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Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
How I Used One System To Escape The Revenue Treadmill (And Build A Self‑Scaling Business) with Dr. Shannon Irvine
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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 business owners if revenue only jumps when you push and sprint, big promos, big launches, big push and then it slides back down the moment you take a breath, you're on the revenue treadmill. Man, I know that treadmill. For years I thought the answer was just one more push. Better promotion, better partners, better launch campaigns. Just another push. I finally realized my real constraint was truly simple. We had no self scaling system. Revenue depended on me pushing the boulder uphill every single quarter. By the end of this video I'm going to show you the five step constraint method I use to get off that treadmill for good and build a self scaling business and buy back my time without shrinking revenue or profit. If we haven't met, my name is Dr. Shannon Ervin. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, wrote the bestselling book the 67 Day and have helped hundreds of business owners scale over 5 million and 10 million by focusing on one constraint for 90 days. Instead of chasing every revenue spike, we're going to walk through what the revenue treadmill looked like in my own business and then the theory of constraints simplified into plain English and the five step loop applied to escaping that revenue treadmill for good and how the biggest companies use this same thinking. And I'm going to also you a 90 day constraint sprint that you can start using this quarter. So if your stripe account looks like a heart monitor with big spikes when you push and flat lines when you don't, you my friend are on the revenue treadmill. And I can tell you I was on the launch life for nearly a decade. Seriously heavy promo, big cart open pushes, big teams to be able to handle all that pressure being put on my business at the same time and what it would do to the team. Really fracturing people to go from running an excellence and the culture driving the business to all hands on deck, fires everywhere, things burning down, compromising because we are doing such a large push, really hinging my entire revenue for a quarter or for a half a year or year on the outcome of one event. Exhausting right now don't get me wrong, there was a big cash hit when we did these big launches. But then what most of the gurus don't tell you Is this slow slide back down and seeing that bank account just dwindle, dwindle, dwindle, dwindle, and knowing that if anything is going to shift it, it's like Atlas Shrugged. It's on my shoulders. And the pressure of that, the intensity of that, Certainly I rode the high for the month or two after the launch, but what we call the launch free fall or the promotion free fall. How on earth? Internally, I still had to pay team. I still had to show up and deliver, but yet the bank account was running dry. And one of the things I started to try was like different campaigns trying to do affiliates, better partners, different ads, different funnels, all to try to maximize this revenue push that was looking great on the outside, but literally destroying me on the inside. So the cost here is it wrecked my calendar. We literally ran like a marathon for two straight months. My team was exhausted. There was just no predictability about what was going to be the outcome. Literally, launches could be all planned, and then something would happen with the government or a shutdown or a TSA or something in the environment, and everyone would contract or potentially expand, but there was no predictability. That is like being on, I imagine, never done that. But I'm just saying it's that, yes, it's a high when it goes well, but the team's left exhausted, the systems are all broken, and it's like you walk in the next day after a frat party wondering what the heck happened? And guess what? If revenue's gonna grow again, it's gonna be on you. There was just no predictability. And I'd always tell myself, like, I was pushing for safety, right? I was pushing for that big revenue hit. But I was always one push away from that safety actually happening. So the big realization was the problem wasn't weak effort or weak tactics. The constraint was no consistent evergreen acquisition and sales system. Revenue only moved when I was actively pushing. So that leads me to the theory of constraints. Your business is not a to do list. Your business, it's a pipeline. And a pipeline only moves as fast as that tightest point. So I want to explain constraints in a simple way. So every system has one main constraint and fixing everything else's noise. I want you to picture water flowing through pipes with one narrow segment dictating the total flow. That is constraint thinking. And constraint thinking is what you see every business owner at 5, 10, $20 million doing in their business. They are not focusing on the Hail Mary. They are. We are not focusing on the one and done. We are focusing on a System and specifically constraint theory to map this to business. I want you to think about how you go from awareness to leads, to conversations, to sales, to delivery, to renewals. That's one pipeline, one constraint. I want you to think about your business. So if you think about you're creating awareness, then you're bringing in leads and then you're having conversations and then you're creating sales, then you've got to deliver on those sales and then there are renewals. There's all these different avenues within the business, right? Until you fix that narrowest point, more effort anywhere else just stacks up pressure in front of the constraint. I want you to think of it like a hose in the summertime that you've like twisted, right? It doesn't matter how much flow comes in, it's going to stop at the constraint. That's something that launches, do not let you see. And then you are left holding the revenue bag again and again and again and again versus