Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - When Hustle Fails, Scale and Structure Succeed - 003

Episode Date: July 12, 2017

Are you looking forward to your first heart attack? Do you plan on developing chronic anxiety later in life? No? Well then, this is the episode for you. Craig Ballantyne and Bedros Keuilian both know what it’s like to take hustle and grind to an unhealthy level, and they both discovered their greatest success AFTER switching over to scale and structure. Is it time for you to make the switch too?

Do you ever wonder if you're doing enough hustle and grinding in your business to grow it fast enough? Let's talk about hustle and grind. Hey, man, certainly. Buddy, why are you wearing the hustle t-shirt? Well, I thought that's what all the cool kids were doing these days. They're hustling, they're grinding, they're up there, you know, just weird. Yeah, yeah, okay. And you know what?

That's a really good point. So today we're going to talk about hustle and grind and scale and structure, and when you need to do each one and why you need to do it. So let's get started on another episode of the Empire Mastermind podcast. All right, you know, I kind of see what you're saying, you know, because I actually looked up on the internet what the definition of grind is. And grind says, reduce something to small particles or powder by crushing it. I don't think that's what Gary V meant by crushing it, by reducing yourself and grinding yourself down into a powder. And, you know, really, you grind yourself into unhealthy habits.

You grind yourself, as I did, into anxiety tax. I mean, I went to the hospital because I was working all day long and I was out partying. way too much and I was grinding myself down and I had to go to the emergency room a couple times. So grinding is not the right way. That's when I first found out the hard way. What about you? You know, it's funny you should say that because I always talk about how we entrepreneurs are like fighter jets and mere mortals are like crop dusters. And so as a fighter jet, you're able to do things and withstand pressure and pain that the mere mortal can't stand. Sometimes that works against us because we go, we can just hustle and grind and painfully get our way. Grind through it, man. I'm going to grind through it.

Right, but do you really need to? Maybe there's a phase of hustle and grind, but then at some point you get to scale and structure. Now, for me, hustle and grind led to what I thought was a heart attack in my guest house, later found out it was an essential tremor and an anxiety attack. So since then, I've evolved my business and it's scaled faster than ever before. Right, we don't want you to grind yourself into what we did. Yeah, we've been there, we've done that. So, Craig, when do you think is the right time for someone to hustle and grind as they're going into business?

Well, I think you got to get some traction, right? I mean, you got to go out there. You're going to do some things wrong. I mean, when I first started, I didn't know what it was doing for a long time. I was writing my fitness programs on the internet. I was out there. I was grinding away in a personal training thing. But I think you can only hustle and grind your way. You can only grind your way to $100,000 at most. You might be able to hustle yourself a little bit farther because hustle is to move quickly. It's to obtain by persuasion. But it's also known as a fraud or a swindle. And I think that basically, If you're just a hustler, you don't really have anything behind you, and that means you really are building your $200,000 business a year on sand and not solid rock. So you can probably go $100,000 a year for grinding, and then maybe $250,000 in a year for hustle. You know, I think you nailed it there. And in fact, it's kind of a funny process. But I look at hustling.

When I was in hustling, I said yes to everybody on everything. So an opportunity came, hey, man, we should make this product together. Yes. Hey man, we should do this event together and speak at it and travel the United States. Yes. And I found myself burning the candle on either end and down the middle because I felt like if I said no to something that I was going to miss out on an opportunity. And when you hustle and hustle and hustle and grind, what you really end up doing is

leaving bits and pieces of you everywhere else and your core business and your family have nothing to take. Right. So Warren Buffett has a great quote. The difference between successful and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything. So yeah, you can get successful by hustling and saying yes to everything, but you ever see Warren Buffett make a video where he says, hey, let's get out there and grind today, let's hustle. I'm like, no, you're never going to see Warren Buffett do that. You're never

to see Bill Gates do that. These guys are structure and scale and long term and vision and strategies and systems, right? Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about that first piece, the structure. Because before you can even scale any business, before you can scale your team, before you can scale your marketing, scale your sales, scale your influence and persuasion, you've got to be personally structured and then that structure needs to lead down to your team. So there's no one more qualified to talk about personal structure than you. Lay it on us. All right.

