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Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. What if I told you that the real reason you're still doing everything inside your business has nothing to do with your team and everything to do with your brain being wired for chaos, thinking it's safer than calm? I'm going to show you the exact mental pattern that keeps business owners stuck as the bottlenecks, even after they hire great people. But here's the catch. At the end of this video, I'm going to walk you through a 60 second test that will tell you brutally whether you are ready to stop being the bottleneck or whether your nervous system is addicted to staying in the middle of the business. If we haven't met, My name is Dr. Shannon Ervin. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years. I'm the author of the bestselling book the 67 Day Year. And I've helped hundreds of business owners scale to multiple millions while stepping out of of the day today. On a recent client advisory call, I had a client who had a full team, clean dashboards and great revenue, but she was still jumping into every fire. She knew she was the constraint, but she didn't see how her brain was wired to secretly keep it that way. That's what we're going to unpack today. By the end of this video, you'll understand why your nervous system keeps pulling you back into the weeds. And you'll have a simple 60 second constraint test to pinpoint the one thing to fix first in your business. We're going to walk through four big shifts. Number one, how your brain is on autopilot, quietly keeping you in the middle of everything in your business. Number two, why you keep optimizing the wrong parts of your business. Number three, a 60 second constraint test for your CEO, team and profit systems. And finally, number four, how to make working on one outcome feel safe instead of terrifying. You didn't wake up one day and decide I want to be the constraint in the middle of my business. Your brain just wired it in that way when you were surviving the building phase of your business. When you're in the beginning stages of your business, you're the founder, you're the owner, you're doing everything. You're hiring, doing sales, doing ops, hiring everything is on your shoulders. Everything revolves around you and it works until it stops working. When you're just getting started up to a about a million or so, you're the center of your business's universe, or what we call the founder operating system. You're doing everything. You're hiring, you're doing sales, you're doing operations, you're driving the day to day. You're. You're in everything. Here's the reality. Every time you jumped in, the business survived in. Your brain labeled this as me. Being in the center of the business equals safety. Your brain labeled this as me and the business. Every single day doing everything is safe and profitable. You have a hardwired pattern to make you be in the day to day, be the one driving revenue, because no one can do it as well as I can. That isn't your fault. Your brain literally got wired that way when you built your business. And so now you here you are scaling, trying to scale, you have a team and they're begging you to get out of the day to day and you just can't do it. You're the only one seeing what's wrong now at like half a million to 3 million, that old wiring is still running, even though the business needs something different now. I call this pattern the founder brain. When your safety system and your scaling goals are literally at a tug of war, and the truth is, being in every decision is isn't leadership, it's your old safety wiring working on repeat. If you can't leave your business for two weeks and not check in, that is the sure telltale sign that your business is running on what we call the founder operating system. And your brain is wired to survive the business, not to scale the business. So if you're exhausted working in the business, driving revenue, doing all the results, and you're still not able to have your team run the day to day, you do not have an effort or a team problem. You have what we call a constraint problem. What I mean by constraint problem is your brain is hardwired to optimize everything. It is not yet wired for what is necessary for scaling, which is constraint thinking. It's looking at the one area of the business that is the most read and we'll talk about what that means and optimizing just that one thing for your brain as a business founder. In the founder operating system, your brain is just hardwired to see everything because you had to. And that works. That's crazy because it works up to a certain point and then literally stops working. That optimize everything. Thinking literally takes your team and has them running in opposite directions of each other, taking the business to a standstill. One of our clients, we'll call her Betty, was optimizing for operations when marketing was the problem. So we did sat down and we did what we call a triage with her. It's the step one of our scaled CEO program. And, and after going through triage, we saw that marketing was the one constraint, specifically ads. And we saw that clearly and set up a triage plan for her to go after those specific constraints. But when we checked in with her, she was optimizing for operations instead of marketing. Now why would that happen? Well, when she was stressed. When we're stressed, when you're stressed, we reach for familiar tasks that we're good at instead of the one hard constraint, like the business owner obsessing over the new funnels or AI or different tactics, when the real constraint is no one on the team owns the setting, the leads. So your impulse to fix everything, it's a stress response, not a strategy. So instead of trying to guess, we're going to run a quick constraint test together. This is a 60 second constraint test that will show you everything. In about a minute, you're going to see exactly where you're capping your