The #1 Reason Your Life Stays Small (And How to Fix It)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Codie Sanchez** (0:30)
Do you know how the greatest retailer in American history got himself arrested? He was crawling across a Brazilian supermarket floor with a tape measure. That was Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. He was so obsessed with monitoring every single detail that he could fly a two-seater plane over his parking lots to count the number of cars outside of Walmart. But the part that you got to realize is that it almost killed his company. That's the trap most founders, owners falls into. To put more simply, do become the bottleneck and that's how good operators actually kill your business. Today, I thought we'd do something different. I'm going to tell you the three archetypes of bottlenecks to avoid becoming, and then I got a little four-step test that gets you out. This is the BigDeal podcast. Let's go.
Let's start with one sentence I'd like you to tattoo on your face. Don't be a hero. If you are in business or in life and you think that being Superman is the fun game, you are actually playing the wrong game. Like, you know you should delegate, and yet if you're anything like me in the early days of building a business, every week, waking minute basically ends the same way, with you solving everything. And I totally get it. When your business is brand new, your heroics are like, that's your only option, right? You're dead otherwise. And if that works to keep you in business, you think it works to make your next millions, but that's not true. All right, so here's what happens. As your business grows, so does the list of problems to solve. And each time you swoop in and try to fix things yourself, especially where those problems are outside of your unique subject matter expertise, you basically remove the highest dollar use of your time for whatever seems urgent, but is really just in front of you. That's not how you build a business. Because what happens is you keep diving in front of every problem and your brain gets rewired neuron by neuron to prefer being needed to winning, being free or making more money. That's not good. Great owners scale, but they don't scale just with themselves. Your business needs systems and people that run them. I've learned this a hard way so many times. One of the more embarrassing moments of my life as an entrepreneur happened years ago.
I got invited by one of my favorite entrepreneurs of all time, Richard Branson. Now, why do I like him? Because he basically lives this adventurous, huge life while also running multi-billion dollar businesses. So he invited me out to Necker Island, and it was with a small group of other entrepreneurs. That's what I wanted. I wanted to become sort of somebody who did crazy things and also built some of the biggest companies on earth. It's really rare. It's not normal to be like cross-continent ballooning while you have a multi-billion dollar airline. And so when the invitation came from him and his team, like you would think, wow, this is a bucket list item. You're going to drop everything and go, right Codie? And instead, like I remember specifically looking, he sent like an agenda of what we were going to be doing. And it was like water bicycling, whatever that is, bioluminescence snorkeling.
He actually had a line in there like you will spend as little time as humanly possible on your phone. And I literally cringed. I thought there is no way my company cannot afford to have me offline for that long. And it's still a regret of mine to this day because I thought I was being the hero and I was going to save everything. Everything was fine. I could have been gone for two weeks. But the next time something breaks in your business, I want you to actually say like, why might this be a good thing for me? And how can I train a long-term fix as a system, a teammate to handle this as opposed to do it myself? Because if a small part of you lights up, like you just get hot and bothered when the phone rings and only you can fix something, you're being the hero. And that actually means you're an addict. You're addicted to your own supply. And so this week, you know, I want you to do something totally different. I like to call it the rescue tally. So every time you jump in to handle something, your team should own. Or that an AI tool these days can solve. I want you to just like have that little sticky note that you wrote the quote on and make a mark. Every one of those marks, I want you to start associating with time. And then you're going to save that. And you're going to start to think about after saving day after day, what is the cost of all of those little check marks? And this is really important because when you think about one of the most famous manufacturers in American history, we talked about Sam Walton. Well, I've got an even crazier story for you about Henry Ford. Like, we like to think of these people as innovators and incredible builders, and they are. But the same things that made them their first dollars are actually the things that made them miserable. And Henry Ford actually was that. Like, in the beginning of Ford, if you don't know this, he owned more than half of the US car market. The Model T was printing money, total innovation. You know, his little face will be on entrepreneurs' version of Mount Rushmore.