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Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Why Your Work Addiction Is Capping Your Business (And How To Lead Like a Scaled CEO) 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. If your business only works when you are in the middle of everything, you don't own a successful company. You own a stressful job with overhead. And I say that as someone who lived there way too long. Most of the overworked founders that I advise are not addicted to work by accident. The world has been rewarding their work addiction for years. That's exactly why they can't let go. If we haven't met, My name is Dr. Shannon Ervin. I have 20 years as a business owner, a bestselling author of the 67 Day Year book, and have helped hundreds of business owners scale to 5 and 10 million while working 10 hours a week. This is what I call the science of scaling. On a recent CEO advisory leadership call, one of my clients had finally used the Scaled CEO operating system and systemized her husband's H Vac company. The back office ran without her. It was exactly what she said she wanted. And at that moment, she felt completely lost. Her identity hadn't quite shifted to the next gear of scaling. And that's what we're going to talk about today. By the end of this video, you will see exactly why letting go feels so uncomfortable and wrong in your nervous system. And. And you'll have a simple way to start leading from above the business without your business falling apart. We're going to walk through four major shifts from operator to owner, from work addicted to a mentor identity, from controlling to systems that catch red flags before it burns you, and then from calendar chaos to a life that your business actually supports. Can I get an amen on that? Right. Okay. You built your business from, like the middle of it, all, right? And now that bootstrapping, that hustling is the biggest thing holding you back. The truth is the grit, the grind, the hustle, the push. Your nervous system being on 24 7, responding to everything, is what we call the founder operating system. And. And the reality is we're taught that in the educational system, we're taught how to do that. And what we aren't taught is how to operate at the scaling level. And I tell this to my owners all the time. Our whole society is built to get you to a certain level, but it's never taught to get you to where you want to scale your business so it does create freedom so that you don't have to be at the center of it all. We call that the scaled operating system. We're not going to deep dive on that. There's other videos deep diving on those, but today we're really going to deep dive into how do we shift that identity to that of an eight figure business owner, not as growing but exhausted business operator. Most of us are super comfortable in the trenches like that. Like, even though we'd hate to say it because it's what built what we did right, our brain is wired of me in the middle and it's safe and it's profitable. Here's the reality. We like knowing things are done right and because that has been a pattern, it's now stored in your subconscious and you just between you and I, us visionaries, we see all the things that are wrong. And because our team isn't wired to own things, they look to you to be the solution. Okay, back to the advisory leadership call. Everyone on that call is in the top 2% of business owners. We're talking to 5, 10 million. But their team and their revenue and their profit are so wired around them producing when, when they come into the Scaled CEO program, we start working on triaging their business. Then we help them build the systems to install that Scaled CEO operating system and remove them from the center of it all. Well, that's what we were doing in our call, our leadership call with one of our clients, I'll call her Mel. She was the operations generator for an H VAC business. They'd implemented all of our CEO dashboards. We plugged the leaks, the team started owning things and suddenly she is not needed in the same way. And felt a little lost without that normal place. And felt a little lost without that normal place. Her identity was still pinned back to that of the beginner business owner, the one that strove and pushed versus the next level, which is that mentoring identity with her team. So the thing that she said to me was like when we were talking about what is your identity right now? She said a little lost. We're going to talk about that floating feeling. That is a floating where is my place feeling. It's not a sign that something's wrong. It's actually a sign that what got you to where you are will not get you to 10 million. We've got to shift that identity. Here's the belief flip right now, being in every decision, it's not proof that you're a good Leader. It's proof that your systems are not allowed to lead yet. Pretty crazy, right? So let me be blunt. The overwork is a respectable addiction that I had too. The more you feed it, the more everyone claps, the more accolades. And let's be real, it got your business to half a million or a million. So in your brain, in your subconscious mind, it's saying, that's how we get to the next place. But the reality of that type of operating system is while you're getting the claps on the outside, your life and leadership are shrinking. Work used to validate your existence, prove you are important. Oh, God, I get that on so many levels. I always say, my who am I? Do? We're mixed up. You're getting that dopamine hit from the attention. What does it