Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - 7 Pillars of 7 Figures - 115

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

In this episode of Empire, Craig talks about his 7 pillars of 7 figures.  He has learned what it takes to take a business to 7 figures and summarizes for you into these 7 pillars that you NEED to implement. You are a leader and if you don’t implement these pillars, you will plateau and eventually fail.  Listen and learn how you can scale your business to 7 figures and beyond!   “Your values and vision drive every decision.“ “Is this the best use of my time right now?” “Revenue feeds the ego, but profit feeds the lambo.” “Charge what you’re worth.” “Your income will only rise to the level of your leadership.” “Make the world play by your rules.” - Craig Ballantyne   Here’s what you’ll discover: 03:07 - Your vision should be like a Polaroid picture 07:22 - Are you using your time wisely? 10:16 - Why your income has plateaued  13:36 - Chop away the dead wood 17:19 - How to start playing by your rules 18:46 - Communication is key   Follow us on Instagram: @realcraigballantyne / @bedroskeuilian   Buy Man Up and get Bedros’s High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/   Buy The Perfect Day Formula: https://www.craigballantyne.com/#books   Make sure to review us on iTunes: http://bit.ly/theempireshow

You have to have that five-star leadership in order to grow not just yourself, but grow everyone around you. Think of yourself as a coach lifting up your team members so that they can go out onto the field and win the game. It's not you. Hey friends, welcome back to the Empire Podcast show. And when B is away, Craigie will play. That's right. It is a solo show with Craig Balinstein today and is going to be absolutely amazing for you. All right. So I'm the host with the most to help you go and grow and hit your first seven figures or even more.

All right. And what I want to talk to you about today is what I call the seven pillars of seven figures. Now, if you're already there, don't you worry because these seven pillars are also the same seven pillars for seven billion. Because we're going to talk about a couple of female entrepreneurs and use some examples from their world. And they have a collective net worth of $7 billion. All right. So I am going to give you lots of examples. from past success stories that we've had here on the Empire podcast show. Tom Bill, you, Ed Milette, all the greats. And I'm also going to dip into some of our favorite clients in our Empire Mastermind Group

and draw on Vince Del Monte and Zander Fryer and all these great people that are making massive strides. So that we can download, like download not just 25 years of my business experience or 25 years of Baderos' business experience, but download literally hundreds of years of business success so that you don't have the same struggles and failures and missteps that we have had as you hit your first million or your first 10 million or your first 100 million, all right? So this is going to be super exciting. So let's dive in to the seven pillars. And we start with 2020 vision, all right? 2020 vision is the first pillar because your values and vision drive every decision.

If you do not know where you are trying to go, well, any road will take you there as Alice in Wonderland. was the Cheshire Cat or maybe the Mad Hatter. Someone said to Alice in Wonderland, if you don't know where you want to go, any road will take you there. And that's why you're going down detours and rabbit holes and chasing shiny objects instead of being that fast action taker on what really matters. It breaks my heart, right? It breaks my heart because I talk to so many entrepreneurs, my own coaching at events like the Empire Summit that we just had. And I meet you and you say to me, well, I was doing this. And then I went over and started doing this.

And I'm like, no, please stop. Please stop. Because when you get laser focused because of your vision, then you're able to go and do the right things. So one of my favorite female entrepreneurs, I mean, this woman is the youngest female billionaire, Sarah Blakely, really good friend of Baderos. I haven't met her yet. Can't wait to meet her. She's really good friends with Shanda Sumter, another one of our clients as well. And so Sarah Blakely has this phrase that you're visual.

Vision must be like a Polaroid picture. Polaroid picture. And even you young folks know what a Polaroid picture is now because it's cool to go old school and make these Polaroid pictures. But you want to have a crystal clear vision because that drives every decision. And so Sarah Blakely, she started out wanting to help women's lives add value to them. And she created the thing called Spanx. And she said, you know, Spanx is a funny name. Everybody laughs at it. It's unforgettable. And so no. Knowing what she wanted to do, go and sell to department stores and create a massive brand, it allowed her to focus and stay on what Jordan Belfort, who I went to one of his seminars years and years ago, he called the straight line of success. So I went to his seminar before the Wolf of Wall Street came out. And now here it is, you know, this guy's an ex-con and all that sort of stuff. It was after his book came out, but before the movie came out. And imagine an ex-con sitting at the front of the room saying, yeah, Leo DiCaprio is going to play me in a movie.

Like, I rolled my eyes a little bit of that. Sure enough, though, of course, Jordan Belford, who we haven't had it on the show yet, but we should. Sure enough, Jordan Belford went and had Leo. And the thing is that I always remember from Jordan is that straight line of success. So the straight line to success, not just in sales calls, but in your vision like Sarah Blakely had, is what you must start with. One of my favorite coaching clients and favorite guests here of the Empire show, Sharon Stravza, not only did he help me understand the purpose of value or, sorry, vision in building a business at 10X as he did with his real estate company, Tell us. But also, when we were coaching, we realized he was losing out.

