Getting Out Of The Dreaded Business Owner “How Hell Hole”

Lauren: Welcome to The Biz Doctor Podcast, my love letter to business owners the world over. I’m your host, Lauren Goldstein, award-winning business consultant and advisor fondly nicknamed The Biz Doctor by my clients. I help business owners who are burning the candle at both ends diagnose what is actually keeping them buried in the day to day busy work and then formulate a treatment plan to adjust their business and team to fit them so they can take a breath and a vacation and have more fun making a bigger impact than ever.

So grab your favorite beverage and your earbuds and let’s dive into our latest episode.

Have you ever had a business challenge stuck in your craw for way too darn long? You’ve been sitting at your desk or pacing for days, trying to solve this one problem that you just can’t seem to figure out how to solve. It’s maddening to be stuck in what I call the how hell hole. It’s insanity, but it’s also not your fault and here’s why.

Welcome back to the Biz Doctor podcast. I’m your host, Lauren Goldstein, and this is one of my very favorite topics to talk about with business owners because A, we’ve all been there, unless you are a robot, and B, it’s something that we could so easily avoid if only we had been taught how. Well, y’all, let me teach you how to get yourself out of this how hell hole once and for all.

Now, to bust you out of this, I’m going to share what might be a painful truth with you. Your job as visionary business owner and CEO is to determine the where and the why, so your leaders are empowered to determine how things need to get done and who doesn’t. To put it a different way, your primary job as business owner is to mark the X on the treasure Tell the team what you want and buy when.

To illustrate this further, I want to share with you a methodology we use with our clients called Wealth Dynamics. It’s by far my favorite tool to simply and effectively show you the exact team you need to support you towards your goals since every business owner is different. Now in this methodology, there are energies.

Now I’m not going to go full woo here, so stay with me. If you picture a square, there are four sides to that square. Each of those sides has an energy. Now, if you think of this square like your business, the energy we have on top is innovation and strategy. That is the what energy. This is the energy that you are most responsible for as a business owner and CEO.

Now, if we continue clockwise on the right side of the square, you’ll see marketing and communication, which is the who energy, who you’re connecting with your clients, also who you’re talking to, who’s coming in, et cetera. Now at the bottom of the square, we have service and delivery. This is the when energy.

It’s all about fulfillment. And then on the left side of the square, we have the how energy and measurement control systematizing improvement. And that’s about really making the business run without you. To translate this measurement and control answers the question of how can this happen without me? So that’s where the systems, the operations, and the scalability really happen.

So now that you have the energies of a million dollar business, hopefully you’ve deduced that you, my friend, cannot be the master of all four. Let’s talk about the three steps to get you out of the how hell hole. First, let me talk really quickly to those of you listening who are early stagers. An early stage business is you and maybe one or two others generally making less than a million dollars a year.

Or Lone Rangers who are trying to build a business by being the chief everything officer. Whew. Good luck to you. But if you’re pushing this business rock up a hill by yourself, please, for the love of all things that are good, get a mentor, get a VA, hire a part time expert, because you’re going to go 10 times as fast and far when you ask, who can support me and do this for me?

You cannot. I repeat, cannot try to build the plane while trying to fly the plane and taking off. It will end in frustration, burnout, and a lot of wasted time and money. Figure out what your superpowers are and then ask who can help to get you where you want to go. I want to illustrate this with a conversation I was having actually with a business owner friend a few days ago.

He was lamenting to me that he really wanted to grow his practice. And for those of you that have been following along, And know what Golden Key Partnership and I do, we work primarily with service providers. So that’s CPAs, RIAs, healthcare professionals, lawyers, other consultants, agencies, etc. Basically any service provider that is trying to get out from underneath their business.

