Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Avoid Committing the Biggest Entrepreneurial Sins - 052

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

Want to stay a few yards ahead of your competition at all times? In this episode, Bedros Keuilian and Craig Ballantyne reveal the biggest pitfalls to avoid as an entrepreneur. They also share how to manage your time and mental energy like Richard Branson. Watch or listen now to catch a glimpse of the ultra-focused mindset you’ll need to make 7 and 8 figures.   “Empires are built in imperfection.” - Bedros Keuilian   Here’s what you’ll discover: 0:50 - Why the path of least resistance is deadly for entrepreneurs. 2:29 - Why having a bunch of great ideas can actually hinder your business’s growth. 3:49 - How Richard Branson grows his business without having to fly his planes. 7:36 - How the word “no” keeps you from wasting time on smaller business distractions. 9:32 - When do you know it’s time to part ways with someone in your business?   “Selling the product is the harder work, but it’s the more important work.” - Craig Ballantyne

The more I say no to what seem like opportunities, which are really distractions, the more I can say yes to the big opportunity that I have, which is, in my case, Fit Body Boot Camp. Hey, most gurus are out there telling you what to do, but you know what? The secret to success sometimes is what not to do. I'm Craig Ballantyne. This is Beidros Kulian. This is the Empire Podcast Show. We're going to help you build your empire by avoiding some of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make.

So Beidros, let's talk about where entrepreneurs go wrong. and how they avoid some of the biggest opportunities because they're doing the wrong things. Sure, sure. Well, that's actually a great place to jump off is so many new entrepreneurs focus on all the easy stuff, the fun stuff, and they avoid the hard work that's actually going to move the needle. So, you know, if I can go back 20 years and tell my younger self what to focus on, it wouldn't be building a – because believe it or not, 20 years ago, I was already building a website for my business total muscle.com, my very first website in 1997.

And I remember trying to think up how the graphics and the logo was going to look, and I remember trying to figure out how the colors of the sales page were going to look. I never once thought about packaging of the products that I was selling, which was supplements. I never thought about pricing margins. I never thought about doing recurring revenue when they buy one supplement from me that we would drop ship another supplement every month. Like, I should have been thinking that kind of stuff, the things that move the needle instead of things that were fun and sexy. Because I remember making three or four different logos and then going to friends and family and going, hey, which logo do you like?

Right? And getting feedback from them, and it feels good to get that. Yeah. But really, it's about pricing. It's about your margins. It's about the marketing. It's about the selling. It's about, does the page even convert? The sales copy that was on the page, the written words were just last minute thrown on their weight protein, this many grams of protein per scoop. And here's the price. You know, you save 20% over going to your local vitamin shop or whatever. It was not, I was not focusing on the right stuff. And it cost me a lot of money and effort.

That's the path that leads to resistance. So we saw this all the time in the information marketing space. People would spend six months working on their product and one day working on their sales copy. It's got to be flipped because selling the product is the harder work, but it's the more important work. And that kind of leads into the next point where people get caught up with the idea fairy. The idea fairy comes and the next thing you know, they're off doing all these things instead of the important work. So talk about how important is to avoid the idea fairy and avoid thinking small. Sure. I mean, as entrepreneurs, we are a very creative bunch, right? Because most entrepreneurs are cut from that cloth of, I'm a problem solver. That's it. I'm a problem solver. You solve people's most stressful problems where their personal life structure is concerned. Right? And so it's easy for a problem solver to look at the world and constantly see more problems and therefore come up with more ideas to solve those problems. That's the idea of fairy coming at you with new ideas. Hey, I've got a new idea. And while you're working on this idea, you see a new problem. And the idea fairy says, hey, you should try and solve this.

problem. And then you should try and solve this problem. Start this business and this business and this business. Before long you've got 10 irons in the fire but none of them are turning into a sword, right? And so what we want to do is we want to create this level of discipline within us to say, hey look, if I have 10 lifetimes, I will go through all 10 ideas. But in this lifetime, this is the one idea that I want to be my legacy and I'm going to drive this all the way to the finish line. Yeah, absolutely.

