Living The Red Life - Are You A Hamster On The Hamster Wheel Of Biz?

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Are you stuck in the hamster wheel? Or are you creating the hamster wheel? Fresh off a successful event in Miami, Rudy is coming in red hot with advice on how successful entrepreneurs should be creating new hamster wheels – machines that people can run for them.Are you working ON your business or are you working IN it? And how can you learn to tell the difference in your daily tasks? Join the Man in Red as he encourages you to really look at what you're doing and where you're spending your time. Tear down the wheel if you have to. Build a new wheel. Hire someone smarter than you and learn the power of automation in your business. If you run on your own hamster wheel too fast for too long, chances are you'll crash and your business will suffer. Rudy's ruthless approach to evaluating your own time spend is a game changer. Please join us in Wonderland."The key to building a successful business is building a machine that continues to run, that's efficiently run, and then finding people to run it for a continued, prolonged period of time." ~ Rudy MawerIn This Episode:Understanding the business skill of creating your own hamster wheelsHow to work ON your business and not IN itAre you optimizing your own time in terms of ROI?Automation: how to outsource what you do when screening new clientsWhy you need a good mentor to support you as you critique yourself Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlifeFacebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlifeTwitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawer

If you try and go way faster, way harder for way longer, there'll eventually at least be a peak, a tipping point where performance comes down in all areas. So the optimal balance for the entrepreneur is the right hamster wheels, you running in them at the maximal intensity possible, doing as many as possible right at that cutoff line before the performance drops in the mall. That is also something as an entrepreneur we always have to weigh in and balance on, and that's a skill that takes time to develop. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to

start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in wonderland and change your life. Guys welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today, we're going to talk about being on the hamster wheel or creating more hamster wheels. And this is something I talked about at my recent event. I had an event here in Miami last weekend, and I spent a lot of time throughout the weekend continually rephrasing and bringing stuff back to this concept that I teach, which is either being in the hamster wheel or creating the hamster wheel. Now, most business owners need to be creating hamster wheels. What that means is they need to create new machines that people can run for them. However, sadly, most people, especially people not making a million dollars plus, are running on their own hamster wheels. And we go

for our entrepreneurial journey, spending way too much time running a machine, i.e. running on the hamster wheel versus creating and innovating new hamster wheels and then finding the hamsters to run the machines for us. Right. And I'm going to talk to you about how to build those systems and build those machines like the billionaires have done. If you look at people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, they're not in the weeds. They're not on the hamster wheel. And throughout this episode, I don't mean it, you know, in a negative or derogative way. It's just a great way to understand the basics of business and growth and expansion and what you should spend your time on as a CEO. So let's look at Elon Musk. Elon Musk is not in the Tesla factory building the actual car, right?

Jeff Bezos is not in the actual factory building the actual car, right? Jeff Bezos is not in the actual factory packing the Amazon boxes. Mark Zuckerberg is no longer in the code in Facebook, tweaking the code or in the customer service answering the inbox, right? And that's because throughout their life, they've been really good at balancing the act between being on the hamster wheel when absolutely necessary versus building new hamster wheels as soon as possible. And this is a business skill, a tactic that I understand very well. The people that go on and do tens of millions of dollars learn and understand and actually discipline themselves against versus people that are less successful, people that never build these big companies, people that get stuck in the weeds, that get burned out, that don't make progress because they end up on the hamster wheel. It's just like the hamster wheel is an employee in and out every day because you're running a machine, right? You're a cog in a machine versus the one creating machine. The reason we

become entrepreneurs is we don't want to just be a doer, right? We want to be a creator. So today's episode is about how to be a creator, how to get out of the weeds of your business just be a doer, right? We want to be a creator. So today's episode is about how to be a creator, how to get out of the weeds of your business, how to do more, how to expand faster, how to grow an amazing business by building lots of machines and finding great people to run those machines for you. And that will allow you not only to build the business of your dreams, but probably to help reach those financial goals you have and to be able to do it in a business that's not 100% dependent on you, where you're working 18 hours a day, you're burnt out, bored, fed up, and you feel that the entrepreneurial journey sucks because you