really create for you? It creates your team that's wired to rely on you, income that's wired around you producing, and your nervous system. It thinks if I stop, everything breaks. Interesting place to be. Because on the outside, it's looking like it's going great, but on the inside, it feels a little bit like a prison. So I was talking in the advisory call, it's like this. I want you to imagine everything that you built is on one side of the Grand Canyon, right? It's on one side of the Grand Canyon. But the reality is on the other side is where things really take off, off the gap in the middle. That's identity, not tactics. That's the crazy thing. So when you finally, finally systemize and step out, it will feel uncomfortable at first. That doesn't mean you went backwards. It really means that that work addiction, that. That being in the middle of it all is losing its grip. And your next identity hasn't fully formed yet. We've got to build the. The bridge to the other side where scaling can happen. So I want to talk about the game at seven and eight figures. It's no longer about how much you do. It's about who you are being while you decide and who you are grow around you, the people around you. So on the advisory call, I asked each of the CEOs to listen their current adjectives for their current leadership style. Now, almost every business owner that's on the call is visionary to a degree. And so I asked them to really think about what is their leadership style with their team and with their business right now. Some of them came back as committed, dedicated. A lot of doing verbs, right? A lot of verbs that were surrounding the doing, the executing, the, um. And. And like I said, with Mel like she came back as lost because we have advanced her systems to the point to where they didn't need her anymore. So almost every CEO that we're just getting started, their identity for their leadership revolved around the productivity and doing of the day to day. So then I asked them to define who they are in the next season. What kind of leader do you need to be for the next season? Knowing that the next season is truly a mentorship season. It's having people and systems around you that run the day to day and revenue generation. So passing on the brilliance in your brain and getting it into a system that other people can follow, lead the day to day, lead the revenue generation. What type of leader? The question was, do you need to be for that next season? And they would say, I want to be a leader that develops people. That is inspiring. So. So they started coming up with different adjectives than where they were before. This side of the canyon, that side of the canyon. Right. Big difference. And then the most important piece, I shifted them with something called a brain prime. Now, if you've been in my world a lot, you've heard me here, I'll talk a lot about this. But brain priming becomes the bridge tool to get that $10 million plus. So I told them, if you say I want to be X, Y, Z, it puts your brain in a tug of war. Because it's your brain subconscious is hardwired to only create more of what you already have. And so when you say I want this thing that's beyond ourselves right now, I talked about that last week and how we do this in our businesses with setting 10 year goals and that kind of thing. If you didn't hear that video, make sure you go back and listen to that. If you. Because the neuroscience abound. True achievement is pretty powerful. But if you say I want to become, your subconscious hears, I do not have it yet. And it keeps you in this massive tug of war. So I asked them to shift their narrative, everything that they put on this side of the canyon to an I am a decisive. So it looked like something like this, like I'm a visionary, decisive, organized mentor. So the brain starts looking for chances to act there that way. This is the bridge building process of the brain prime to take you from this side to the other side. When you do this, you'll literally notice moments in your day where you can choose between decisive and not, visionary and not, organized and not. So your brain starts seeing the actions more. So here's what I'd love for you to Do I want you to write your own sentence? Your I am. You're where you're going to be when your business is at X. Maybe it's trusting, calm, structured, leader. Put a sticky note on your computer screen and say it out loud as many times as you look at it. At least once a day, you're going to say it out loud. The scripture talks about God spoke things into existence. I know this is a business conversation, not a spiritual one, but business is spiritual, y'. All. And if God created through the verbal word, it didn't say God thought it into existence, he said that he spoke it. There is power and magnetic resonance. It's not woo, it's science. As you how the brain is trained to get to the other side of the canyon. So to uplevel to that eight figure, even nine figure, we have to show our brain through that current language of I am right. What's going to happen is you're going to notice these, these moments where the old way of just doing and jumping in and being in the middle as you're repeating this leadership, ownership you're going to transfer over to, you'll notice those moments with your team where you'll decide the new identity and walk from that place versus the old. So leading from above your business does not mean checking out. It means your decisions are driven by dashboards, not dopamine. So what do I mean by that? We call this the scaled CEO dashboard. It's