Most entrepreneurs think the biggest threat to their business is the economy, AI, or the competition. It isn’t. In this episode, Randy Gage shares the three mental models he uses with top entrepreneurs in his Breakthrough U Business Accelerator to break through constraints and scale, whether you run a five-client side business or a $500 million company.
I get the honor and the pleasure of working with the top 1 or 2% of the top 1 or 2% of high-level performers in the world, particularly entrepreneurs. Today I want to share the three mental models I work on with them that allow them to transform their businesses in the most optimal ways.
Welcome back to the show, everybody. As you can see, I’m not at home. I’m down in Key West, locked in my lonely writer’s garret, outlining the final table of contents for my next book, Sovereign Operator, and how you become one. I’m really excited about it.
A couple of days ago I finished a coaching call with the Anarchist level of my Breakthrough U Business Accelerator program, and I felt like I needed to open that call with these three mental models. Even though the people in that group are amazing, beyond amazing, they still face the same challenges I see in beginning entrepreneurs who haven’t broken the million-dollar-a-year barrier, that glass ceiling of making more than a million a year. I see it at every level, because it’s more of a mental thing than a business diagnostics thing.
Yes, of course you want to know your customer acquisition cost, the lifetime value of your customer, and what you pay to get a lead. A lot of dynamics go into the equation, and plenty of people besides me teach those things. I’m really good at them, but that isn’t where the breakthroughs come from.
These three mental models will help you transform your business no matter what size you are. Whether you’ve got a dog walking business with five clients or you’re running a business doing $500 million a year on a nice, solid growth trajectory, these three models apply to you.
Here’s the first thing I tell my people: don’t be the thing that can kill the business.
Here’s what I know with every fiber of my being. The biggest threat to your business is not the economy. It’s not AI. It’s not your competition. The biggest threat to your business is you, because you have probably become the constraint.
Sometimes you hear people say, “I’m the bottleneck of my business.” That’s usually what we’re talking about. There’s a constraint in the system because they’ve never looked at their business from the systemic level, which is what I do. That’s the first thing I diagnose with someone. I’m always asking: How do I automate? How do I systematize? How do I scale? I evaluate every business in that context.
Systems have been the lifeblood of my success. I’m really good at building them, breaking them down, and finding the constraints. And these three mental models I’m always beating the drum about with my Anarchists are the same ones I point at myself in the mirror every morning as I work out how to get to the next level.
So identify where those constraints are and what you’re doing to contribute to them:
Identify those, and know that they are the biggest threats to your business.
Number two. How do I say this delicately? You need to move from a ham and egger perspective to a defy gravity perspective.
Now, I want to be really clear. I’m not one of these woo-woo people who say you can sit at home, watch The Secret, meditate, and a Lamborghini will manifest in your driveway. Just write down positive affirmations and all the business will be attracted to you. I’m not saying that, and I’m not saying gravity doesn’t exist. The law of gravity is real, like the other universal laws.
But most of the time, what we as entrepreneurs define as gravity, as universal laws, as truth, isn’t truth. Usually they’re bad premises. Often it’s a good premise that expired and is no longer relevant, or it was a bad premise all along and nobody ever really looked at it. Nobody went back to first principles, reverse engineered it, rebuilt it from the ground up, and asked, “Is this really the way?”
When I say don’t be a ham and egger, I mean I encounter too many entrepreneurs who think small. A speaker tells me, “I’m thinking of raising my keynote fee from $10,000 to $12,500.”
I talked about this a couple of episodes ago. A consultant I work with was obsessing over a proposal for a client, a $10,000 project. He obsessed over it for weeks. Finally he sent it to me as one of his electronic hot seats. That’s part of the coaching program: members create an executive summary of their issue, send it to me as a Word or Google doc, and I analyze it and give them feedback.
His question was, “What else could I put in this proposal to make them more likely to give me the $10,000?”
I read the whole proposal. It looked brilliant. So I changed the price from $10,000 to $25,000, changed nothing else, and told him, “Send it out now. Take exactly what I sent you and email it to the client.”
About 90 minutes later he had an email back: “Okay, great. How do we get started?”
What was I doing? Just getting him out of the ham and egger mindset.
