, you know, our land geek coach students all the time. And they'll be like, well, I do that job. And I'm like, that's cool that you do the job. But, like, one of the things that I always teach is if you're doing a job, you have to, like, you have to start to think about. Cause I'm a big fan of swim lanes, okay? Like process mapping and swim lanes. And I truly believe that it's not just about saying, well, I do this entire process in the swim lane. It's about still chunking out the work and who can do the. Who can do the work. Like, what type of person would I give this to? Oh, I'm going to give this to my senior accountant. And you might go, well, I don't have a senior accountant, Scott. I'm new.

Great.

Well, then you plug the senior accountant role into the flowchart and you say, this will be for the senior accountant one day.

That's right.

And then as you build up, guess what? You know, everything that that senior accountant is going to do, because you're doing it today. You're filling the role until you can hire Frank, in my example, to go fill the role for you, and then you go to Frank, Frank, here's what the senior accountant does. It's all of this stuff in these swim lanes that I've been doing, and I can't wait to get it off my shoulders. Right. And I think that that's a piece that a lot of people miss. Is they exactly right?

My job exactly right. Yeah. In fact, one of the. One of the things that we do with our clients as they start to put the process together is we have them create a hierarchy chart, like literally an org chart. And they go, well, Frank, that's crazy. It's just me and a va. And it's like, well, okay, but that's not. We're not going to create a people org chart. We're going to create a functional org chart. And we start off with an organizational chart. And we literally break, break it down. Sales, marketing, customer service, you know, operations. What are each of these pieces? Draw it all out. And we start functionally. And then we say, okay, well, let's put some names in these boxes. And, you know, it's usually. It's working with Sherry as an entrepreneur. It's usually, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry, Sherry in every box. And that's the way it is at the beginning. But now, you know, now you know exactly how these different pieces and processes are. Are eventually going to break down for each of these individual roles. And you can start to identify a prioritization. Well, okay, this is the box I gotta fill first. So when. When the cash comes in and we're ready for it, this is the first role we're going to hire for. And so you're not just hiring for whatever is painful today, you know, so a lot of entrepreneurs will do that. You know, they. They come into the office, they deal with TPS reports. You know, for those of you seeing the movie Office Space, know what I'm talking about? That's what they deal with today, the paperwork. And they go, I gotta hire somebody for this. So it's this making pain go away movement as opposed to a strategic movement, which is one of the reasons why a lot of entrepreneurs fail in bringing in new people. Because that's the wrong role at the wrong time, and they're not ready for them. They haven't done any of the work, Scott, that you mentioned, where they're writing down. Okay, this is the work that the senior accountant is going to be doing, right?

Yeah.

So, Frank, before we get to our tip of the week, just one more question. What is the worst advice you see or hear given in scaling businesses?

Yeah, the worst advice I Hear is in order to scale, you have to lower your prices or lower your value proposition. I hear that all the time that scaling means less value. That is not true. You absolutely can deliver more scale and in some cases even raise prices when you scale. Because now you can do things sometimes faster, more efficiently, and at, at. And usually you're honing down, you're focusing in on a particular market area. And so you can, you can now start charging specialization prices. But I do hear a lot of times, oh, it's time to scale. So going to drop prices. This is a lot of times the consultants, they'll work with corporate clients and they'll charge, you know, 50, 100,000, $200,000 in engagement. And when it's time for them to scale, they say, oh, well, in order for me to scale, I'm going to have to create some kind of subscription service business and charge 300 bucks for a report or something like that. And so they'll just immediately drop their prices because they think that's the thing they have to do. It's. It is not. It's a myth.

All right, well, Frank, this has been great. You're speaking our language. Scott and I are constantly talking to our community about, you know, not just solving your money problems, but also solving your time problems and scaling your business, getting yourself out of the business, putting on that CEO hat and, you know, having that aspirational hourly rate. What's your time worth? It's not worth $10 an hour. Is it worth $1,000 an hour? Is it worth $5,000 an hour if you're not doing so anything less than thousand dollars an hour, you shouldn't be doing. Yeah, right. And we have the most. We're like, it's like the best time ever to be an entrepreneur. We have global talent at our fingertips. We have so much automation and software. It's incredible. It's incredible.

Scott, whatever, whatever you do though, whatever you do, don't do this. Like, don't make my mistake. When, when your wife says to you, honey, will you do do X? Like will you clean the shower for me? Don't say, do you know what my time is worth? You just go comply.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a good point.

But yeah, definitely take, take into consideration the price of the hotel room that evening.

Total overall cost.

Right?

Yeah. You got to reverse it. That's why, like, you got a valet park. Yes. Why don't we walk? Do you know what my time's worth? You know your time's worth. So Frank, what is your tip of the week? A website or resource? A book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

So there's a book that I absolutely love, that I like to recommend for anyone who's looking at their business model and making shifts in it. It's called Getting to Plan B. Breaking through to a Better Business. Getting to Plan B. And anyone who's done any serial entrepreneur work knows that plan A never works. So if you've started out a business and you've created some processes and you're finding that you're struggling, you're not alone. So check out this book. You can find it on Amazon and things like that. It's John Mullins and Randy Commissar put it together, but Getting to Plan B. And it's a ton of great stories about large companies and how they had to pivot in order to make things work and getting really creative about it. So that's one of the things that I think people get out of that book, is they start to think very creatively about what needs to change in order to become a scalable business model.

Very cool. Very cool. Before we get to Scott Todd's Tip of the Week, I do have to just give a shout out to our sponsor, flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life. Start building your passive income machine with none other than Scott Todd, who's done it thousands of times. So go up that mountain of land, investing quickly, safely, efficiently, and do it in real time. Because we all know accountability works. Group accountability is even better. So learn more. Schedule a call. Go to thelandgeek.com training thelandgeek.com training and Frank, did you know that the tuition you're gonna make it back six months or less, guaranteed. Just do what we tell you to do. It's not gonna cost you anything. Make it back 180 days or less, guaranteed in either terms or cash deals. You've literally nothing to lose. Solve your problems, money. Solve your time problems. The landgeek.com training. All right, Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

All right, listen, this is right up our conversation alley for today. I want everybody if systems is your thing, systems and workflow. Right, Because I'm a big fan of the workflow component of it. Make sure that you're following us@processmoto.com for Process Thursday. Every week we're building or every couple weeks we're building, on Thursdays we're building someone's processes and maybe yours is up there too. So check out Process Moto and join us on Thursdays.

Process Moto. I love it. Do you want your business to run like clockwork? Stop managing your workflows and automate them. Boy, is that my favorite word, isn't it? Used to be free.

Used to be free.

Yeah.

Automated.

Used to be free. I think free is my second favorite. But if you want to learn more about getting to that next level, the guy does it every day. Go to frankbria.com so my tip of the week is frankbria.com we will have a link to the show notes and just a reminder listeners, by the way, the only way, the only way we're getting the quality of guests like a Frank Bria from frankbria.com is if you do us three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got a rate, you got to review the podcast. Send a screenshot of the review to supporthelandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 wholetailing course, how to double your money 30 days or less. Frank Brea, Are we good?

This is great. Thanks so much. Been a blast.

Thank you, Scott. Todd, are we good?

We are.

Yeah. All right, let's do this. One, two, three.

Let's freedom ring.

Close enough. Frank's life, man, I had no idea this was going to go on. All right, thanks, everybod.