I love that word, the discipline to do that. And it's very much like the next point, which is the discipline to extract yourself from the business. Now, it's so hard because people think, oh, nobody can do stuff as good as me or I'm too cheap to hire somebody. So what can somebody do? How can somebody avoid making the mistake of staying working in the business too long and not working on the business? Sure. What can they do? Well, you know, I always talk about to our coaching clients, you don't see Richard Branson, you know, in the cockpit of any of his Virgin Atlantic flights, right?

I hope not. No, the guy owns the company. He's the face of it. He helps come up with the marketing ideas and the service that you're going to get. but he's not in there serving you cocktails or flying your airplane. That's just absurd. So he's not working in the business. He's working on the business.

And likewise, you've got to start working on the business if you want to scale your business. And so if the goal is to extract yourself out of that business, you have to go, all right, maybe there's no one out there who can do it 100% like me. But my challenge to you is, can you find someone that you can teach, train, and give wisdom to where they can do at least 80% like you? If so, 99.9% of the time, the customer is not going to know the difference. And so replace yourself with someone who can do it 80% of the way and extract yourself out there. And then over time, that 80% will become 100%. And I used to do this in my personal and training business. I kept training people one-on-one and I never hired more trainers, even though I had more demand from prospective clients because I was like,

who am I going to hire as a trainer that's going to be able to deliver workouts and the experience and the results that I can deliver? No one can train clients like I can, right? Well, I ultimately realized through Jim Franco, my client who was also my mentor, he says, look, can you find someone who can just deliver 80% of the results that you do? If so, train them up, and then over time, that 80% will become 85, 90, 95, 100%. And that's how I was able to scale to five gyms. And now this is how we were able to scale to over almost 700 gyms with our Fit Body Boot Camp locations. Yeah, absolutely.

And I own several of those Fit Body Boot Camps. And I was having a conversation today with my partner in South Carolina, a young man named Daniel Woodrum, amazing young man. And he's having great success building up teams there. And the revenue is going up. And I said, Daniel, I said to him this email. I said, you must commit to me. And I want you to commit to me that you are going to grow this business so that you can step back. I want you, your goal is to feel guilty for making so much money for working so little.

And I said, will you promise me that? Because he has done so much. He's put in so much sweat equity. And people won't ever know that. And people will always be given him a hard time. but he has earned the right to build the team, give everybody opportunity, bring those people on who are actually doing it 95%, if not 110%, as well as he can do.

Because to be honest with you, entrepreneur, you think you're great at something. There's somebody out there who is way better than you at it. So let them do it. And when you hire those people on, when you train them up, when you build that culture, you can step back and become that empire builder not working in that business, right? You know, I'm so glad you said that,

that, hey, Mr. Entrepreneur, the reality is there is someone who could do it a lot better than you can. Sure. Your job is to be the shock caller. And now, I think I might be guilty of teaching people to be control freaks, and they probably misunderstand what control freak means. This doesn't mean that you've got to be in the business doing the work. Yeah. I say be a control freak in how you run your business, how you delegate to your team, how you have high expectations. You know, you look at our set here, and it's spick and span. You look at every refrigerator inside of our headquarters, the labels on every single drinks and soda pops and water bottles are turned facing the same way. That's a control freak because how you do anything is how you do everything.

But I think most people who are entrepreneurs, they become control freaks and, hey, no one can do it as perfect as I can. Well, the truth of the matter is empires are built in imperfection. The moment you're trying to be perfect, you're going to be an artist. The starving artist is perfect because they don't sell their artwork until it's perfect. The entrepreneur, the empire builder, the legacy maker works and lives in imperfection. If it's 80% good enough, I'm going to deploy it and bring the other 20% is going to catch up over time. Absolutely. I love that.

I love that. Okay, so next thing is they need to start saying no, which dovetails perfectly. What can you say no to today? Well, first of all, there's opportunity. Second of all, is it doing more in the business? What can you say no to? So what were some of the big breakthroughs that you had in building your empire where you started saying no?

You know, it's funny, as we created those mastermind programs, right? You and I had the 100K info group. I have the 7K, 7-figure formula mastermind. You start seeing these clients who are in your master-end programs coming up with more business ideas. And all of a sudden they approach you and they go, hey, since you're my business coach, do you think you'd want to partner with me on this? And of course, to me, it seemed like it was a smart opportunity. Well, they're already proven.