One of the most powerful dynamics of Breakthrough U is the retreat I do with the Anarchists, which is coming up in about a month. I’m so excited about it, because it blows up ham and egger thinking. Sometimes people come in running businesses worth a couple hundred million dollars and still have ham and egger thinking in all kinds of contexts.
Somebody will come in saying, “Oh my God, my calendar! I’m working 12 or 14 hours a day.” And sitting in the group are people who work 15 hours a week and have businesses 15, 20, even 50 times bigger than the ones whose owners believe the business can’t survive without them there 12 or 14 hours a day.
Someone will ask, “What if we raise the price from $5,000 to $7,500?” And somebody else in the group sells a similar offering for $100,000.
Someone comes in wondering how to write a book, and they’re sitting across the table from somebody who’s written 65 books. Someone wonders how to charge more for a speech, and they meet me or other members of the Speaker Hall of Fame or the Million Dollar Speakers Group, people who have spoken to millions around the world.
Someone thinks, “If I could just get an investor to put $20,000 into my business,” and they meet somebody raising half a million dollars with some of the biggest Silicon Valley venture capital firms on their advisor deck. All of a sudden, the ham and egger thinking blows up.
That’s something we all have to do, and it’s one of the reasons I do this YouTube channel.
If you are the thing that could kill your business, admit it publicly in the comments and make the affirmation: “I have been, or I am, the thing that could kill my business, and I’m going to stop.” If you’re bold, daring, and gutsy, put it in the comments. I read all of them.
Same thing if you’ve been thinking like a ham and egger. Someone will tell me, “You don’t understand. I work in a third world country. The economy is so bad, and nobody there has money.” And I’ll show them someone in the group from that same country who writes $10, $20, $30 million checks on a regular basis. We have to blow up ham and egger thinking. If that’s you, put it in the comments: “I’ve been thinking like a ham and egger, and I’m not going to do that anymore.” Declare it publicly, affirm it, and make it part of your psyche.
The third mental model is really important. Approach your business with this mindset: I will build signal that creates market gravity. Instead of chasing after business, business will chase after me.
The first two models were about mindset: worthiness issues, imposter syndrome, limiting beliefs, limiting thinking. This one is about the actual logistics of the business. It’s still a mental approach, but it’s really a strategic method of operating the business.
I’m a strategic advisor to a company, and on a recent call the founder told me he wanted to make 100 cold calls. I said, “No, no, no. This is not the model you want.”
I just wrote a blog post about this called Read This Before You Pitch Me. Open it now and read it after you finish this video. So many people think the way to grow a business is to cold call until your fingers bleed, or send 50, 75, or 100 spam pitches by email or LinkedIn DM. I blow that up in that post. You’ll see it’s not the way to go.
When we solve problems and add value, we’re transmitting signal. We become known for solving particular problems in a particular way. When you get known for that, it builds market gravity. Now we’re using the universal law of gravity in the context we want. Gravity pulls, so we pull business toward you instead of chasing after it.
There are a lot of videos on this channel about this. If you haven’t seen them, search “signal” or “market gravity” on the channel and you’ll see how to create market gravity. Every CEO and founder I work with, I want them to get this perspective.
If number three is your breakthrough, write that in the comments: “Yes, I have been chasing after business. I’m going to learn to build market gravity so business chases after me.” I really do want to hear from you.
Let’s wrap it all up into the main goal you want to reach.
I hate to affirm a negative, but I think it’s safe to say most of you watching this have identified that you’re the constraint in your business. If you got all the way to this point, you probably recognize it: “Wow, I am the constraint of my business.”
So what’s the breakthrough? The people who reach magnificent, record-breaking levels of business development, along with the health, happiness, and harmony that come with doing it the right way, transform from being the constraint of the business to being the constraint assassin of the business.
The people who work 15 or 20 hours a week and grow huge companies? They’re hunting down constraints. They’re not working in the business. They’re working on the business, as Michael Gerber talked about in The E-Myth, if you read that way back in the day. They look for constraints, hunt them down, and assassinate them. That’s how you break through to the next level.
I’d love to hear what you think, so get down in the comments. If you’re not a subscriber, hit that button and the notification bell. Every Monday we run replays of shows I’ve been on with other podcasts, and every Thursday I do a new original episode just for you on becoming a better, healthier, happier, more prosperous entrepreneur.
Have an amazing week. I love you guys. Peace.
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