25 Years of Business Advice in 27 Minutes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So I've been running businesses for 15 years, and I've hit this wall multiple times. It's somewhere around 7, 8, 9, 10 million in revenue, where suddenly your biggest problem, it's not a lack of ideas, it's a issue with you, you're the bottleneck. And so I've got this buddy named Ryan Deiss. He's got this amazing quote. He says, the more valuable you are, the less valuable the company is. And I read that quote in one of his books a while ago, and it kind of changed my game on how I thought about business. And so I decided to have Ryan come on and talk about this simple but very effective framework he has for running companies. It's changed my life and maybe it could change yours. But on this podcast, he shared everything. So he shared his whiteboard, his spreadsheets, his flow charts with his employees. It's basically like a 30-minute MBA, which is pretty insane and very valuable. So check it out. Let me know what you think in the comments. All right, let's get into it.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:53)
You have two things that I like. One is you have this quote, which is the more valuable you are at your company, the less valuable your company. I think this is like for every entrepreneur, you will hit this point, especially when you want to sell, where it felt really good to be the man, to be the one creating all the value, to taking all the shots and having your name everywhere and your face everywhere and your fingerprints all over the business. It does feel good from an ego perspective. It does feel good to have control, but it sucks if you ever want to go on vacation or sell your business, because the more valuable you are to the business, the less valuable the business is.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:30)
Yeah, you got to decide. Do you want to be down on the court, hitting the last minute jump shot to win the game? Or do you want to be up in the owner's box? That is the choice that you make. And so you're either going to be the most valuable player, or you're going to own the team. Most entrepreneurs would much rather be valuable, and they would rather do the things that enable them to get started, than do the things that are going to enable them to actually achieve the things that they say they want. But really, they kind of like being important. They kind of like being valuable. And I think that's, you've got to decide what you actually want. And the nice thing is, it's your business, so you get to decide.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:13)
Yeah, but a lot of times, the problem is impulse control. Like, so, like.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:18)
He says, as he cuts you off.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:22)
It's impulse control, I think. Like, I can say that I want something, and I do truly want it, but 20 years of previous behaviors have to be broken, and it's incredibly challenging to actually do that. And I think that, like, evolving as a person is, we actually just did an episode on the other day, is way more challenging than a lot of people think.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:42)
I like this graphic you had here of the before and after.
You know, I think the messy sort of entrepreneur, which is, you know, I've been guilty a lot of these things. You're working 80 hours a week, you're in the weeds. If you ask who owns this, the answer is me, me, me. For each area, the whole team is asking you, hey, you got a minute to talk about X? You know, 200 times a day, you're missing soccer games. You can't sell the business because it's too dependent on you and the business owns you rather than you owning the business. And then you have sort of the ideal sort of outcome here at the end, which is, you know, it's an hour a week for you, team executes without you, the team optimizes without you, the team decides without you, you can take a 30-day vacation, you break revenue records while you're gone and you're exit ready if you want to, right? Like as an ideal end state. This is for an entrepreneur who wants to exit, you know, wants to build what is sort of insultingly called a lifestyle business, but is I think the main type of business I'm interested in. I use business to have a good lifestyle. So yes, that's kind of what I want. So what's the process? How do you do that transformation? How do you go from player to the owner's box, Ryan?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:46)