own growth and freedom in three key scaling areas. CEO, team and profit. All right, high level, I'm going to walk you through how to take the 62nd. So for each system, CEO and team and profit, you're going to rate from A1 to to attend with one simple question each. And what I want you to do is scale it one to ten. First thought like ten being perfect, one being failing. Right. And so I want you to quickly say the number and don't change it. All right? So quick first impulse. Deal. All right, here we go. Question number one. Your CEO area. Can your business run for a week without you in the middle of everything? Meaning if you leave for an entire seven days and you do not check your slack, your asana, your text messages or your emails, can the business run without you for seven days? That's your CEO scale of one to 10. For the team, the question is, does every key metric have a clear owner besides you? Meaning revenue leads every piece of the puzzle. Is there an owner that is not you? So if your name is on half or more, that would be a one. If your name is not on any, that would be a 10 in that team scaling system. And finally, question number three is, is do I? You ask yourself, do you have a simple CEO Dashboard that tells you what is red, what is yellow, what is green, what is red meaning it's broken, it's not hitting the key metrics. What is yellow meaning it's fragile, it's close to turning red and green meaning it's doing well, it's hitting the metric. Do you have a simple dashboard that you can look at for five to 10 minutes and know exactly where the constraints are in your business? Those are the three simple questions of the 60 second quiz. All right, now pick the lowest score of those three. That's your current constraint. That's the thing that you want to put all your energy on. And the reality is if you're lowest in the CEO system, then we're really looking at that founder, operating identity, your calendar and your decisions. We call this a decision bottleneck. That means all the decision everything is still up in your head. People have to come to you for decisions, for your opinion. Your calendar is chasing problems, not constraints and your identity is still tied back to that beginning founder versus the scaling CEO. If you're lowest in the team area, the team system, this is hiring role, clarity and ownership. This is the choke point. What this means is you haven't actually, even though you have team and they may be amazing and they may be a players, you have not given them ownership of the key metrics that drive outcomes. And without them knowing the key metrics that drives outcomes, they will never take ownership. And that will always be the choking point in your business. And if the last one or the scaled profit system is the lowest, it's because there's no scoreboard that you're working off of. So everyone including you is flying blind on how to be successful. The reality is you just did in 60 seconds what most founders avoid for 6 12, 24 months. And if this is already revealing some things after this video register for the self scaling business diagnostic, it's guided live with me. I'll give you deeper scores on these systems and an exact 90 day plan for solving that big constraint. Your business doesn't change when you see the constraint. It changes when your nervous system stops panicking about fixing everything at once and when their systems there's to support it. So right now to your brain it thinks if I don't touch everything, if I don't look at everything, something is going to break. And that keeps your nervous system triggered into fight or flight, looking for every detail, reading every email, watching every post, seeing every step that your team is doing and giving like hey did you think abouts? Hey what abouts you get the idea? It's not that we're telling our team what to do, it's just that we're showing them everything that is wrong that they would eventually catch if they owned it outright through a numeric number. So if you don't touch everything feeling like something will break. That's why focusing on one thing seems like a threat. Now, the overcome to this is to give your brain what we call a sandbox. We love doing this in what we call 90 day scaling cycles. One 90 day window, one critical number and a weekly red, yellow and green system dashboard to be working through. Okay, so the sandbox here is you want to work in a 90 day window, you want to pick one critical number and we're going to look at that number weekly. Is it red, is it yellow or is it green? How are we going to do that? We're going to just take one line item, one critical number and we're going to see where is the ideal, how do we win? We're going to put an outcome key performance indicator with it and then we're going to measure it weekly and we're going to determine is, have we hit the target this week? If yes, then it's green. If we miss the target, that means it's fragile and it's yellow. And if it is beyond a short little yellow window, then it is red. Which means we're not hitting the critical number. And that is the only thing we need to focus on. This is going to start to train your brain to see one thing and drive one thing from red to green. Now, the key to this is somebody else on your team owning this metric. For example, you might choose a team owns a weekly revenue number as the constraint and what's changed? Right? So that might be the number you look at. And here's the thing, every urge to jump back into everything is a cue. Install the system so that one problem never has to come back to you again. This is going to change the game and allow you to really scale. You can't lead like a scaled CEO with that kind of bottleneck identity. Your brain will keep dragging you back to the old job description in the middle of every action and all revenue generation. So I want to take you through a quick exercise that's going to support you in starting to take on the identity of a scaled CEO. One that measures