Ugh... I have to do something I hate in my business...
For the last 20 years, I've had a number of different businesses. And I'm in the middle of launching a new business because I see a big need in the market. And I've been trying my best to avoid doing something that I really don't want to do. I don't enjoy doing it. I haven't had to do it for a very, very long time.
You get accustomed to... You know, when you have a successful business, you kind of call your own shots at times, obviously, you do things to serve your customer, but you have choices, you have resources, you have decisions that you can make. And so I've done my best to avoid having to do this thing. And I'll share this with you in a minute what the thing is.
However, I found myself yesterday, coming to the point of decision, and I got really frustrated. And so I just, I just stopped, and I just spent about an hour in the Word reading, praying, studying. And when I came out of that time, I just had a refresher because I was getting frustrated. And what I realized is that me having this one constraint, if you will, or this one thing that I was not willing to do or not wanting to do, meant that my entire blueprint, my entire business blueprint was shifting.
If I didn't do this thing, then I would have to do all these other things. If I did this thing I would not have to do all these other things. Or if I did this thing, all these other things would be easier. If I did not do this thing, all these other things would be harder, and there'd be more steps. Right? If I did the thing, then I would have three steps. If I did not do the thing, I would have 15 steps. As I'm battling this back and forth, I could certainly hire somebody to do the thing. However, I'm just a big believer that you have to have familiarity with the process that you're hiring somebody to do. Otherwise, how do you know if they're doing a good job? How do you know if they're doing it well with excellence? How do you know if they're taking advantage of you?
I had a student the other day who reached out to me, and she's like, she's in the process of building a funnel for one of her businesses. And she's like, Hey, I just want to like can I delegate this? Can I source this for somebody? Can I find somebody overseas, and normally, we do that we use Upwork, we use online jobs.ph. We use all sorts of different vehicles to find real quality offshore people, Filipino people, Indian people, great, great people. But you get a massive arbitrage with what it costs us to hire a US-based college-educated person. It costs us to hire a Philippines-based, college-educated person or Panama-based. college-educated person, massive differentials like 20 bucks USD, five bucks, and seven bucks offshore.
And so I told her, I said, Listen, I do not suggest you do that if this is your first time doing this process because A, you're not gonna know if they're doing a good job. B, you're not gonna know if they're doing it according to your blueprint. And see, you haven't done it. So I told her a different plan. I suggest that she worked with, partner up with somebody that I suggested that she worked with us based on who's done a really good job. And then, you know, that way she can get it done. She can get it done on point on, you know, project within scope and learn
And I used to have a bias toward where I would just delegate everything.
I'm a big believer in who not me and who not how. I don't like to learn things if I can just hire somebody to do it. I don't like to do things if I can just hire somebody to do it. However, this is a bit different now. I'll explain that in a minute. But I learned I used to try to delegate my CRM, you know, I've used Infusionsoft. I've used Ontraport, and Click Funnels. And I used to just try to hire people to do that stuff. But then I realized something. I realized that everybody has their own approach to their own philosophy, and I realized that it was like a big black box that I had no clue what the heck they were doing. I had no clue they were doing well and if they were not doing well.
I also learned this when I used to try to hire people to run my Facebook ads. I've spent hundreds and hundreds of I think it's close to $2 million in Facebook ads, and I've run through I think three or four different agencies. And, you know, you come to a point where you start to see these patterns, and you diagnose what's going on, and you recognize a couple of key things.
Actually had a coach a couple of years ago. And he told me something revolutionary to me was fascinating. He ran a $30 million business, a small team, a lean team, exceptionally profitable, and delivered tremendous results to the marketplace. He ran a phenomenal business. I was shocked when he told me that he never delegated his CRM built. He never delegated his work in Infusionsoft Active Campaign and Ontraport and whatever CRM was being used.
I'm like, what, why? Because Paul, he goes, that's the most important part of your business. He goes, That is the most important part of the business. That's where you're getting your conversion. That's where you're spending money to put people into that mechanism. Why would you ever delegate that to somebody else? Why would you ever outsource that to somebody else? And I'm like, but I don't know it. And he goes, dude, learn it. Here.
