STAGE

Treadmill Operator

I dropped onto the couch, exhausted. It was nearly midnight, and I’d just gotten home from teaching one of the eight Financial Peace University classes scheduled for that week.

“You look tired,” my wife, Sharon, said. That was kind of her. For months, she’d basically been a single mom, running the household and raising our three kids while I worked sixteen-hour days. If anyone had the right to be tired, it was Sharon.

“I feel like a truck ran over me,” I told her.

“What did you do today?” she asked.

What did I do today? I asked myself. Every day for the last few years had honestly been a blur. Ever since I started my financial counseling business, I’d had more clients to help and more work to do than I had hours in the day. As much as I wanted to, there was no time to think about how to scale the work I was doing. Even when I took the leap to bring on my first team members, the business was growing so fast that we all ended up working our tails off day after day.

But now, even though it seemed impossible that we could be even busier, things had kicked into a whole new gear. We figured we could help more people by teaching a finance class than we could through individual counseling. So we developed a curriculum and started teaching it in a small ballroom at the Holiday Inn across the street from our office. About 350 people packed into that ballroom to hear me, thirty-four-year-old Dave in a bad suit and armed with an overhead projector, teach how to take control of their money. We started with one class a week on Tuesday nights. It quickly grew to two nights, then three. Before we knew it, we were teaching classes every night of the week and twice on Saturdays.

So, when Sharon asked me what I’d done that day, it was easy to recall the routine I’d been following for what felt like years at that point. I’d gotten up before dawn to spend some time with my Bible and grab a cup of coffee before I headed to the office at 7:30. I’d spent the morning there, walking around like a human fire extinguisher, putting out this fire and that fire until it was time to do the radio show. Then, after three hours of hosting the show, I hustled over to the hotel to set up tables and chairs for that night’s class.

The worst part of this process was setting up the old-school projector screen. That thing had like fifty snaps that held the screen onto the frame, and I had to snap every one of them. Once that was done, I rushed back to the office to shower and shave for the second time that day, then back to the hotel to teach the hour-long class. After class, we broke up into small groups. We flipped the beds up against the walls and pushed the furniture out of the way in all the sleeping rooms on the first floor of the hotel to turn them into discussion rooms. Once class was done, we put all those rooms back together, took down the tables, stacked the chairs, and unsnapped and folded up that stupid projector screen. That night, as most nights, I’d stayed late to pray with and coach a scared couple who needed reassurance that, yes, they would be able to dig out from under the mountain of debt that was crushing them.

Don’t misunderstand—I’ve always loved my work. My passion then and now is providing people hope and showing them how to clean up their financial messes. But that season in my business had me stuck on a treadmill of never-ending physically and emotionally exhausting work. I knew I couldn’t keep up that pace forever, but I also didn’t know how or when this season would end. I still had the same problem I had when I started the business: I was producing the revenue and producing the product. I had too much work and too little time to think about what was next. I’d become the bottleneck for my business. I was a Treadmill Operator.

Most Treadmill Operators are like I was in those early days. You don’t really own a business; you own a job. You own a job because if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. If you own a painting company and you do all the painting, guess what? You own a job. If you don’t go to work, no painting happens, and that means nobody’s getting paid, right? When you own a job and you’re sick or get hurt, you’re unemployed. Whatever the work is, you’ve got to do it because you’re the only one getting it done. Being a Treadmill Operator might be the hardest stage of business because it all depends on you, and that includes the stuff you’re good at and the stuff you’re not good at or know nothing about. It can be a real struggle, and a lot of business owners get stuck in this stage.

The Treadmill Operator spends their time just getting day-to-day stuff done. They generate so much of their business revenue that they don’t have time to do much else. They’re too busy setting up the chairs, swinging the hammer, or turning the wrench to figure out what the next step for their business should be. When I was at this stage, I was working my butt off, but I felt like a rat in a wheel—just going in circles. You know the feeling. You can’t stop for a second because if you do, you won’t make this week’s payroll or this month’s rent. If any of this hits home for you, you’re probably on the treadmill just like I was.

SIGNS YOU MAY BE IN THE
TREADMILL OPERATOR STAGE

You’re working in your business way more than you’re working on your business.

You can’t take time off because no business would get done.

You can’t take time off because you’d make no money.

You’re at risk for burnout—physically and emotionally.

FRUSTRATIONS YOU FACE IN THE TREADMILL OPERATOR STAGE

You don’t have enough time to grow your business.