So first of all for your structure, you have to figure yourself out. And most people don't. Most people are scared to figure themselves out because there's some difficult conversations you got to have with yourself about bad habits, about why you're putting things off. But listen, if you truly want to have an impact, you can't just grind it out. because those things that you need to have the conversations about are going to hold you back. They're going to hold you back from everything. So you do some introspection.

You figure out your day. You use my time journal that you can get. And you go through and you identify what I call magic time. And magic time isn't grinding time. It's magic time. It's being strategic about structuring your day so that you can use your magic time to scale your business and your opportunities. So when you know your best time of day to work, when you structure in your, best health habits and your daily routines and morning rituals, then you become a highly

disciplined entrepreneur who becomes that high performer, who is that fighter jet. And that's how you structure yourself. Yeah, that's well said. Effectively, when you are well structured in your personal life, you become the leader that you're supposed to become. Absolutely. To lead your team and your organization into multiple millions, right? Right, right. And you live and lead by extreme examples so that your team sees you, oh my goodness, look at how dismalities. He's not checking his Facebook while he's talking to me. He's not texting while he's having a lunch conversation with me.

He's really caring, and that's the leader that I want to get behind. And when you attract those people, that's when you can start to scale your business, which is what you're the expert on. Yeah. Yeah. So where scale is concerned, I look at two things, the vision and the path. And I will talk about that in just a second. But again, when we go back to scale, when we go back to hustle and grind,

because it's funny, I haven't thought about this. until we had this discussion about doing this particular episode. But I started thinking about the days of hustle and grinding. Here's typically how it went. Somebody would go, hey man, it'd be a text or an email or a phone call. Hey man, I got an idea. We should travel the United States to nine different influential cities and have workshops, you and I together.

And I would go, Sounds like a good idea at the time. Yeah. In that moment, it sounds like a good idea. I take a deep breath and I would go, if I say no, he's going to go ask somebody else in the industry, right? Fear of missing out. Fear of missing out would force me to do something that I knew I shouldn't be doing but didn't have enough discipline to say no to it.

So that was thing number one. So I added an extra layer of hardship and anxiety into my schedule that was already packed in full and into a poorly structured life at the time. So these days, I say no to many opportunities because I have vision and I have the path. So what does that really mean? When you're going to scale a business, you have to go, all right, what do I want? What is the end result that I want? What is the outcome I want with this business? Now, for me, I want 3,000 locations of our Fit Body Boot Camp franchises worldwide by the year 2020.

Now, for that to happen, my vision, right? That's my vision. The path is I've got to have a team that is great at generating traffic of leads, turning those leads into actual franchisees, getting those franchisees. See, now we're talking about operations, getting those franchisees to dial in their operations and systems, so that they will buy more. You see what happened? So we got traffic buyers, right, in-house,

who buy the right traffic for us to convert into franchisees. The teams that sells the franchises, then pass them along to operational and coaching teams, who then coached them into becoming successful one-off location owners and then encourage them to open up multiple locations. So between existing location owners opening up multiple locations and us constantly bringing on new franchisees, we're on pace to have 3,000 locations by the year 20th,

The moment that I take my foot off that pedal and entertain an idea of doing an event with someone else or launching a new info product or running a different coaching program or doing something that's outside of my industry, I have lost sight of my vision and soon the path becomes unclear. And that's the difference between the hustler and the guy or gal who's going to scale an empire. Oh man, that's so great because I always talk about there's two different types of people. There's reactive people that struggle and those are the hustlers and grinders because

it's like everything that comes their way, I got to take this. Otherwise, I'll miss out on this opportunity. And the reason they do that is because they haven't spent time thinking about where do I want to get to. So reactive people struggle. And then there's the proactive people, the people that have done their vision, the people that are structuring and scaling things because proactive people succeed because they look into the future and know where they want to go.