It's not that hard. He goes, There's really no higher value activity than for you to understand how to convert traffic into leads or customers or whatever the objective is. And so I adopted that. And it has been revolutionary for me because now I know I can hire somebody to do something, and I can hold them accountable. And not that the people that would be hired would intentionally mislead or be misguided. But there's something to be said for clarity accountability and transparency. But there's, even more, to be said for the operator, understanding what's going on.
And I remember a story about Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It was one of those guys. And they had a computer problem where their developers, their computer programmers, they had a whole team working through this computer progress problem, and they couldn't solve it. They just couldn't fix the bug or whatever the issue was, and they had let the team do their thing. And then they were off the deadline. And so once they were off deadline, the dude came. He said, show me the problem. He sat down, and he fixed the code.
The team of 10 people, professionally high-level menza, PhD people couldn't solve it. But the operator could because they knew the complete operation of their business, top-to-bottom soup to nuts.
So I'm a big believer in then that's a really good approach. And the other reason is, you're going to get a lot of people in the marketplace when you're looking at really any type of services, whether it's a software service, a coaching service, some type of a blueprint course, how to do it done with you done for you, agency work, they're going to leverage your lack of knowledge to make things seem a little bit harder than they are and be charging more than getting that thing done would cost. And you don't know what you don't know.
So if you're in the dark about how some of this stuff works, well, you're going to be the towel and not the head. And I'm just a big believer that we're supposed to be the head and not the tail. So this thing for me is cold calling. And this business that I'm starting, I've tried just about everything you can imagine, to avoid having to do cold calling. But it's required and it's necessary. And especially if I want to keep my machine relatively simple.
With cold calling, again, three moving pieces without cold calling about 15 moving pieces. You know, when you look at a race car, what's the difference between a race car and a Honda Accord? Like sit in the driver's seat and visualize it for a minute? What do you see in your normal sedan or your BMW and then sending the race car What do you see in the NASCAR race car?
And what you'll notice if you're doing this exercise is it's not what's present in the racecar. It's what's absent. Right. There's no radio, and there's no passenger seat. There's really nothing. There's no backseat. Its tires, engine, roll cage pedals, dashboard, shifter, and steering wheel go. So by lightening the machine, they make their machine run faster.
Most businesses that I see people trying to build are like a Frankenstein. They've got so much extra crap, which they look at and try to figure out what's working and not working. They don't understand. They don't have any clarity of thought, because it's so complicated and so convoluted. And that's not how we should be doing things. We should be building a racecar.
We should be building a machine that has high fuel efficiency that's effective and delivers exceptional results to a marketplace in the cleanest method possible because whenever you add new systems into a machine, you make things more complex, and you do it by a square factor. It's not math, and it's multiplication.
When you add a system, you have that system that interacts with other systems and their second and third-order consequences in downstream effects that we just aren't aware of. So you want to keep things simple and clean.
So for me, it’s cold calling. As I came out of prayer yesterday, the Holy Spirit said to me, he said, How would you feel Paul, if you didn't have that limiting belief about cold calling?
How would you feel if you didn't have that limiting belief about cold calling? I'm like, well, be pretty awesome because I wouldn't have all this mental clutter in this resistance and hesitation.
And he says, Well, just use your faith and beat it.
I'm like, Oh, my gosh, that's revolutionary, right? Because again, I could. I already have three different services that can do cold calling for me. I could do that immediately. However, I need to get in there. I need to do it for at least a little bit of time. I need to get a sense of the KPIs. I need to get a sense of the scripts. I need to get a sense of how that machine works. And so my takeaway for you today is if you're struggling with something in your business that needs to be done that you don't want to do, I submit to you to consider that and pray about that and say to yourself, how would I feel if I didn't have this limiting belief regarding this thing?