haven't built the right systems and machines. So let's define the difference, right? And I talk a lot when I was, you know, educating over this weekend, the difference between the people that are working in their business and on their business. That's where this core principle that I teach about the hamster wheels comes from. Successful people do more work on their business versus in their business. Unsuccessful entrepreneurs and owners that are smaller in revenue and generally don't tend to grow into a mass expansion operation is because they spend more of their time in the business. So I want you to take a second and think right now, think about your last working day, right? The last 24 hours of your day and even the last week of your day. Were you working mostly in the business or on the business? And I challenge

you for a few days, kind of like keeping a diet log or a food blog. What I encourage you to do is go through the next three days or even the next one day and look at every hour block or 30 minute block, right? However you work generally. And look, was that task categorized and was that in the business or on the business? And how we define those is in the business is doing a repetitive task more than once. So answering customer service you do every day, writing a new blog post you might do once a week, right? And then on the business is building the hamster wheel, the framework where you can put someone in to run it. So it might be building using those two examples. It might be building custom replies, pre-built replies, SOPs, and then hiring someone to run customer service. That is on the business. You're working now on the business. You're building a

hamster wheel, which is called the customer service hamster wheel. In this analogy that someone can now come in and run with your custom replies, save replies, SOPs, and then obviously the person you hire. The second example about say blog posts or content creation. If you're doing the continued content creation every day, say you do a blog post, a Facebook post, an Instagram post, you're working in the business because guess what? The next day you have to do the exact same thing. However, on the business in this example would be maybe creating a few posts, doing a loom overview of why you did the post this way, why you picked them, the topics you picked, how you plan the topics, how you like the thumbnails,

how you like the images, how you like the videos, how you like to caption them, the fonts you use, the description you put under the video. If you use any hashtags, time of day that you post, and then eventually finding someone to do that for you. Now, congratulations, you built the machine and then you brought the hamster in to run on the machine every day for your blogs and social media content. This is how you progress as an entrepreneur. It's very basic. It sounds very basic, but most people aren't doing it and they're not doing it every day. Successful people, people that build big businesses like myself, are obsessed with machines building more and more and more machines and then finding great people to run in them sadly there's not that many fast

and sustainable hamsters that can run these machines without burning out a lot of them come in strong just like a running race they take off really fast and then they burn out and quit or collapse or stop right so the key to building a successful business is building a machine that continue to run, that's efficiently ran, and then finding people to run it for a continued prolonged period of time that are ideally as good as you, nearly as good as you, or in a few cases, even better than you at running that specific machine, okay? That is how you progress in business. Like I said, go back and look at the last few days and then create a plan like a spreadsheet, right? And every, you know, a couple of times a day, just fill in what you did while you remember.

And then you can tally up, was I working in the business or was I on the business, right? And over 50% of your time should be on the business, okay? Now, eventually there'll be things that are very hard for anyone else to do. Right. So you'll eventually have some hamster wheels you're going to have to run in. I have hamster wheels. I have to run it.

For example, every single week I do one or two live Zoom sessions. Every single week I record a podcast just like this for you guys. Right. Why? Because this is my podcast. You come for my British accent, red hair and and all the knowledge I drop. Right. So that's harder for me, harder for me to replace. Now, could I eventually have a podcast where I bring some of my staff on, they co-run it, and I do it once a month? Yes, of course. Could I eventually do all my live calls where I only do one a month instead of one a week? Yes, of course, right? And that's called optimization. However, I've deemed

these hamster wheels to be vitally important hamster wheels that give me a good ROI. So I get on the podcast hamster wheel and I run for 20 minutes and I give you guys a new podcast. I think that's a good ROI. You guys hopefully get a lot of value and I drop knowledge just like this episode right here today that probably most of my other staff and other people can't teach. I go on the live Zoom. All the members get immense value. They get to hang out with Rudy. They get to learn from Rudy. That's a big perk of the program. And some of these members are paying anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000. So, and just for context, the way I do it in my head is, well, these programs make, say, $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 a year. So if I have to do one hour over 52 weeks, that's 52 hours I have to give.