You feel trapped by your business.

Business stops when you stop.

You can’t take a vacation—and you don’t remember what a vacation feels like.

Running a small business can be lonely, isolating work. Our Small-Business Labor Crisis Report 2023 shows nearly 14 million small-business owners (42 percent) feel alone when they’re dealing with business problems and decisions. A whopping 18.6 million (56 percent) say they’ve dealt with burnout in the last year. Small-business owners get to the end of the day feeling emotionally and physically exhausted, even losing sleep because of their businesses. I don’t say all that to discourage you. I’m pointing it out because while I know you feel alone, you’re not alone. The Treadmill Operator stage is hard for everyone. Business owners who are in the Treadmill Operator stage say things like:

“I lost a key team member from an injury, and now I’m back to working in the business instead of on it. My phone won’t stop blowing up. I know I need to hire someone, but I don’t know where in the world I can get the time to train them. I’m working crazy hours, and I feel incredibly behind.”

“If I don’t have thirty to forty calls every day and fires to put out, then what do I do? I’d love to travel with my family, and I’d love to be able to go on a trip without my phone. But that would be one of the scariest days I can imagine.”

“I’m stuck doing office work most of the time.”

Sound familiar? Here’s the irony of the Treadmill Operator stage: By successfully starting your own business, you built a trap—a trap made from success. By the very act of succeeding, you created a situation where you’ll have more work than you can do by yourself. So, on one hand, congratulations! You beat the odds. Way to go, rock star! You know better than most that the calluses on your hands and your character, earned through stress and strain, are the trophies of service to others. You’ve accomplished way more than most people ever will, so hold your head high. But now the question becomes How do I get out of this trap, and how do I get off the wheel?

Getting off the Treadmill

The solution to getting off the treadmill is to get to a place where the majority of your business revenue can be generated without your being in the room. You do this by being diligent about how you use your time, about the people you hire, about the tasks you delegate, and about your numbers so you know you can afford the help. I started to get off the treadmill when I began delegating some of the coaching I was doing to my first team member, Russ Carroll. He was a semi-retired financial coach who joined forces with me in the early days of the business, working on straight commission because I couldn’t afford to pay him a salary at the time. Once I wasn’t the only one handling clients, I could spend time on planning and goal setting that would grow the business while he was generating revenue.

The second big step we took was putting Financial Peace University (FPU) on video tape (yep, good ol’ VHS!). To be honest, I didn’t think it would work. I even snuck into one of the first classes using the taped version of FPU and stood in the back of the room while the class watched the video. As I was teaching on the tape, I told people to raise their hands. The audience on tape raised their hands—and so did the people in the live FPU class! When I told a joke, the entire class laughed! It blew my mind, and believe me, I was happy to be wrong because then I knew we were onto something. With the class on video, we could sell these tapes and people everywhere could take FPU. It was another way the business could make money when I wasn’t in the room. It was a game changer! People, products, or processes that generate revenue without you are essential for growing your business past the Treadmill Operator stage. I can’t tell you what those key people, products, and processes are for your business. You’ve got to figure that out. But I can walk you through the four skills you’ll need that will give you the margin to make that happen and get you off that treadmill:

• Time management
• Delegation
• Budgeting
• Hiring

Keep in mind, you’ll use these skills all the time and in every stage of business. But without the foundation for these skills, leveling up from Treadmill Operator to the next stage of business will be practically impossible.

Time Management

You’re successful. You’ve developed a service or product and a customer base. Great job! It’s going well, but you’re at your limit. Everyone who’s winning will reach their limit at some point. That’s why it’s up to you to make sure you’re spending every minute of your week on the right things. Time is the one resource that’s truly fixed. We all have the same amount, and you can’t get it back once it’s gone.

So, are you spending most of your time working on things that are growing your business or on the ankle biters that get in the way? Until you take control of your time, you’ll keep wondering where it all went, and you’ll be left with only two options—working longer hours or working harder. And I know you. You already work your butt off, and you’re already putting in long hours. But with three key time management tools, you can get a handle on where you’re actually spending your time, start prioritizing your time more effectively, and finally stay on track with those priorities: the time audit, the time management matrix, and the forced ranking tasks exercise. Let’s walk through how to put these tools to work.