That is so clear. So I'd like to give everybody watching this some kind of tool to use and that I call a filter, a vision filter is what I call it. And this vision filter is very simple. So when I'm asked to speak at an event, I ask myself one of two questions. One, is this going to help me sell more of my franchises? Number two, am I going to be able to extract a coaching client, a consulting client out of it, who I can later sell a franchise to or help, you know, build a franchise, because that is the other part of my business is I help other emerging franchises build their empires. And if the answer is yes, If I know that I can get one or two people out of that event,

either buy my franchise or become a franchise coaching client, then I will go and speak at that event. That is the filter. If it's just, hey, can we pay you to come and speak? These days, the answer is likely no, because the moment that I'm away speaking, I'm not there running the empire that's supposed to be growing because we've got a deadline.

So where your vision is concerned, you've got to have a quantifiable number and a deadline, and then a path that's going to get you there. And that's how you scale your empire. Yeah, so listen. If you're young, if you're hungry, if you're getting started, yeah, you're gonna have to grind it out a little bit, but you're not gonna grind forever.

And yeah, you're gonna hustle, you're gonna take on a few things, you're gonna have to try it out, say, yeah, maybe this speaking thing, I tried it, it's not right for me, I need to be doing the live streams or whatever it is. You will need to throw a bunch of things against the wall and see what sticks at first.

But when, and the last question I wanna ask you here, but when does someone make that switch from H&G to S&S? You know, I'm not sure if there's a number. Like for me, it was somewhere between $500,000 and a million dollars a year, right? But I can tell you this, there comes a point where you start feeling it,

where you are at work hustling and grinding, and you miss your family, you have some guilt about your family, you realize your fitness and your health are struggling and suffering, you're starting to have anxiety attacks like you and I were. Those are all actual indicators

of the fact that you are past your hustle and grind phase. This is what I said when I said, we're fighter jets. Because we're fighter jets, we go, F it, I could, I could still do it. I could still stay in this phase.

There's nothing noble, there's nothing noble and special about forcing your way into hustle and grind. So when you start feeling the fact that you're missing your family, you're no longer taking care of your self-care, you're having anxiety attacks and essential tremors like I used to have, then maybe at some point you have to realize

I gotta become a big boy or girl and start thinking about scale. Do I need a leadership team. I need a team that's gonna be on board with my vision. I need a team who's on board with the path of my vision, and the deadline of my vision. If they don't believe in the deadline of your vision,

they're not part of your scale team. And that is the only time, it's so weird that I'm making more money, I have more success, and for the first time ever, I get to spend more time with my family, traveling and enjoying them when before I was making less money and spending more time, hustle and grinding,

and gave my family the tired bedros. Right, so structure and scale to put that in your life. So last thing, let's leave them with that instruction, on putting together the vision filter for themselves. How do they go about putting that in place? Because if we can give them the one thing from this show today, is giving them a vision filter so that they can start to reduce the pressure on themselves.

Yeah. So the vision filter, as I see, it starts off with one simple question. Your big reason why. Now, my big reason why is a two-part reason, and that's what I shared a fitness business summit a couple of days ago. The two part is this. I'm a passionate fitness professional.

I want to help fitness business owners because I'm an entrepreneur as well. So I want to help fitness business owners grow their businesses. And through them, I'm going to help them get more clients and more impact in the communities they serve. My big reason why is to help entrepreneurs and help people live healthier lives. And so I will launch more franchises worldwide

where I can help businesses grow and help bodies and health change. And that's my big reason why. And once you have a big reason why, every single thing I put through my big vision filter and if it doesn't come through on the other side, then I simply don't do it. Awesome.

So that's what you need to start doing now. Think about what you need to say no to so that you can become a very successful people with structure and scale instead of grinding yourself into dust.