through metrics and owners and dashboards, not one who puts out the fires and makes all the decisions. So I want you to choose an adjective. An adjective that you know would define you when you are operating like a scaled CEO. Maybe it's I'm a calm, decisive, strategic leader who lets systems and owners carry the weight that is going to feel new to you and it's important to define it in advance or what we call dia. It's literally building a neural network towards scale. So I really want you to hear this. You can't out strategy, out hustle or out tactic. A scaling CEO or scaled CEO, you have to decide it in advance and start to take on the identity of someone who runs their business this way. So you fill in the adjectives there. A calm, decisive, strategic leader, whatever it is that aligns with you, but it's really who lets systems and owners carry the weight. So when you say this out loud to yourself every single day before you meet with a team, before team meetings, before big decisions decisions, this starts to frame choices differently within your business. Your brain will start to notice when you're reverting back and start to pull you like a magnet toward what it is that you know will create scaled or becoming a scaled CEO. This enables your team to start really owning the day to day because you're not playing pulling it back into your hands. This seems like such a simple hack, but at the same time you can't find me a 10 million, 20 million or $30 million CEO that did not lead with who they needed to become so that they could run the business they wanted to have. So repeat this frame out loud to yourself every morning when you wake up, every time you're about to go into a meeting, every time you're about to look at work and see how your brain starts noticing changes. You know, Tony Robbins kind of made this famous. If you've ever heard his thing like don't look at red, don't look at red, don't look at red, and all you see is red. It's because your brain, once you build a pathway or start that repetition game of a pathway, your brain starts to notice it. It's something called the reticular activating system that gets like woken up and it's like a bodyguard then. Now it's paying attention to any time you're calm, consistent strategic leader that works through owners and metrics, not putting out fires. So now your brain goes to work for you. Okay, here's a great example and one that I personally had to use. You get a slack or an asana ping, Are you going to let the owner handle it and check the dashboard later? Are you going to go in and just check it out and see if you can Give them some advice. That's a perfect example of choosing the scaled CEO identity over the hustling, operating, grinding beginner business owner. So the slack pings and because you have owned that identity, you check the dashboard later and see how that plays out. You let the owners keep the ownership and you drive through the dashboard. It's the thing that shifts the game and why we build dashboards inside the scaled CEO for those business owners that are doing around a half million to 5 million and trying to get to the next level. Because most of us have been hardwired to be in the center of everything driving revenue and day to day operations. And what ends up happening is we all of a sudden we built the business for freedom and time with our family and legacy and all that. And we start to feel like the business is closing in on us, like it's a prison that's strangling us. And it's not because we don't have great people and it's not because we don't didn't try to create SOPs and and get them to run it. It's because we didn't hand the ownership over and drive from metrics and dashboards. And it's not something we naturally learn. It's not something that's comfortable. Because what got us to a million dollars in our business stops working to get to become a scaled CEO at 10 or 20 or 30. So this is the moment you get the slack ping, the asana ping you get and you let the owner handle it. And you look at the dashboard and if the dashboard's green, nothing to think about, and you start building that nervous system that says green is safe, yellow and red. The owners come up with a solution for a new mentor. Big difference, but a shift that allows you to scale. Okay, I want you to do a micro action. I want you to write your IM sentence and put it near your computer screen as you work on this quarter's constraint so that you see it and say it as often as possible. I want you to imagine three months from now opening a simple red, yellow and green dashboard while your team runs the plays you used to hold in your head and realizing you're no longer the bottleneck. Amazing, right? Well, that's the power of becoming a scaled CEO and become getting your nervous system wired to allow it. Listen, your brain wired you in the middle as safe. That wiring pushes you to fix wrong things. The 62nd test showed you the real constraint. Focusing one quarter at a time rewires safety around systems, not heroics. So if this hit a nerve because you can see you're the constraint just like I was. This is exactly what I built the self scaling business diagnostic and the Scaled CEO operating system for. So click to take a look at the diagnostic and book a scalability audit to map your next 90 days, what to delegate, what system to install and how to truly scale without you in the center. And it's going to buy back 10 to 20 hours a week without slowing revenue, in fact growing revenue at the same time. So I hope this has been an eye opening transition for you to think about your business in this way. I love being able to share the science of scaling so that you become a scaled CEO. I can't wait to see you at the diagnostic. Until then, bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course if you want want to go deeper or see this on video, please follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon Irvin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.