The other night, Amy and I had a couples massage, overlooking the skyline, here in the penthouse. There’s this app you can get on your phone called SOOTHE and it’s like Uber for masseuses. You hit the app, and BAM! 30 minutes later, you get a massage right there in your crib.
Anyway… As I got on the massage bed thingy, and the dude went to work on me, I noticed something. The dude’s hands were popping like snap-pops. Every 2-3 seconds his fingers and hands popped. The dude was giving me the hardest, most painful massage I’ve ever had. He was probably mad he got me instead of Amy!
As I laid there, in immense pain, listening to his hands work me so hard they were popping, I realized this guy’s work is killing his career. There’s no way he can continue on for 10 more years wearing his hands out like that. I read somewhere that the average career span of a masseuse is like 10 years. They wear their hands out and arthritis kills their career.
It got me to thinking about entrepreneurs like us
Often times, ‘the work’ kills our career too. We get so tied up doing the work, that we never ascend to the next level. Much like the masseuse’s knuckles, it’s only a matter of time before doing the work kills our career. The people who last the longest in business are those who figure out how to scale.
It doesn’t matter if you hand make the best musical instruments in the world if it’s only you doing the work, you WILL hit max capacity. Most of us didn’t get into business to hit a peak and stay there. WE got in business to embrace the perpetual climb. You make a million. You want ten million. You make ten million. You want a billion. It’s our entrepreneurial personality that makes us always push for more.
Entrepreneurs who hit a plain and stay there are living in fear
Many of us entrepreneurs live in fear.
Fear of scaling.
Fear of investing.
Fear of losing it all.
Fear of having to start from scratch.
Fear of delegating.
This fear keeps us in place, doing the work, killing our career. It’s the deadliest cycle any entrepreneur can fall into. It’s almost impossible to get out of. Especially if the entrepreneur is comfortable. We didn’t take risks to change the world, just to get comfortable. F*ck that.
If you’re a small business owner and you’re doing the work. You know the ten dollar an hour jobs that you refuse to let go of. If you’re still doing the work like some over protective control freak, you’re never going to grow. It’s a fact. There’s only so many hours in a day and only so much energy in your life.
You can’t go big while playing small
I’m not telling to stop working hard. I work as hard as anyone. I work on the big things not the little things. When I was a lone wolf entrepreneur, I did ALL of the work and I saw my income top out. I didn’t get into sales to have a cap on my earnings. If I kept doing the work and growing, I couldn’t keep up. The work was killing me.
It was hard for me to give up the work. I had to find, train and pay the right people to do the work. It wasn’t easy either. I’ve had to “fire” a lot of people that I liked. But once I broke through and got the work taken care of, I broke through period. There is a tipping point. You just have to stick to team building.
Now I’m going to ask you to ask yourself; “Is the work killing me?” and if you got the answer you didn’t want, it’s time to man up and start hiring. You took a risk to get where you are. It’s time you took another risk to get where you want to go. Hell, I’ll make the sales and marketing training part easy for you. You can buy www.showupandclose.com for your sales team and have them virtually trained by me. See. I’m already making it easier on you.
It’s time you stop doing day laborer jobs and start acting like the CEO of yourself. If you can’t afford it, buy technologies that help. Instead of you doing the work and going to networking events or knocking doors, make a funnel and run an ad. They work better any way. Don’t know what a funnel is? Find out here www.phonefunnels.co Lastly, share this on social media so we prevent people’s careers from dying. Word.