something we do with every one of our scaled CEO advisory clients. It's really looking at revenue, delivery, profit, all the systems within the business truly creating key metrics, key owners. And it's measured with a red, yellow or green. Red meaning we didn't hit the target, yellow meaning we're close, but it's fragile. And green meaning we hit the target. We nailed it. This starts to create a scenario for you as the CEO where at a moment you can look at how's my entire business operating. And because you see what's red, your energy can focus in, in 90 day cycles around what is red, turning that red to green, Big giant difference. So it's not unplugging. It's not. Because most of us, I talk about this on my live trainings. You know, an exit isn't just, you know, sitting on a beach. Maybe you're going to retire, maybe you have a legacy that you want to leave to your next generation. May you want to sell the business eventually. Maybe like me, you want to be able to do the things in your business that only you want to do like they light you up and your exit is not doing any more of the other things. So when we run our business from above, it's not just kicking back, it's having the freedom to be able to see your business from such a holistic point of view that is never a doubt who you should hire, who you should fire, who should what you should be focusing on to make the business scale. It's true freedom. It's no longer working from the push and the hustle. The reality is there's owners for each number, not you as the backup brain catch all. So when you do this, when you want to grab something back, I want you to ask why do I want to take this over? What am I afraid of really here? Because that's usually something's at stake here, but when we want to take it back and it could be from if it fails, I let my family down. That's why we're doing tug of war with our team. So it's why do I want to take over, what am I afraid of? And what system would fix that fear next time? Now you're starting to replicate yourself instead of just taking back over. Okay, I've got a personal story about this. So I remember when we first started this. I started developing this. I needed to change from the founder operating system to what we now call the startup Scaled CEO operating system. And I was running from the dashboard and what I discovered broke my heart, to be honest with you. Like my service numbers, it wasn't my revenue numbers that went red, but my cert, like my deli. What I promised my clients we would deliver was in the red. And for somebody with like high integrity, that delivering what we promise is so important to me because I feel like that's where I'm put on the earth. To serve right and to help people get their genius out to the most excellent level it can be. So when I saw that it had turned red, it just hit me like a pit in my stomach. My fear when my service number went red was like, I'm not being in integrity. I'm not delivering what was promised. But finally I saw it and it was flying under the radar for probably an entire year. This is the power of the Scaled CEO dashboard. And instead of taking it back from the person who owned it, I employed something I called and created called the Decision Matrix. It's something called one three one thinking. And I want to teach this to you right now because it's the best way I have found to truly let go of the baton that you're tug of warring with with your team. So when something comes up red, we have a simple conversation. The conversation goes like this one problem. Tell me what the problem is. Why is this number red and the team member is the one that says here's the problem, it's red because we're not doing, we're not able to get to the promise that we have in the right amount of time. We get to the promise, but it takes too long. Great. Okay, problem identified three. I need you to give me three solutions that you would come up with, own and implement fast to change that number from red to green. And so I give them time to think through the three. What are their three like they could do this or this or this and they bring those three to me and then the final one is this. Okay, which one of those three do you feel will be the most effective? Now when they bring that final decision to me in the decision matrix, I say I think about it through my lens. Now one of the systems we help build out is how to get your thinking brain out to the world of your team so that they don't have to come to you for all the decisions. We do that through a very specific system that we develop for people specific to their owner and their founders. But decision matrix really helps transfer that ownership over to the team member. So if that final decision is anywhere in the ballpark, I finish this one three one with a go for it report back. Let's see that number shift in the next week. Okay, and so what does that do if first of all it makes them identify problems better. So if they don't have the right problem, that's a coachable mentor moment. Right? That's a moment that you can pull off the identity of the doer, put on the identity of the eight figure mentor leader and say, okay, so what I see is I see your side, but this problem seems like a bigger problem. So they can start to see how, how you think. We've got to transfer your thinking to the team when they come up with the three solutions. If they're just nowhere near potential right Solutions, this is a mentoring moment. You listen to them and you validate their process and at the same time you tell them based on the one problem, the