So he was lamenting to me about how he was struggling to get out from underneath his business and grow it. Specifically his practice being the sole service provider in his healthcare practice. And what was really fascinating when I was listening to him talk is that I knew he was in the how hell hole, but he didn’t know that that’s where he was stuck, even though he kept asking the question of how and why I think this is so important to talk about is because so often that’s the question that we were taught to ask of how. How do you do this? How do you, how do you get into college? How do you get better grades? How do you start a business? How do you lead a team? And sure, it’s important to know certain mechanics of how to do something like lead.

It’s not always necessary to know how. What I mean is, if you are a business owner that’s Expertise is, say, invention. You’re probably not going to know how to have the best customer experience, but I guarantee that you will know somebody that does. So back to my friend, so we’re talking and he’s talking about how he has one practice that’s filling up, it’s going great, but he wants to expand practices, but he doesn’t know how.

So I looked at him and I said, well. Who do you know who’s another health care service provider or medical service provider who does have multiple practices and who has successfully done it? And of course he said, Oh, I know so and so. So I said, great, set up a time to talk to that person and figure out what went well, what didn’t go well.

And my favorite question of if you could do it all over again, what would you change? Because after, after we’ve done something, hindsight is always 20 20. And it was pretty amazing how instantaneous his stress level decreased. Because what happens when we’re stuck in the how hell hole is we just work ourselves into a lather where we’re getting more and more frustrated that we can’t figure it out.

Because let’s be honest, we’re business owners. We know how to do stuff. We’re smart. We’re capable. So why is this thing stumping us? Well, it’s not because you’re not smart. It’s not because you don’t know how. It’s because you don’t know the right person to show you how. If you’re in the growth and scaling phases though, this phase for business owners can be the most fun and also the most anxiety riddled.

But I have good news, it doesn’t have to be, you just have to put down the shovel. Kind of like my friend did. So the first step to getting you out of the how hell hole is put down the shovel. I know, don’t laugh or roll your eyes. It’s simple but effective. I’ve seen it time and time again, both with my clients and because heck, I am actually human myself.

You’re digging your way to trying it, trying everything you can to figure it out. Like I said before. And you’re not getting very far. But as Albert Einstein once said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. To me, what he’s illustrating here is that it is inconceivable that we can find the answers we need on the same level of consciousness, awareness, or perspective in which we see something as a problem.

This is why oftentimes the solution to said problem comes when we stop thinking so hard. Putting the shovel down means taking a break. Taking a moment to breathe, go for a walk, stepping away from being up close and personal to problems. You can see the whole picture. Think of it this way. If you’re too close to a Monet, it looks like chaos and color, but step back and it’s a breathtaking masterpiece.

Before we dive into the next bit, I want to take a second to share with you something that I’ve seen drastically change businesses and teams for the better. Imagine waking up every morning with a team that knows exactly what is expected of them and how to achieve success without you having to micromanage them.

Imagine how much time and dollars you will save by hiring the right team member from the start. Not to mention getting the most out of every current member of your team. That is what’s possible with our tried and tested tool, the Golden Key Scorecard. The Scorecard is a simple, impactful, and fillable tool for managing your team, ditching inefficiency, and I guarantee We’ll help you stop playing whack a mole chasing team docs all over the place.

It’s as easy as filling out a form. If you want to get out from under your business, shifting from business operator to business owner and take your business to the next level while reclaiming your time, then our golden key scorecard is just the ticket. Our scorecard provides the time tested framework and process to get you and your team out of the weeds and into a well oiled machine that can scale without you.

It’s time for you to run your business instead of the other way around. Become an expert in this critical piece of the foundation to creating a high performing team. Download the Golden Key Scorecard for free at goldenkeypartnership.com/scorecard/. Now back to the show.

I’m not saying you can’t ever ask yourself how, but what I am saying is if you find yourself challenged or in a place where you are not the expert, so out of your depth, whether it’s You know, you’re trying to figure out some marketing thing, or for me, where I find myself to be out of depth is sometimes talking to developers and building software.

It’s not my happy place. And so I get to ask who can be my communicator, which leads me to point number two. Ask yourself who. No one expects you to be an expert in everything. In fact, you know the saying, a jack of all trades is a master of none. Figure out what the goal is and by when and see who can make it happen.