Time Audit

As a busy leader, you’re getting pulled in a hundred different directions, so you probably feel like everything is top priority. But the truth is, not everything has to happen right this minute. The time audit gives you the big-picture view of how you’re spending your time today so you can start spending it on the right things going forward. The time audit is simple. Just jot down everything you do during the day over the course of a week. It works best if you track your time in thirty-minute increments in real time throughout the day. If you try to wait until the end of the day, you’ll never remember what you did eight hours ago. Log every activity, even if you’re just answering work texts and emails. Even on weekends.

I understand if you think this sounds like one more thing on your list that you have zero time for. But trust me, it’s worth it. We worked with a guy who was running a construction company, and he was working at a jobsite about thirty minutes from his office. Out of habit, he was driving back to the office every day for lunch. That meant he was spending an hour each day—five hours a week—just driving back and forth for lunch! When his time audit showed him how much time he was wasting, it was an easy change for him to simply pack his lunch and skip the trip back to the office. That one change gave him back enough time to get his books done during the day instead of late at night after his family went to bed.

So, I bet you can spare a few seconds a few times a day to capture what you did for the last thirty minutes or so if it means getting back a few hours in your week. At the end of this chapter, we’ll show you how to access our free Time Tracker Tool to make this step as quick and easy as possible.

Time Management Matrix

Once you have a good picture of where your week went, you have some decisions to make. You’ll need to keep doing some things, stop some things, and delegate some things, which we’ll talk about a little later. When I was figuring this out for myself, I liked using a tool that I first learned about in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He called it the Time Management Matrix, and it acts as a filter for all the activities you logged on your time audit.

Quadrant 1: Urgent and Important—What has to be done now or it’ll cause serious problems?

These tasks are usually easy to spot. Put every task from your time audit that’s both important long term and urgent today in box number one. Urgent and Important stuff must be done immediately.

Quadrant 2: Important but Not Urgent—What do I need to work on to move my business and life to the next level but is not urgent?

Put all the tasks that are important long term but not urgent today into box number two. These are things you need to do, like exercise, strategic planning, goal setting, and date nights, and if you neglect these things for too long, they will become urgent. It’s kind of like maintenance on your car. It’s important to change the oil in your car, but if you don’t do it regularly, you’ll end up stranded on the side of the road with an urgent engine issue.

Quadrant 3: Urgent but Not Important—What am I doing simply because it’s urgent that I should stop doing?

Put everything that’s urgent today but not important long term into box number three. This includes things like, on a small scale, when a team member is standing in your doorway telling you that the copier is out of paper or, on a larger scale, when you’re at risk of missing a deadline that could cause you to lose customers and money. Those are urgent tasks. Do them as soon as possible, but be careful! If the tyranny of the urgent wins out all the time, you’ll end up focusing on the fire that will save $40 rather than the project that will generate $40,000.

Quadrant 4: Not Important and Not Urgent—What can I drop or delete?

These tasks should also be pretty easy to spot. They’re your time wasters. This is stuff like watching television, scrolling social media, grabbing your phone every time it dings, or replying to the political email from your dumb-butt buddy. These are things that eat up valuable time but don’t help you get anything done.

Seeing which quadrants get the biggest chunk of your time and energy changes the time-management game. Now you can focus your time on the tasks that are worth doing. Eventually, you’ll start seeing patterns and learn to make better judgments about how you spend your time each day. That’s huge for Treadmill Operators who are running full speed all day, every day.

Forced Ranking Tasks

You can organize your to-do list even further by using the forced ranking tasks exercise to prioritize the tasks you have to do in the short term so you can focus on the most important thing today. It’s an easy way to identify your A1 activity, so I like to call this the steak sauce exercise. You can access the how-to for this and get a rundown of everything we’ve covered here in our Ultimate Guide to Time Management at the end of this chapter.

Delegation

As the owner of your small business, how much do you think your time is worth? Two hundred dollars an hour? Three hundred? More? Now think about how much it would cost you to hire an assistant. Someone to answer the phones, handle paperwork, manage your schedule, and take notes in meetings. About $20 an hour? If I offered you a $20 bill in exchange for $200, you’d have no problem telling me what a bad deal that is. But that’s effectively what you’re doing every hour you spend at $200 a pop on tasks someone else could be doing for $20 an hour. Not only that, but those tasks are also taking up your time and keeping you from working on your business and growing revenue. I’m not saying those tasks aren’t important. You might not think twice about doing them yourself, and you may even enjoy them. But you’re shortchanging yourself when you don’t delegate them to someone else.

