If you ask the wrong question, the answer can be dangerous. And I believe a lot of entrepreneurs are asking the wrong questions. They want to know how to 10X, 100X, dominate the competition, boost profits, etc. Those are all fair goals to strive for, and it’s not my job to judge them.
I too want the CEOs and founders I work with to scale, boost profits, etc. But here’s the thing: those are outcomes. They’re the scoreboard. And nobody ever won a game by staring at the scoreboard.
So let me share with you the top three issues I work on with most of them…
- How to stop being the thing that can kill your business.
For most of you reading this, your biz evaporates 10 minutes after you’re dead or disabled. Maybe you’ve built something that can be sold as scrap for your beneficiaries, maybe not. But as soon as you take your hand off the steering wheel, the wreck is a foregone conclusion.
Here’s what I know from advising hundreds of founders: the biggest single point of failure in most companies isn’t the economy, the competition, AI, or the Easter Bunny. It’s the founder.
Every major decision runs through you. Every key client relationship runs through you. The pricing lives in your head. The vision lives in your head. The sales process is basically you on a Zoom call being charming. Your team doesn’t make a move without checking with you first, and if you’re honest, you kind of like it that way.
Because being needed feels like being valuable. It isn’t. It’s being trapped. You didn’t build a business. You built a job with overhead, and a boss who never lets you take a vacation. (A shocking number of the entrepreneurs who find their way to me haven’t had a true vacation, or even a real day off, in years.)
There’s a simple law in operations: every system is limited by its tightest bottleneck. Speed up everything else and it doesn’t matter. Output is capped at the constraint. In most entrepreneurial companies, the constraint walks around wearing the founder’s face. (Some days I see it in my own mirror.)
So here’s my vision for you: You will transform from being the constraint to being the person in charge of hunting down constraints and killing them.
That’s the real job of a CEO. Not doing the work. Not even managing the people doing the work. Your job is to find the thing choking growth right now (a broken handoff, a missing leader, an offer that doesn’t convert, a decision only you are allowed to make) and murder it. Then go find the next one. Forever.
You’re not the engine. You’re the mechanic who keeps the engine running at full throttle.
Start here. Write down every decision that only you can make, and every relationship that would walk out the door if you did. Then ask yourself: if I disappeared for 90 days, what breaks first? That’s your first constraint. Go hunt it.
And watch for the voice in your head that says, “Nobody can do this as well as I can.” Probably true. Also irrelevant. Clinging to it makes you a victim of your own business. You can be a victim, or you can be a victor. Choose mindfully.
- How to stop thinking like a ham-and-egger.
In boxing, a ham-and-egger is a journeyman. He shows up, takes his punches, and collects enough to buy breakfast. Never a contender. Never headlines the card.
I counseled two different agency founders this week to charge an initiation fee of $100k to accept an account. Their mindset is that they should leverage their time, employees, and debt to invest in new clients for months before they start earning anything. I told both of them to grow a pair (see number 3 below) and start charging clients upfront for the tremendous investment they’re making in them. And in both cases I suggested they raise their fees by 30–40 percent.
Look at that dynamic for a second. These founders were essentially running a bank for their clients: lending them expertise, payroll, and borrowed money, interest-free, for months. And calling it “good customer service.” That’s not generosity. That’s ham-and-egger thinking. (And the reason so many founders give away too much equity raising money they shouldn’t.)
Ham-and-eggers think small because they see themselves as small. They chase the clients who are easiest to get instead of the clients who are best to have. They price based on what they think the market will tolerate instead of the value they actually create. They take every deal that comes along because they’re terrified the next one won’t. Here’s the mantra I stress to them:
The premium market isn’t shopping for cheap. It’s shopping for certainty.
The company that can afford a $100k initiation fee doesn’t flinch at the number. It flinches at the founder who looks like he’s apologizing for it. When you discount, you don’t look generous to the premium buyer. You look unsure.
And this is where it stops being a pricing conversation and becomes an identity conversation. You will never consistently charge more than you believe you’re worth. You’ll never pursue a market you don’t believe you belong in. Your prices, your client list, and your vision are all bumping against the same ceiling…
The size of the story you’re telling yourself about who you are.
So you can tweak your pricing all day long. But until you upgrade the self-identity underneath it, you’ll find a way to drift right back to where you feel “comfortable.” And comfortable is exactly where ham-and-eggers live.
Want to bust out? Ask yourself three questions. Who would I be serving if I knew I was the best in the world at this? What would I charge them? And what belief is stopping me from making that offer this week?
Then go make the fucking offer.
- How to build Signal that flips the chasing biz dynamic.
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I’ve been banging this drum relentlessly. But it’s worth repeating, because it’s the thing that makes the first two possible.
Signal is what the market can actually hear about you. Not what you say. Not what’s on your website. What actually gets received.
Most entrepreneurs are stuck in the chasing business. Chasing leads. Chasing referrals. Chasing prospects who ghosted them. Chasing clients for late payments. Every month starts at zero, and the whole operation runs on hustle. That’s not a sales problem. It’s a Signal problem. Your Signal is either weak or misdirected.
Building Signal means getting three things into alignment:
The Transmission: the problem you actually solve.
The Receiver: precisely who has it.
The Differential: how you solve it unlike anyone else on Earth.
When those three lock, you create Market Gravity. Business comes to you, instead of you chasing after business. Prospects show up already sold. The sales cycle shrinks. Price stops being the main topic of conversation. And yes, clients will happily pay an initiation fee to get on your calendar.
Most companies try to buy Market Gravity with volume: more ads, more posts, more noise. You can’t buy it. You have to build it.
And here’s the part nobody else in the positioning world will tell you: a weak Signal is almost always a conviction problem. Narrowing your Receiver means turning away revenue. Claiming a real Differential means risking being publicly wrong. Pricing to the outcome means declaring what you’re worth. None of those are copywriting decisions. They’re courage decisions. You cannot transmit what you don’t fully believe you’re worth.
The real goal
Notice how these three feed each other. When you stop being the constraint, you finally have the bandwidth to think bigger. When you stop thinking like a ham-and-egger, you create an offer worth broadcasting. And when you build real Signal, the right clients come to you, which makes it a whole lot easier to stop being the constraint.
That’s the real goal. Not 10X for its own sake. A business that can thrive without you, at a price that reflects the value you create, that pulls in the right clients instead of chasing them. A business you don’t need to escape from.
So which one is the constraint in your business right now? Be honest. Then go kill it.
Of course, the real reason I’m telling you all this is that I’m really chiding and reminding myself! Because I keep catching myself falling prey to these same limiting beliefs. You’re welcome.
Peace,
– RG
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