Is that worth it for a program that generates over $5 million? Absolutely it is. It's 100K. If you do the math, 50 lives, 52 weeks, 5 million, that's 100K per swoop, right? So to me, that's high or right. So there will always be some stuff generally, unless you're fully out the business, which can happen and I've done in other all right so there will always be some stuff generally unless you're fully out the business which can happen and i've done in other businesses but there will generally be some stuff that you're always still running on right that's how you avoid being i guess a fat hamster when you retire and have nothing to do as entrepreneurs we love to keep working out right we love to keep uh running some stuff and being involved but it should be in really high impactful stuff. I still speak to my celebrities, right? I don't speak to necessarily all my other clients, right? But I

still speak once a week to the celebrities. That's a high ROI thing to do. Some of my celebrity partnerships generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. So can I spare 30 minutes a week to do a meeting with their team and then be on the phone when they call me once a week? Absolutely, right? I do a couple of calls a week with my leadership team, right? To train them, to answer their questions, to help them. I do a call most days with my marketing team. High ROI for that. It's generating millions and millions, in fact, tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue. So it's high ROI. So I've picked and built the machines that I want to run in. And a year from today, half of those machines will either be removed because they're no longer providing an ROI. My hope is half of them I'm not doing, or I'm spending a lot less time on because I have other

people co-running on those hamster wheels for me, or totally removed where I've brought in a hamster as good as me, if not better, that's now running that machine for me. That's the progression of businesses, the circle of life, right? So most of you right now, if you look at the hamster wheels you're running on every day, they're probably not as high ROI as me because you haven't repeated this process a thousand times like I have to grow the business. And that's okay. Everyone has to start somewhere. And you now have this knowledge. You're armed with this knowledge to go away and implement so look at your day look at where you're spending your time okay and i guarantee right now 50 50 of what you're doing right now you're going to look at it and go if rudy was judging this hamster wheel what do you

say it's high roi probably not so that's where you're going to make a hard decision you're going to do one of a few things number one you, you're going to totally destroy it, burn it down, destroy the hamster wheel, get rid of it forever. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm going to interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return. What I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests.

It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far or any previous episode or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you hit a five star review, give us your feedback on the show, the and subscribe and download plus if you do that and send me a screenshot on instagram at rudy more life i will send you a bunch of my free training marketing courses sales courses worth 499 yes 500 worth of courses for a simple 30

second review it would mean the world to me send me that screenshot i would love for you to leave that review and i would appreciate it very very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome so let's get back into the episode i appreciate you guys and let's dive back in number two you're gonna go this hamster wheel is not high roi it's actually easy to build the wheel and have someone else running it for me i'm gonna build the sop over the next week every time i work on it for the next week i'm gonna build the SOP over the next week. Every time I work on it for the next week, I'm going to record myself and talk through to my invisible brand new hamster that I'm finding one day how to run in the wheel for me. Okay. So that's where you're starting to

train on board and delegate. Okay. And then number three is you totally automate it, right? So you have someone right now on your team that you could bring in or you can automate it with AI. You can automate it with actual automations. Right. Where so you might be sending a custom link to everyone that has a Zoom call with you. You can go in and automate that. You might be updating a countdown timer every day. You can go in and automate that with custom code. Right. You might be manually replying to people that interview, that want to interview with you for your company. You might be manually going back to every single one that's interested and asking them questions.

You can build an automation that when they click apply, they automatically get sent a Google form with those questions. And then, which is what we do. And then what we do after that is we ask them the same five or six big questions. So now we send them a second one, second link where they actually do a video interview with AI so the AI will ask them those questions. But when they answer those questions, they get two minutes of questions to answer back via video.

The AI will then grade their answers, their communication skills, okay? And it will grade, give us a grade out of 100. So now we'd look at a candidate based on their Google form answers, obviously their resume and their video response and the AI's grade. So you see how we're already automating that process. recruitment to finish this for you. We then have a department head review. If they approve it, they then do a one-on-one interview in person or live on Zoom. And then only finally when they've made a hiring decision, do I sometimes, depending on the role and the significance of the role, okay, do I only sometimes come in and actually do a final interview and approve? Sometimes I don't do it and they're hired without me. Okay, so that's a recruitment hamster wheel that most of you haven't even built yet. Some of you are kind of fumbling through it, right?