Delegation is one of the most misunderstood and abused areas of leadership in small businesses today. It’s not just blindly pushing your responsibilities off onto another team member. Effective delegation starts with a detailed description and explanation of why you want to delegate a task to a team member. Your team member needs to know why the task is important, how it relates to their role, and how much time you expect them to spend on it. When you delegate the right way, you activate your team members to work in their personal strengths on particular tasks, and that, in turn, frees you up to focus on other tasks only you can do.

If you’re thinking that sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. And that’s one excuse small-business leaders use to avoid delegation. I’ve heard plenty more excuses and even had a bunch of my own. Does any of this ring a bell?

“It takes too long to teach somebody else.”

“Nobody can do the task as well as I can.”

“I still like doing the task.”

“I can’t risk losing control.”

When you get down to it, there are really two main reasons why business owners don’t delegate: Either they don’t have the people they need, or they have the people on their team, but they aren’t trained. The first problem—not having the right people on the team—is solved through hiring. We’ll talk about what a good hiring process looks like later, but when you’re looking to build a team of people you can delegate to, you want to look for two specific character traits: integrity and competency.

Psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud explains that the word integrity comes from the root word integer. An integer is any whole number, not a fraction. In life, integrity means living in wholeness—no splits or hypocrisy. It’s being the same person with the same general behavior in any setting. Look for positive team members who model consistency no matter how much time you spend with them.

When it comes to competency, you’re looking for more than the ability to accomplish the task. Competency is about how the task is accomplished. Cloud says, “Character is the ability to meet the demands of reality.” People with the character to be delegation-worthy are mature enough to know their limitations, they know when to ask for help, and they consistently show a level of excellence and the diligence to maintain it. They’re also courageous enough to bring you bad news when it’s called for without hiding anything, even if it reflects badly on them.

Business owners can solve the second problem—lack of training—by simply taking the time to train the people they do have. Some leaders are hesitant about training because they don’t want to be micromanagers. Showing people how things need to be done is not micromanaging; it’s training. Once you’ve trained your team member and they’ve proven they can do the task, but you continue to hover over their shoulder, that’s micromanaging.

Delegation is a critical strategy for growth. Even if you use every minute of every hour of every day well, your business will grow only as big as your ability to delegate. It’s up to you to push past the excuses if you want to grow your business beyond the Treadmill Operator stage. At first, delegation will be one of the hardest things you’ll do in business. But if you slow down to master the delegation process now, you’ll be set to speed up later. I dive deep into this process in detail in my Quick Read brilliantly titled Delegation, which you’ll also be able to access at the end of the chapter.

Budgeting

I can’t stress enough how important a budget is to running your business. That shouldn’t be a shock coming from the guy who teaches people how to handle their money. You need to know where your business stands financially at all times. Your budget will show you that and help you generate the margin you need to grow your business. A budget is a plan for your money (what you make, spend, and save) where you tell your money (aka revenue) where to go. Think of your budget as a windshield that lets you see what’s coming up and gauge how you’re doing on reaching your destination.

In the Treadmill Operator stage, the biggest benefit of having a budget is that it will show you if you can or can’t afford to hire help to grow your business. If you don’t make enough money to hire help, then you need to figure out how to make more money. Your business budget will make that clear, show you where you might be able to make adjustments, and help you problem solve for how you can afford to hire more team members.

You also shouldn’t be surprised that a guy who preaches about staying out of debt in life also believes you should stay out of debt in business. Really. Just like living debt-free in your personal life is countercultural, running a debt-free business is totally and completely countercultural. But it can be done. People are shocked when they learn that we built our fifty-acre, $400 million headquarters without debt. Regardless, it’s true. We don’t borrow money. I continually remind our team that we build (and grow) at the speed of cash. You can too, and that starts with a solid budgeting process.

At first, you’ll focus on your budget for the next month and work your way up to a projected twelve- to eighteen-month budget. As you do that, you’ll create retained earnings, which is the secret to staying out of debt in business. Imagine being able to see where your business could be financially a year from now. How much better would you be able to plan and take advantage of the opportunities that come your way with that kind of knowledge? This is why budgeting is an essential skill for Treadmill Operators who are ready to break into the next stage of business.