outcome solution I think is this, and here's why. Now if you miss the why step, then they're always going to come back to you. My hope and what my experience has been is 99% of the time when I use the 1, 31 decision matrix, the they know better they know they're incredible people you have. You just don't realize because you haven't transferred ownership fully to them yet. So I'd say 99.5% of the time they do get the problem. Their three solutions are solid. And the one that they choose is in the ballpark. They go, they get their win, they get confidence in that decision. And then the neck, they just iterate and keep improving every time they need to make a decision. And off the off chance, the 0.005% of the chance that you have somebody that just isn't thinking, guess what? It highlights that you might have the wrong person in the wrong role. So that's the decision matrix and how you can really not take back control, keeping in that old identity and really transition once you've built that bridge over to the other side of the canyon. I don't want you traveling back because your business will follow. And then we work through that dashboard because the dashboard is green, yellow, and red. Guess what? So is how you're going to feedback to the team. Green is always go. It's always in public. We're always atta girl. Attaboying the greens in person, on the team meetings. Great job. Look, your numbers, green. Tell us what you did. Give them that moment in the sunshine. Every green number that we do on a monthly basis, that's what we're doing. We're celebrating them in the call. Think about soccer. There's green cards, yellow cards, red cards, right? So the yellow cards. Remember what I said about yellow? It's close, but it's fragile. So a lot of people think yellow. It's close to green. No, no, no. It's close and fragile, meaning it can turn red at any moment. So this is where we employ privately with the owner of that metric. All right, we're yellow this week. What's the problem? What are your three solutions? What is the decision you're going to make? And how are we going to know when we won? And so now you're coaching them to be owners. This is the true shift from our identity as the doer to our identity as a true CEO, true owner that can lead from above. Red, same thing, but we're documenting it a little bit deeper because if this is a pattern that this employee is always read in their metric. Now you have a plan in process, and I'm not going to go deep. Maybe we'll do a video if that is something of interest to you. How we do our red, yellow, and green in terms of our employee promotions, our employee Raises and our employee improvement systems. And also we fire people that need to get released to a better environment for themselves. The truth is the fear of incompetence, the loss of control and the team not caring too much is what we're really scared of. Right? Every time you feel the urge to jump back in, it's just not a signal to work harder. It's a signal to install a system so you never have to grab that thing again. If this is hitting a nerve because your business still depends on you deeply, find the link around this video and take the self scaling business diagnostic. In about 10 minutes you'll see exactly where the bottleneck is and what to fix first. If you are still the hero of every story in your business, your team never gets a chance to become the heroes. One of the things I did on the scaled CEO advisory leadership call is I asked them to identify who is the one team member that's driving you crazy that you want to take over from them all the time because they're just not doing it. They're just not accountable. Things keep dropping, mistakes keep getting made. Pick that one person, I'm going to challenge you to do the same. And then remember our identity needed to shift from the doer energy to the owner energy. And that is the bridge of brain priming that we walked across building up that next level leadership. So we talked about the sticky note, right? And practicing that out loud. We're going to say that again. Speak it out loud. That is how things actually get built in the spiritual world. Speak it out loud. But here's the thing. When you've picked this person that is, they're just driving you crazy. Like things are always falling through the cracks for them. I want you for a week or two to put your leadership mentor from the other side of the bridge that mentor visionary energy on that person. For a week or two we're going to look through the dashboard, see do the 131 with them. Chances are you might be surprised in their responses and how they would go about it is fantastic. They've just been afraid so they, they just keep letting it drop. Right? So we're going to learn that about them. If they don't understand what the problem is, this is your chance to mentor and coach them. They're now getting a yellow card and you're coaching them to come back as green. Right. You might find out that they have great solutions but maybe they don't choose the right one. That's a mentor moment. That shows you they have capacity, they have fear around Choosing the right one and being wrong and letting you down. So I want you to just put your mentor energy on that person for a couple weeks and find out, are they the person that just didn't have the tools to, to own, to row the boat in the same direction as you, or are they the person that is quietly putting down anchors as you're trying to scale? Big important difference. And without your mentorship identity on that person, nothing will change. So that's my