Some of you will need to do it right now. And some of you will get to it at some point because let's face it, you can't have a company without employees, right? So, but that's something that you probably won't automate in a fashion like I just explained. You will spend a lot of time running on that hamster wheel. And because it takes so much time, you won't interview in a fashion like I just explained, you will spend a lot of time running on that hamster wheel. And because it takes so much time, you won't interview as many people. And now you won't find good people because you're not interviewing many of them because you're doing it all manually and you're on the hamster wheel yourself and you're running and you're tired

because guess what? You got to run on 40 other hamster wheels that day. And now you don't have good employees, which means what? You don't have good hamsters to run in all the other wheels that you're building. Okay. So you see how it has a ripple effect. One system or hamster wheel can impact all the other hamster wheels too, right? Look at everything you're doing, right? Back to the original question part. Look at everything you're doing. 50% you need to either totally destroy because it's not actually going to help you, okay? You've been fooled or tricked yourself or led into believing you need it when you don't really need it. Okay, next one is you're going to bring in someone right away to start taking over it.

Number three is you're going to fully let go tomorrow, which means you're either going to delegate to someone in your team or you're going to automate it. Okay, this alone will free up half of your week. Guess what you're now going to do with this new found 20, 30 hours a week. You're going to focus it solely on building new hamster wheels. Building new hamster wheels is the most important part or one of the most important parts of business because it's the efficiencies and the machines that will fuel the growth without you, which means you can expand way faster. Now, a lot of those hamster wheels will be around sales and marketing. I also spoke at my last event, 80% of your time probably should be on sales and marketing. So 80% of those hamster wheels, or at least 50% should probably

be on sales and marketing processes. Okay. And if you don't have those yet, you should be using this system to delegate everything else you're doing. So you can now spend 50% plus of your time on sales and marketing. If your business is suffering right now, it's because you don't have good sales and marketing. I went around the room at my last event, dozens, hundred people there, and I said, who here has a million dollar business? And then I asked everyone, how much time do you spend on sales and marketing? Most people that didn't have a million dollar business, less than 50%. Most actually around 10 to 20% a few five percenters which means they're expecting to grow their business spending 95% of their time not on sales

and marketing that's like saying I want to get a gym body I want to be on the cover of men's health I got how many days to go to the gym a year all 15 days a year so 95% of the time you're not working out but you want to be on the cover of men's health well I can tell you coming from the fitness industry 10 years ago, the person on the cover of men's health is working out the opposite 95% of the year with 5% of the time, maybe 10% of the year as days off. Okay. So that's the difference around intention and having the time and freedom to focus on

the right things is about building the right systems. And then also being critical of yourself and disciplined and knowing what you should and shouldn't be doing. Getting rid of stuff you shouldn't be doing. Saying no more and making informed decisions. Now, you might not be a smart enough entrepreneur just yet because you're new to understand exactly what to be doing. That's when it becomes critical, absolutely critical in hiring someone to tell you what to be doing, telling you what hamster wheels to build, what hamster wheels you should still be running in as the CEO and guiding you on the exact hamster wheels to build and better yet, telling you and showing you exactly how to build the hamster wheel and how to find the hamsters to

run in those wheels. That is what an advisor, a mentor, like our myself and my coaches that's exactly what we do and you don't have to pay me money where i'm not trying to sell myself here you can go and find other people similar businesses to use friends people that can advise you too you can join communities groups networking to start getting those answers right it doesn't have to be about paying someone right away i do advise that every great person in life has a mentor and a support team that's why i have a coaching program and a mentorship program because it's been so successful for me i've spent over a million dollars on that myself and that got me to this point today but anyway that's not the point of today's discussion but it is important to know

the right hamster wheels to build the right hamster wheels to build, the right hamster wheels to still run on, have that advisor telling you, right? And that's a very important part of this. So in summary, so far today, okay, we've talked about the definition of being in or on the business, running in the hamster wheels versus building them. Most of the time you want to be building them, except for a very few special hamster wheels that you need to be doing, that you know is high ROI, that you can't find other people to do for you. And over time, and I'll tell you from experience, over time, you should even try and get rid of some of those and challenge your own limiting beliefs. Can this run without me? Some things in my business, I've been able to get rid of when I didn't think I could, and it's been okay.