The beauty of this is when you find the right who, aka the right person, then they will actually tell you how. So if you start dialing in your vision and your goals and then get really good at finding the right who for the job, your job as visionary leader of the business will get exponentially easier.

Third, and this is the hardest y’all so listen close, channel Elsa and let go. Let your people do it or let an expert do it. This is honestly one of the biggest hurdles most business owners get to clear. Getting someone else to do it and letting it go. Sure, you might know enough to be dangerous about something, but it doesn’t mean you should be doing it.

And it certainly doesn’t mean that that thing is the best use of your time. So when you have the vision and the definition of done, let your people run with the ball and get it over the end zone. This will free you up to do so many other wonderful things with your time that will actually move the business forward.

Last but not least, when it comes to the how hell hole, this is a lesson I learned from chess. Yes, I play chess every week. It’s actually one of my very favorite things and teaches me a lot of business skills and life lessons. But this one in particular has changed everything. Be wary of being hyperly fixated on a piece in danger because you will miss out on the rest of the board and consequently might miss out on something more important that you didn’t see coming because you had your blinders of hyper focus on.

Now don’t get me wrong. Sometimes hyper focus is needed, like when you’re shipping something or during different seasons of the business, sometimes it is necessary to cut out all of the distractions and just focus on that. Where I see business owners and entrepreneurs get in trouble is when a problem pops up that seems urgent and critical and suddenly you’re down the rabbit hole and not able to see the whole chessboard of your business.

A great example of this is actually a revenue problem. Now you’ve heard me say this before, but I see a lot of business owners getting bent out of shape around revenue. The truth is, actually, if you go back to season one, episode two, why revenue doesn’t fix everything, revenue is a lagging metric. There is always something else that created that cascade before you saw the dollars come in.

Revenue is a symptom of something else. So if your revenue is declining, Go back and find out where that line of demarcation was that made that revenue start to decline. My advice is to get yourself an unbiased third party who you can trust to help you zoom out, help you shift perspectives, and more than anything, talk through your challenges that you have that you might not feel comfortable talking about with your team.

It can be lonely in the top, and one thing that is for certain, we cannot solve problems in an echo chamber. This is one of the very reasons I created Golden Key Advisory to support growth and scaling business owners with the challenges that pop up. As you navigate the transition from business operator to business owner and learning how to be the leader of leaders.

It’s honestly one of my favorite things in greatest honors, supporting business owners as they level up and reach for a bigger impact in true entrepreneurial freedom. It doesn’t have to be me that’s your shotgun rider, but it does have to be someone. You cannot build your business alone. Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.

So to bring us to a close, if you find yourself stuck in the how hell hole like so many other business owners around you, take a step back, take a step back and ask who, who can I talk to that can help me solve this problem? Who can I give this problem to, to solve? And you know, sometimes it’s just important to just walk away from it and come back with a clear eye.

Because sometimes when we give a problem the space and time, we realize that it’s actually not as big a problem as we thought. I hope that this has been helpful in getting you out of the how hell hole and moving forward in a positive direction towards your business goals. That’s it for this week’s episode.

Thank you so much for listening in. If anything I shared, sparked something in you.  Let’s connect. Drop me an email, tag, or DM me on Instagram. And it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out on the interwebs. And also don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. You’re the first to get notified when our next episode is live and ready for your ears.

Thanks so much for listening.

Until next time, thank you for listening to The Biz Doctor Podcast. Now, I like to say that friends, don’t let friends WebMD your business. So if you’re wondering what your next steps could be, here are some options for you no matter what. Head to the show notes or to my website, goldenkeypartnership.com for some impactful resources to support you getting out from under your business.

That’s also where you’ll find the links to learn more about our services and how we support business owners just like you. Who are ready to make the successful jump from business operator in the trenches to visionary business owner with more freedom and flexibility. All that info is on our website, so pop on over to learn more or get in touch goldenkeypartnership.com

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