challenge to you as I challenged my scaled CEO clients. The reality is they're either going to be an anchor thrower, not capable or willing to scale and they can exit cleanly, or they're unaware. A player who just needed someone to see them, to give them winnable green targets. Right. I had this too. I had legacy staff. I don't know if you're like me, where I always see the best in people before they even see it in themselves. Right. These were legacy staff. They'd been with me for a long time and they were fantastic until the business grew to 2 million. But they started throwing down anchors, starting saying things like, well, that's not the way we used to do it. That's not what I'm comfortable doing. That's why I didn't do it. It's not how it's been done before. Lots of signals that they were great to a point, but they're not wired to scale. They're wired to stay. And that's okay. Like we can bless them. In fact, that person that I realized through the red, green and yellow system that I'm like, they're not where and who I thought they would be, and they're not going to go past 2 million. So what did I do? I actually have a friend that had a half million dollar business. I told her, I said, listen, this is a person who can get you to 2 million easily, but they're not going to get you beyond that because that's not their sweet spot. But if you want to grow to 2 million, she's your person and she hired her. And that was such a big win win for us both. Win for us because all the reds then could turn to green on our business, but also put her in a position where she could thrive. So it's a win win. So your job is no longer to fix everything yourself. Your job now is to grow people who can own the reds and turn them to green without you. All right, I'd like to transition over to something that's so important. The reality is if your calendar does not show your freedom. Your business is not actually building the life you say you want. And that was a hard pill for me to swallow. Listen, time audits suck. They're annoying as heck, but they reveal, especially after you've freed some time up after doing them, that they kind of reveal the patterns, right? Why? Maybe you don't have as much time as you want. One key question to ask is, am I scheduling what matters most for my life? If I want to be a calm, peaceful leader, but I don't have scheduled walks, I don't have scheduled massages, I don't have margin in my calendar, then am I really running a successful business? I was saying to a client that wanted grandkid time or family time, but they only got leftovers at the end of the week, I'm like, that has to shift. Your calendar needs to literally reflect the massages, the walks, the grandkids, right? So the nervous system could downshift. It's only after doing that did her business cross those big thresholds. So pick one personal priority that you're building the business for that you've been telling yourself that the business is for and put it on the calendar this week. Let systems and people you're building hold this space for you. So important because the idea that you'll do it then when your business has gotten to X, that you'll get more time then. If you haven't built this Scaled CEO systems, I hate to tell you it's not going to happen. So build in the reason you're doing business for and build your business around it. And I just want you to imagine 12 months from now looking just at a dashboard, simple yellow, red and green from your home office, mentoring a leadership team that owns the day to day and revenue generation and the numbers while you work the hours you choose. That's not a fantasy, that's a different operating system. Today we talked a little bit about shifting from the operator to the owner. Shifting from the work addicted, the doer to the to the I am leader, right? We talked about shifting from control to systems that make things that aren't working safe and from firefighter to mentor with a calendar that matches why you got into business to begin with. So if you've been thinking the whole time, this is exactly the gap that I'm in right now, then you are who we build the Scaled CEO operating system for. If you're still watching, it's probably because you recognize yourself in this. You've built something incredible and real. You're at that top couple percent of business owners, but your calendar, your team and your nervous system are all still wired around you. Being in the center of it all, here's what I would like to invite you to do next. Don't try to willpower your way into a new identity alone. Instead, click the link with this video and take the free self scaling Business Diagnostic and it will score your CEO system, your team system and your profit scaling system and show you exactly where you're capping growth and how to start leading it all from above. After you complete it, you'll have the option to book a scalability audit with my team and that's a one on one working session where we'll map the next 90 days, what to delegate, what systems to install, and how to buy back 10 to 20 hours a week without stalling revenue. So if you're done being the backup brain to the entire business and you want your business to run more without you this year, click the link, take the diagnostic and we'll walk you through the rest. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. 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 to go deeper or see this on video, please follow my YouTube channel at doctorshanon Ervin on YouTube. I cannot wait wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.