He was stopping a habit that got him to success in the first place, which was nightly visualization, nightly visualization. And so at the end of our day, I help entrepreneurs really build in their perfect day, their perfect week. and we had to add back in nightly visualization to Sharon's life, and that was the thing that has allowed him to go and really focus his new startup to success. Okay, so not only do you have long-term vision, you have to have short-term visualization of how every day, every sales call, every meeting is going to go, and that's how you're going to grow. And when you have that vision,

one of my favorite sayings from Ed Milet that he shared on the Empire show with Bedros a while ago was about how when you can get other people's visions, to fit into your vision because your vision is so big, that's when you attract so many people that want to work with you, that want to help you, that want to help you go and grow. And that's what the Empire Show is all about. So make sure you have 2020 vision first. If you don't know how to do that, get my book, free perfectday book.com, go and get the perfect day formula.

There's a vision exercise in there that will really, really help you. All right, the next thing that we're going to do is help you find focus. So I'm like you. I hire coaches. I go to my coaches. I get their advice and I take action. And one of my coaches is the man, the myth, the legend, Bedros Kulian. And I went to Beedros last year and I said, B, well, not last year, but two years ago when I was really getting and growing my coaching business, I said, B, listen, I want to do these six things, these six things to go. And he was like, nope, no, Craigie, you only get three. You only get three. So here it was. I had like six,

you know, little children, you know, children ideas. And he's like, listen, you got to send three of them away and focus just on these three. You have single area of focus. And every time, Craig, every time that I've told somebody to take six ideas and get it down to just three, or five ideas down to three or ten ideas to three or whatever it is, but really three big rocks in your business that will get you the lead generation, the sales, and attract people in your world, when you have those three pillars, that's when you're going to go and grow. And that's what we're all about here on the show. So even Baygros has helped me do that. And when you are seeing have that singularity of focus you will stay on that straight line of success but you will also be

able to really have a great answer to this this question that you should be asking yourself not just every day but every hour and you know you can't ask this every minute because obviously you have work to do but it should be an overriding thought in your mind maybe painted up on your wall and the question goes like this is this the best use of my time right now is this the best use of my time right now is this the best use of my time right And then what you need to know is how your energy flows over the day. So if you know that creating videos or creating a sales letter, that should be done in the morning. And instead in the morning, you're checking email and Facebook and Instagram. Well, you're not using your time properly.

You must use the time as best as you can. So always be asking that question. If you take nothing else from this particular show, it's institute. that habit of asking, what's the best use of my time right now? And am I using my time the best right now? That's really important. So we got 2020 vision, which then allows you to have that singularity of focus. And when you have singularity of focus, you move into pillar number three of the seven figure or a seven billion dollar business, which is strategic scaling, okay? Strategic scaling. So about a year and a bit ago, a client came to Badros and myself. His name is Frank.

He's from the Netherlands. He's an online nutrition coach. He was doing great. He's doing 10K a month. So he had a six-figure business. And he was able to strategically scale 10x in 10 months, 10x in 10 months, by being able to take his strategy and his vision and put it into place and execute. So one of the things that I've taught on this show, I've taught at the Empire Summit, I teach it our Empire Masterminds, I teach it every coaching session I do is building the 90-day plan. If you go back, I think it was the New Year's episode that we did in kickoff 2018 or 2019. We did this one on goal setting and was like, okay, we're going to go through the 90-day planner. You're going to have your outcome goal, your three rocks underneath that, right? Just three rocks.

And when you have that in place, you can go and get quick victories and you know exactly what to do every single day. And when you know exactly what to do every single day, it's so easy for you to execute. Execute, execute, execute. So in order to have strategic scaling, there must be that plan for execution in place. Another one of our favorite Empire Mastermind clients is this young man named Xander Friar. Man, he has an offer dialed in for his high-impact coaching, where he helps health and wellness coaches scale. And now, Baderas and I have helped him build the foundation of lead generation and team, and you stack one and one and one upon one another,

and that is how you are able to scale. So you have to have all of these pillars in foundation, as well as your own ability to have your leadership at place, which is the key to growing up other team members. Shanda Sumter, who I mentioned before, she has this amazing quote that she shared at the Empire Business Summit, and she said, your income will only rise to the level of your leadership.

That is another writer-downer. Write that down. Your income will only rise to the level of your leadership. Because right now there's a lot of solopurners watching this show. Maybe you're a gym owner, you have a couple of part-time trainers, or maybe you're an online coach, or maybe you're a copywriter, or maybe you just have your first video sales letter. It's starting to get traction. Well, listen, if you are only a leader of one person and that person is yourself, you're going to be capped out.