They're hard workers. They're already paying me money. Now they're launching a second business, a new business. I know what their work ethic is like. So I should partner with them. And now I'll have a second, third, fourth, fifth business. Well, in reality, every time I say yes to a new partnership in business, I was taking away effort. and energy from growing fit-body boot camp.

Those mental leaks. Yes. Mental leaks. That's exactly it. And so, in fact, you and I did this, we had a, most people don't know this, we had a publishing company called Ruckus Publishing. And we had about five or six publishing partners. Hard workers, great people.

Amazing people. But at some point, we go, holy cow, you've got early to rise to grow. I got Fit Body Boot Camp to grow. Why are we helping these four people, five people, six people, and the smaller businesses that they're growing? We gave them 100% of their business back. we start focusing on our own businesses and those groups. So the biggest lesson for me there was to the more I say no to what seemed like opportunities,

which are really distractions, the more I can say yes to the big opportunity that I have, which is, in my case, Fit Body Boot Camp. You have to say no to the easy work and you have to say yes to the hard work. Because most people, you know, whether they want to create new product, that's easy work. And so you have to say no to that and you have to glue your butt to the chair. You have to write the sales copy. You have to focus on growing your number one business. And then the last thing, we talked about bringing on people that are great.

We also need to have the beginner entrepreneur be okay with parting ways with people. Yes, yes. You know, as I built my businesses, there's been times that I've had business partners who weren't quite a good fit. I've been very fortunate to have you as a business partner for almost a decade, and we've been a great fit. that you come up with so much great content for our Empire Mastermind and our Empire Podcast, and you'll email me that and we'll go through and we'll meet up and we'll shoot this content. Not every relationship that I had in business was this symbiotic. And so at some point, you either outgrow your business partners or you might have just a complete different path on how you want to,

they see the business going left, you see the business going right. You have to be willing to say, hey, I'm willing to part ways either you buy me out or I'll buy you out. And I've had to do that with two former business partners, and it was the best decision I could have made because I was able to stay friends with them instead of having a kind of a damaged, eroded relationship. And the same thing goes for employees, by the way. Statistically speaking, and you and I heard this at the Genius Network Group, when your company grows by 3X, in other words, from $0 to $300,000, from $300,000 to $900,000 or a million, each, and that's called a 3X growth, is called a phase. Every two phases, you might have to get new employees if your employees don't increase their self-development, right? Because people always ask, well, wait a minute, how is it the company went from zero to $20 million a year and you're still the CEO? Because 99% of the time, the boss, the CEO, the president also does the self-development to become the leader they need to become for a $20 million company, a $100 million company.

Whereas most employees don't invest in their personal development. And so when the company was doing 100,000 a year, yeah, they could keep up. Companies now doing a million a year, and they feel left behind. And so as an entrepreneur, you do have to make that tough decision. If your employees are not doing the self-development, are not catching up to the growth of your business, you must part ways with them and replace them with higher-level fighter jets. Yeah, absolutely. And so what we're really focusing on in this episode is saying no to distractions, really getting focused.

You know, a guy like Tom Bill U, he grew Questbar because they were focused on the protein bar. Yeah, eventually they got into other stuff, but they were focused on the protein bar on a very small number of protein bars first. And that, you know, that laser focus allowed them to grow. So what we want you to take away from this episode is being okay with saying no, doing the hard work, staying focused. Thank you so much for joining us for another amazing episode of the Empire podcast. Now, the greatest compliment that you can give to us is liking, loving, and sharing this episode with all of your friends. So please go to iTunes and give us a five-star rating and then share it online and social media with everyone that you know. And make sure to tag us because we love hearing from Empire listeners.

And if you own a business that's doing half a million dollars or more in annual revenues and you know it's got massive potential. And you like myself and Craig Ballantine to help you scale it by 5x, 10x, and 20x in the shortest amount of time possible, then you might be a great candidate for the Empire Mastermind Program that we have. To learn more about the Empire Mastermind Program, go to bedroskulian.com forward slash empire.