Now, some things in my business, I tried to get rid of. One of them was a big project and department this year that I wanted to get rid of because it took about 25% of my time. It was massive, biggest part of my day. And I tried to get rid of it and then it all fell apart. So I had to step back in. That showed me, hey, Rudy, I didn't have a good enough hamster wheel built. And I had definitely, I actually fired two of the hamsters running in that wheel because they did such a bad job they weren't a good fit and i demoted one more hamster so i it was basically a a crapshoot it was terrible it was a terrible hamster wheel terrible the wheel system wasn't built optimally it was okay just wasn't quite optimal but worse were the people trying to run in the hamster wheel just terrible and i learned

this and i saw this i had to step back in and it cost me probably millions of dollars in that six seven month gap but also in life right that's not ideal but also you can't ever progress to that next level if you're not willing to give up what you're doing at the current level so you will have to eventually take those risks but like me you've got to watch it you've got to have the best hamster wheel possible find the best hamsters and then be willing to step back in and turn it around if it does break so I'm back in turning that hamster wheel possible, find the best hamsters, and then be willing to step back in and turn it around if it does break. So I'm back in turning that hamster wheel around. It's a massive part of my business. Okay. And then I eventually am looking now, how do I learn from that first failure, find the right, build a better wheel that can work with even less smart hamsters. But how can I actually find an even smarter hamster to increase my odds of winning?

So a better wheel and a better hamster, right? That's the goal here. So that's part of progression. That's the difference for me going from tens of millions to hundreds of millions, right? This is a big part I know I have to tick off. There's a couple of big parts that I don't have good hamster wheels and hamsters right now, and it weighs on me every single day. Me and my team know, my exec team, we know we've got to build those. We've got to find those and we've got to get those fixed. So you as a CEO should also know where are the gaps, where are the hamster wheels I need to work on and fix? How urgent are they? And how urgent are finding the people? That's when you start getting into growing those teams and systems quicker. So I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

I hope you enjoyed the analogies I shared, right? And obviously I'm saying every single person is important, right? It's just an analogy. But hopefully it's an easy one to understand. I shared this with my members and they loved it. It was a big takeaway for them. So hopefully it was a big takeaway for you. And hopefully it's something you can stay consistent with.

Why? Well, just like fitness, this isn't an overnight thing, right? Because in six months, if your business grows, then everything's going to have changed. So the hamster wheels you were running on that were vitally important may not be that important anymore. Some of them, they may not even be helping and you just don't notice. You're just there running, right? Often in business, and I'm guilty of this too, I'll just be running. And then six months later, I'm like, why am I still running on this again? Do I even need this? I'm like, let's get rid of it. Right. So you say you have to stay disciplined, have to stay critical, have to follow up to make sure that you're continuously optimizing your time. You can only run so far per day. You can only run so fast per day. And you will eventually burn out if you try and run faster and further every day for a prolonged period of time. So just remember that, right? I'm not a big burnout believer, but just scientifically,

if you try and go way faster, way harder for way longer, there'll eventually at least be a peak, a tipping point where performance comes down in all areas. So the optimal balance for the entrepreneur is the right hamster wheels, you running in them at the maximal intensity possible, doing as many as possible right at that cutoff line before the performance drops in the mall. That is also something as an entrepreneur we always have to weigh in and balance on.

And that's a skill that takes time to develop. But I hope you enjoyed today. If you want more help from me and my team figuring out the hamster wheels, helping you build them, showing you exactly how to build them, how to find people to put in them and guiding you through this then of course we're here to help you know where we are just look for the red and reach out until next time guys keep living the red life

great episode implement this dm me on instagram let me know how those hamster wheels are coming in your business and i'll see you soon take care my name is rudy moore host of living the red life podcast and i'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life.