You might get to seven figures. I know a few people that have gotten to seven figures with no help. That's hard. Now, if you want to go to eight figures, you're not going to get there unless you're a great leader. Shanda's been able to scale from $5 million to about $25 or $30 million by becoming a great leader. Badrus has scaled Fit Body Boot Camp up to $800-plus franchises because he's become a great leader. So if you aren't a great leader, go and get Man Up. Go to manup.com, get that book, Beardris's book, and become a great leader.

You have to have that five-star leadership in order to grow not just yourself, but grow everyone around you. Think of yourself as a coach lifting up your team members so that they can go out onto the field and win the game. It's not you putting everything on your back. That's the six-figure earner, maybe the breaking seven-figure barely, but stuck and plateaued at that level if you're putting everything on your back. Now, that leads into profit planning. Profit planning is the fifth pillar of the seven-figure business, because you have to understand. Bezos loves this phrase, that revenue feeds the ego,

but profit feeds the Lambo. All right, I know. I switch that up on Beidros there. He usually says profit feeds the family, but I like to joke that profit feeds the Lambo, because if you don't have profit, you can't buy the Lambo. And I know that some of you out there, want to buy the Lambo. Now, what that means is it's great to have seven figures in revenue.

It's great to have $7 billion in revenue. Like Uber, I don't know what they're making, but it's billions of dollars in revenue, but they do not profit. All right. Well, that's a whole another argument to have about whether these types of unprofitable giant tech businesses are really good businesses or not. But in your business, in your business, you absolutely positively must have profit because you're not getting massive amounts of investors. capital. So you have to have profit. Now, where do you start with this? Well, we broke it down with Vince Delmani, one of our Empire Mastermind members. Absolutely amazing dude. He's been a coaching client of mine since 2007, so over a decade of dominance for that young man. And he became

a millionaire by 30, just like he said he would, and he's growing and going. Now, here's the thing, is he had a business that was generating millions of dollars, but he was like, man, where's all the money. It's not in my bank account because, you know, like, that's not growing as fast as our revenue is for our business. And so we sat down, we did like an autopsy and audit, a financial investigation into his business. We went, okay, there's money leaking out here, there's money leaking out here. He was running a couple of side businesses that were bleeding a little bit of cash, and we chopped away, right? We chopped away at the dead wood, just like you have to do that. So you might have to go back and look at how you collect cash receivables and how much is paid up front

for your coaching and understand that people are going to be delinquent on payments in your businesses, whether you do supplements or whether you do coaching or whether you have a gym and you have memberships and there's going to be credit card declines. You have to make sure you try and get more that cash up front in some instances in order to feed the business so that there's revenue there, but also so that you are able to take away profit. So billing, cash collection, and making sure that you charge what you're worth. And most of the time I tell people you're going to charge what you think you're worth, and then you're going to double that.

All right. Charge what you think you're worth, then double that. Here's why. One, you're definitely undercharging. You're undervaluing your services. But two, two, is that you think, okay, if I do an hour of coaching, an hour of my time is worth $200. Okay, understand that there's more than an hour of your time that goes into an hour of coaching.

right you got to do the preparation you also have to transition into the coaching session and then transition out and back to the other work so it's really two hours of time if not more that's why you have to charge your worth and then double it that's another writer downer okay so we got three killer writer downers here now into number six structured sales structured systems for sales is what you have to have all right so yesterday I was down in irvine california and I was working with a company that does $239 million in sales. And the guy who runs it, he has a master's degree in military history. And man, he is just dialed in with the military analogies.

And he runs that thing like an army. It's just a machine. And that's why they're so profitable and they've grown 5X in the last five years. Because he has the systems in place for sales, he has a sales team out there. They have sales systems. He has time systems for his team. That's why they're bringing in me is to dial those things. and even more because I work with a lot of high-level leadership teams.

And I just absolutely love it. It was a beautiful office and just a well-oiled machine. And if you take a look at your business and you looked at it with outside eyes and you said, is this really a business built on systems and structure and strategy? Or is it built on chaos and disorganization? And if it's disorganized and you're trying to grow, you're just going to be spinning your wheels. You're going to be spinning your wheels because you probably don't have the video. and you're going down a lot of detours,

and you're just trying to catch up, and you're in reactive mode, but you have to switch over to proactive mode where you're planning ahead and being structured. And if you're not able to do that, you're always going to be stuck at 250K, or maybe you're at 400K, or maybe you're at 90K. And if you're, oh man, if you are the person who's stuck at 90K

in either revenue or personal income, it's got to drive you so insane, so insane. Or the same with like, if you're stuck at like, 790K or 850 or 900 or 950, oh, that's got to drive you nuts that you haven't broken through the barrier of six figures or seven figures. All right, that's got to drive you nuts. You've got to get to the next level and it's going to start with those systems. Now, now, another one of my favorite female entrepreneurs is Oprah. Oprah Winfrey. Absolutely amazing. She lives two hours from her office now, you know, now that she has the own network. So she doesn't go and have meetings. She has a system where people,