And just watch what happens. Right, because the Bible talks about strongholds. In many cases, the devil can mess with us, not because he's actively working, but because he planted an investment in our brains, which the Bible calls a stronghold. So we have these beliefs, these ways of seeing things, these mental models that are limiting us that are restricting us, are constraining us. They are blind spots, we don't know that, we don't know them, right? And so one of the best ways and that's why you'll hear me often talk about having clean thinking, taking the time to be still, and learning how to manage the mindset in our attitudes. So important.
The farthest distance you'll ever have to travel is your right ear to your left ear, about six inches. And the only difference between a multimillionaire and ditch diggers is how they think. So we've got to learn how to think according to the Word. When we're reading the Word, that's the only time that the author of the book is right there next to us interpreting the book. And that's incredible, so pay attention, if you're running into things, pray about it, and be like, hey, how would I feel if I didn't have this limiting belief regarding this thing?
For me, how would I feel if I didn't have this limiting belief regarding cold calling? I'd feel like okay, I just got to do this temporarily. I can get through it. I feel like I don't have to do all this other stuff. And I feel like okay, let's just get a job. Let's just get it done right, done next. So that's what the Lord showed me.
Then he instructed me and said something like, “Well look, Paul, use your faith, beat it man be the head, not the tail, you're gonna let this little thing mess you up, you're gonna be the tail here, and not the head”. I'm like, “nope”.
And so hopefully that helps. Again, just make sure that you have some mechanism to surface these things when they come up and then attack and address them. And, you know, don't retreat on them. That's what I found myself doing is I was retreating. And I felt bad about that. I'm like, Man, this little thing, it's got to be so messed up.
But we all have those little things right for you. Maybe it's not cold calling, and maybe it's something else. Maybe it's learning a new system or changing your mindset about business. Or maybe it's, you know, marriage or something else that's, that's got you pulling that is pulling your focus away from where it needs to be in so in all those cases, man, just beat it and you've got the tools and the resources in the empowerment. And it's just a decision, right? We just got to get it done. And it's also temporary. Because literally, we can hire just about anything.
Well, we can hire anyone to do anything you want to do. There's someone else out there who can do it better than you and enjoy doing it more than you. And we'll do it faster than you. That's how we want to build businesses of excellence. However, we don't want to delegate too fast, in my opinion, we want to be smart about it. That way, you're maintaining the headship in understanding your machine and understanding how the pieces fit together. That's a big thing I've noticed too, with people is that if they do not understand how something works, then they can't see how the pieces of their business fit together.
The lack of vision produces bad decision-making when you can see the entire working of your machine. Because these things are our systems right there. Non-linear dynamic systems change their systems. And so once you have an understanding of that, then you can make better decisions. If you don't understand that, and if you're just trusting other people, you know, especially people you're paying money who are incentivized to keep working for you, they're incentivized to keep surfacing projects like any agency hired to do anything. You know, their job is to make it create dependence for the business owner to rely on them. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. However, as the business owner, we don't want dependence on anything.
We want systems that run well, by good people. And that's how that works.
When we get these things moving in the right direction, the sky is the limit.
There are three critical things that I've learned over my twenty-plus years, evaluating over one hundred and fifty different business models as a Christian entrepreneur.
I've put together my observations and these three keys (I learned the hard way) into a Christian Entrepreneur Manifesto, along with some step-by-step walk-throughs and demonstrations.
There is no opt-in required.
It walks through my favorite model, the Finders model.
It might be interesting for a Christian looking to start something new or for the first time to escape the "business running them vs. them running their business" or the nine to five and not to have to work for themselves or someone else until the age of eighty.
Check it out here:
https://christianentrepreneurinc.com/go-video
I hope it helps!
Blessings,
Paul
PS: God is a big God.
He gives us above and beyond what we can ask or think.
We must ask big.
We must think big.
And if we don't, it's not His fault if we live limited.
Work hard, pray harder, and never ever ever ever quit.
You've got this!
PPS: Whenever You’re Ready... Here's How I Can Help You Generate An Additional $5 to $10k Per Month Or More:
- Check Out Our Christian Entrepreneurship Manifesto
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