really looking at in the flow from awareness to renewal, where is that biggest constraint? So once you see the real constraint, you don't need 10 new offers, you need one loop to run over and over and over. So I want to talk to you about the five steps and apply them directly to getting off the revenue treadmill. Number one, we want to identify the first real constraint. I want you to name it. Clearly we only make money when I run a big promotion or, or we have no always on way to turn complete strangers into booked calls, into clients. I want you to exploit the constraint. Take the best revenue patterns you've already have. The promotion, the webinar, the workshop, the the one that actually works and squeeze it. Improve, show up, improve, follow up, improve, offer clarity. The key here is for 90 days, park everything else only look at the constraint. No side offers, no random campaigns. And the rally cry for the team is our number one job is to turn this proven revenue moment into something we can rely on week after week, month after month, elevate that constraint. So turn the one winner into an evergreen system. So for example, in our business we have a self scaling diagnostic. That's where we really are able to serve our clients and help them understand where they are. That's our live event every single week, all through the year. No big spike, big drop, right? Our ads, they're always on so they're, they're able to learn and able to optimize. You have automated nurture and we have human nurture. Each of those came from analyzing the one constraint when we weren't getting nurturing to convert that took a constraint focus. Then we got that shifted. All automated doesn't necessarily work. All human doesn't work either. So we have a blend. Then the key was scalability audit calls or calls feeding into our scaled CEO program. That came as a constraint as well. And as we worked through how to communicate better and better so we could serve our clients better, those scalability audit calls kept increasing. So the key here is having the dashboards that tell us how we're doing, having key roles in weekly rhythms. So the system runs whether you're pushing as the CEO or not. Once revenue is consistent without the big pushes, the new constraint appears. Maybe it's sales capacity or fulfillment or serving the clients in the right way. You repeat the loop there. Instead of going back for more promos, we hit numbers. Only when I grind to the business hits numbers because the system runs that is constraint thinking really paying off. So I want to talk about how big companies use the same thinking. So this isn't like a trick. The biggest companies in the world scale by hunting constraints, not adding more and more chaos. So a great example is Southwest Airlines, right? They realized that turnaround time at the gate was a major, major constraint in their business. So they started to redesign staffing and checklists and incentives and routes all around that one metric, that one constraint, or a really well known big retailer using inventory turns or checkout speed has the constraint and the number and building systems around it. See, you're running the same game but with fewer goose eggs, right? The discipline is the same. Find the constraint, build around it, then move to the next. But you're not chasing big promotions. So I want to talk to you about the 90 day constraint sprint. You don't get off the revenue treadmill with a vision board. I'm sorry to tell you, you get off of it with one 90 day constraint sprint. So the first step is I want you to write down one constraint in one sentence. Revenue only happens when I, dot, dot, dot, fill in the brain that blank honestly, right? Then choose the one critical number that proves that this constraint is improving. Like weekly booked calls from an evergreen funnel or monthly reoccurring revenue from non promo sources or percentage of revenue not tied to launches. You get the idea. All right, step three, for the next 90 days, any big project that doesn't move the critical number gets paused or simplified. And then there's a weekly review. Step four is you're asking is this still a constraint? Are we getting flow through to it? So, so at the end of the 90 days, lock in that system. So what do I mean by that? SOPs roles for the team owners for that metric dashboard so you know that the wind persists after you shift. This is what the big players do at the B B billion dollar mark. So it's what I started looking to when I was in the launch free fall to say there has to be a better way, there has to be a way. And let me go look at what the billion dollar, the multi billion dollar business owners do. And I started reverse engineering those systems and those processes. And it's not just operations or getting a integrator to take things off your plates. It's locking in things like these. One constraint, one number turning it around. It's, it's dialing in dashboards with key metrics with owners that aren't you as the founder, in order to get this to continue to persist after you shift, you've gotta lock in the system because you want the winds to continue after you shift your focus. So if you can feel you're on that revenue treadmill but you're not sure what your real constraint is, start with the free self scaling business diagnostic. We'll be live and score your CEO team and scaling profit systems and show you exactly where growth is getting throttled. After you complete it, you can book a scalability audit and we'll map out that first 90 days a constraint sprint together. So my challenge to you is this, don't just hear this episode and do the same things and expect a different result. Go to the diagnostic, understand your constraints and start to shift the game. In so little time, three months, six months, you can go from a completely dependent system to a completely self scaling business. All right, that's what I have for you this week. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Scene 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 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.