email her very detailed breakdowns that allow her to not have meetings. So she runs the world by her rules. And that's something that I've always operated by and I want you to start operating by. Make the world play by your rules, your systems and build the systems that allow you to operate like Oprah, like this superstar of your business. Instead of you having to go by somebody else's rules and waste your time and do that, if you're doing that, if you're really losing your time, it's because you don't have the system. and rules in place to make other people fit into your lane so that you can move faster. So Oprah and Sarah Blakely, so many female entrepreneurs, there's so much to learn from them because they have a lot of other societal pressures on them, whether it's family or whether

it's expectations of what a woman should do. And when they're able to succeed, that's where the big, big lessons are. Because you can look at some male entrepreneurs and go, well, he doesn't have to, you know, be with the kids all the time, or, you know, he doesn't have to, you know, have these expectations and he can work all this time and do whatever he wants and no one's ever going to say anything about him or gossip about them. But for women, it's harder. So when they're able to do it, man, you've got to pay attention. Now that gets to the seventh pillar of seven figures or seven billion, whatever you want this to be. And it's clear and concise communication.

Clear and concise communication. I think this is a quote from George Bernard Shaw, but it's one of favorite quotes about communication. He goes, the misconception about communication is that there was some. I know I butcher the quote, but what he's saying there is everybody thinks they're communicating with people, but the mistake is, like, you don't communicate properly, just like I might have not communicated that quote properly, but I think you understand what I'm saying, and you don't understand what I'm saying, and then we leave the meeting, and it's like, why didn't you get what I said, done. And you're like, well, I did this, but you wanted this. And there was not good communication. And that's why so much stress happens. So when you have clear and consistent and

concise communication with your team, you have to make sure does everybody understand this? You know, say that back to me. Are we all on the same page? So communication is a two-way street in a seven-figure business. In a six-figure business, it's like that top-down boss. You know, hey, do this, do this, do this. Contract worker, do this. Person I found an upwork, do this. great, great. But when you want to go and grow to the next level, you have to communicate with your team two ways. And we teach in the Empire Mastermind, we teach leadership, we teach meeting rhythms, like how often you're going to meet with your team, how often you're going to meet with people one-on-one. Begros is always talking about how he's leveling up his team, his entire team, plus his leadership team with trainings, bringing in outside experts, all of that so that everybody communicates better, knows one, knows each other better. and that's how your team is going to go and grow.

So you need to have either a weekly video or a weekly email that goes out to your team, talking about highs and lows and everything and amazing people in the company, recognizing people, saying where you may have messed up, being open, honest, vulnerable, authentic. And when you have that rhythm in place, everyone in the business knows what's going on. There's not a lot of communication mistakes. There's not a lot of confusion in their head about, well, we were working with, that client last week and now we're not working with them and now we're using a new software and I don't understand what's going on in this company. All you have to do is explain things.

Explain things. Hey, listen, we were working with this billing company. Things didn't work out because of XYZ and ABC or now we're more advanced and they can't handle us or, you know, they've gone and changed something. So we've decided to move on to this one. Here's why. It's benefit for you. Okay, great. Does anybody have any questions about that? That's how a great leader does clear and consistent and concise communication with their team, where it's that family environment going back and forth. And when you have that in place, you are really going to go and grow. So it's a leadership issue. Bad leaders have bad communication, and good leaders have great communication, and that's how they're able to improve.

Okay, so if you're shirking the leadership, if you're shirking the difficult conversations, that's what's holding you back from getting to the next level. So here's what you need to do, my friend. And here's what you need to do. I've given you a couple of resources already. Man Up by Badros Guglian. If you are watching this show and you haven't yet read his book, that's a little surprising, all right? That's on you.

Same with my book, The Perfect Day Formula. Go and watch that for your 2020 vision so that you can implement Beidros' leadership strategies in there to grow your team, to grow your income. That's what you're going to do right now. And if you are beyond the $500,000 level and you're like, okay, Craig, I got to, you know, 100,000,000. and I'm ready to get to seven figures or if you're beyond that you want to scale to eight figures or more if you want to catch up to Bedrosa Whatever is he is at is he's closing on a hundred million here's what I want you to do

I want you to make sure that you either drop a comment below or send us a message and and make sure that you get Access to the application for the Empire Mastermind group and when you get access to that you're going to fill that out so that you can join our group and grow your Empire using the seven pillars of domination. All right? So one last thing. Make sure you go to iTunes or whatever podcast system you're listening to this on

and give us a five-star rating and review. We love to hear from you and we'll see you soon.