Of course, you’ll need some practical, tactical guidance to build a budget for your business for the first time. Again, we’ll give you access to the whole step-by-step process plus a few pro tips we’ve learned along the way at the end of the chapter. What’s really important right now is that you understand the value a budget will bring to your business and your life so that you put in the effort to build that skill and put it into action. If you do, this time next month, my bet is you’ll have a whole new outlook on your business!

Hiring

Once you’ve optimized your time, worked on delegating some tasks to others, and built your operating budget, you’re ready to grow your business. Things are starting to move, and that’s a good thing. But the only way to solve the problem of having more work than you can get done is to hire more team members. When you have good help, you can continue to focus on growing the business, not just running it. Good hires keep your business moving forward.

Your first hire is a huge step. It’s a big investment financially, and at this stage, when your business is so small, just one crazy person can really screw things up! As much as you need the help, I promise you a bad hire is worse than no hire. When I started adding team members, I’d hire someone if they could just fog a mirror. I thought if I hired them to work, they would actually work. Wrong! There are a lot of people out there just looking for a J-O-B so they can collect a paycheck. You don’t want those people on your team. Hiring the right person is more important than hiring a person. Again, another lesson I learned the hard way.

So, even though you need help now—yesterday would have been better—my advice to you is to slow down. In his book Good to Great, my friend Jim Collins talks about the importance of getting the right people in the right seats on the bus. To do that, you need to take your time. The hiring mistakes I made early on showed me the value of having a good hiring process. Ours has twelve—yes, twelve—components we refined over time. When we follow it (we still aren’t perfect), we have a great batting average on hiring great team members.

The Twelve Components to a Good Hire

1. Pray.

Ask God to send the team members you need to do the work He’s given you to do and keep out the crazy. If prayer is not your thing, at least take some time to nail down the type of person you want (and don’t want) to work with every day. Reflection brings clarity.

2. Get referrals.

Thoroughbreds run with thoroughbreds, so ask your team members to refer people from their circle who they’d want to work with. If their referral is hired and completes the ninety-day probation period, give the referring team member a cash bounty—and hand it out in front of the entire team. There’s nothing like a little cash to inspire great leads and build culture at the same time!

3. Do a thirty-minute drive-by interview.

Never—I repeat, never—hire someone after just one interview. Start with a thirty-minute get-to-know-you conversation where they do most of the talking while you ask questions and listen. Make sure that first call (phone or video) doesn’t go over thirty minutes. You’ll be amazed at what you learn in that call, and you’ll be clear on whether to set up a second interview.

4. Check the resumés and references.

A resumé gives you an overview of the candidate’s formal training, skills, and certifications. Use it as a conversation starter, but don’t lean on it (or on their references) too much. People can say anything. Occasionally, when you check a reference, you’ll find a candidate didn’t tell them to expect a call or email. The candidate may even include someone who doesn’t have nice things to say. These are often signals to run in the opposite direction.

5. Use testing tools.

You need enough relational intelligence to know who to bring on, but the right tools can also help you figure out if someone would be a good fit in the role. You might give a skills test to candidates for roles in writing, copy editing, presenting, design, or web development so you can see if they have the chops to do the job. Another fit indicator is the DISC assessment. It’ll give you a quick look at how the candidate’s style of behavior, communication, and work fit the team and the work you need done. For example, if you need someone great at crunching numbers, you would ideally want to see high scores in organization and details (the C) on their assessment. If you don’t, that could spark additional questions about how that works for them.

6. Ask yourself, do you like them?

Hire people you like. It’s that simple. You run a small business and probably spend a lot of time with your team, so relationships matter. Skills alone aren’t enough. If someone’s good at the task but they’re a jerk or have a vastly different value system, you won’t like working with them (and they won’t like working with you either). Plus, your customers probably won’t like interacting with them. That’s never good.

7. Look for passion. (Do they light up?)

Look for passion when they talk about the position and your company’s mission. Lack of passion is the easiest way to spot someone just looking for a J-O-B. If all they want is a paycheck, you’ll never keep them happy. You want team members who are excited about what they’re doing—construction workers who want to build homes for families to make memories in, writers who want to inspire hope, and web developers who want to create a fantastic experience for customers. Look for fired-up people who love their work and own the why behind it.

8. Review their personal budget.

Can the candidate afford to live on the salary you provide? If not, sooner or later, they’ll blame you for “not paying enough” even though they accepted your offer and should know what they can and can’t live on. When people are worried about their bills, they’re distracted and can’t give their best. So serve your top candidates—before they join you—by making sure they can care for their family and meet their obligations with what you pay. Make it clear that you’re not going to scrutinize their budget to see where they spend their money; this is just another way to make sure this is a good fit.

9. Discuss compensation.

Notice that this comes further down the process than many people expect. That’s okay. It makes sense for people to want to know what the compensation package is, so share it with them once you’ve made it a bit further into the hiring process. If their first question during one of the initial interviews is about how much you’re going to pay them, they’ll leave you for ten cents more an hour. They’re takers, not givers. You want people excited to add value to your organization. If they’re preoccupied by the benefits, don’t hire them.

10. Create a Key Results Area (KRA).

A KRA is a written roadmap for what winning looks like in the role you’re filling. A KRA can be as simple as defining the number of calls and sales volume required of a sales position or the maximum time a customer should be on hold. Operating without a KRA is like taking people bowling without the lights on. They’ll make a lot of noise but won’t really know what they’re doing. That’s why you need to be clear about the role you’re hiring for—otherwise, the person you hire could leave when they find out what their job really is. Don’t set a new team member up for failure by not being clear about what you expect them to do. We’ll talk a lot more about KRAs and how to create them for your team members in the next chapter.

11. Do a final in-person interview and go on a spousal dinner.

This may be the best advice on the list. This is one of the final checks on whether a potential team member will be a great fit. A spousal dinner is your chance to get to know the candidate and their spouse while you share your company story in a casual restaurant setting. It’s a game changer. As their spouse hears about your culture and the role, they’re usually eager to share whether they think the position fits. One more bonus: You’ll discover if your candidate is married to crazy. If they are, stay away. Seriously.

12. Implement a ninety-day onboarding and probation plan.

Once a person is hired, they start out on a probation period—we use ninety days—so everyone can make sure the fit is right. This is a low-obligation period where they can walk away if they choose. But if they decide to leave, discuss what went wrong and try to fix it first. You’ve invested a lot to get to this point. Every quarter or so, celebrate all your new team members who made it through their first ninety days. This is the perfect time for you and your leaders to pass the baton to them as creators of your company culture. At Ramsey Solutions, we invite these new team members to a special celebration at the end of a workday. We provide a meal, I talk about how we got started, I let some of our other leaders share, and then I allow these new team members to ask questions. It’s a great time to celebrate them while also reinforcing our culture.

What Winning Looks Like

I don’t know about you, but when I zoom out and look at all that’s in this chapter, it’s a lot. Honestly, when I think back to when I was on the treadmill, not only was my day-to-day workload unsustainable but also having to think about doing all this stuff on top of that was overwhelming. What they say is true, though: “The thinking that got us into this problem isn’t the thinking that’s going to get us out of it.” To grow your business, you’ll have to learn new skills and think differently about how you spend your time. I’ve seen what happens when Treadmill Operators don’t make those changes. They stay stuck and frequently burn out. Just as bad, many of them fall short of their dreams and never have much impact. And of course, we’ve all heard the statistics about how many small businesses go under every year. You have to stop letting your business run you and start running your business. I believe in the inherent nobility of business, and I believe in you, the EntreLeader. Because there’s heart in what you do. You’re more than the renegade lone ranger or the corporate bureaucrat. And I want to see you win at business and have a blast doing it.

If you’ll put in the work to master the four skills we’ve covered in this chapter, you’ll get to the point where most of the business results don’t rely on you personally generating them. Here they are again:

• Time management
• Delegation
• Budgeting
• Hiring

You’ll know you’re conquering this stage when you consistently have time each week to work on the business, not just in it. You’ll be thinking about where you want the business to be in the future, working on longer-range goals like improving your marketing—and all the other things on your to-do list that you never have time to get to today. You’ll finally have time to think about how to make your business work better, and not just react to the most recent fire.

The biggest shift will happen when you can afford to hire team members you can delegate to, and you can trust that the work will get done in a way that you are proud of. This is the difference between owning a job and owning a business—the ability to scale. You’ll scale your impact. You’ll break free from the treadmill because you’ve imposed your will on the challenges of the marketplace while still making it home for dinner with your family. That’s what winning looks like, and that’s what will move you to the next stage of business, Pathfinder.

Click the QR code below to get a comprehensive step-by-step action plan with tools and resources that will help you create margin in your day so you can spend time working on your business instead of just in it.