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Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. No fluff, just the good stuff. Delivering practical business lessons help you grow your business. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an innovative software company I started back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to our $100 MBA program, giving you the practical fundamentals to improve as an entrepreneur. 100% guaranteed. If you want to win a free ride to the $100 MBA, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today if you won. It's that simple. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode you will learn Are you optimizing for the wrong things in your business? This is a lesson I wish I learned way earlier in my entrepreneurial career. Whether we intend to do it or not, we are always optimizing for something in our business. Another way to look at this is what are we focusing on? What are we trying to do in our business? Some businesses optimize for growth at all costs, some for profit, making sure they're as profitable as possible. Some people optimize for happiness or fulfillment, making sure that their business and the work they do in their business is something they look forward to. Some people optimize for free time. How much free time can I get while having a sustainable business? You're always optimizing for something in your business, but you gotta be intentional about it because sometimes you'll find yourself optimizing for the wrong things. It doesn't match what you actually want out of your business. And another chestnut is that you can only optimize for one thing at a time. We're going to get into all of the nitty gritty details. How to choose what to optimize for, how to actually focus on optimizing for that thing, how to stay on track, and a whole lot more. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. It's really healthy to look at your business like a book. The lifespan of your business is like a book with chapters. And just like a great book, each chapter will go deep in A topic in an idea, or even if it's a fictional story, each chapter will focus on a certain arc in the character story. The problem with a lot of entrepreneurs is that they don't do this. They don't see their business as a story of chapters. They want to do everything at one time. They want to grow profits, they want to grow their business, they want to grow their employees, they want to have more free time, they want to do it all. But a lot of these focuses or a lot of these things that they're optimizing for are counterintuitive. A good example is if you're trying to optimize optimized for growth, meaning you're trying to grow at all costs. Something like a fast growing startup like Facebook in the early days. In order for you to grow at all costs, you can't worry about profit. You really can't worry about being as profitable as possible because you want to spend all the money that you're making or that you have to grow. That's what optimizing means. So you can't have your cake and eat it too. But if you see your business like a book with chapters, you can have the chapter of growth and then the chapter of profit where you shift gears and have a moment in time, have a period where you focus on one optimization. Now, in my opinion, one year is a good period of time to focus. At least you can focus on optimizing for growth for two years. But the minimum, in my opinion, in order for you to get traction and actually see results is one year. And this applies to any optimization, whether you're optimizing for growth or profit or free time or whatever it might. So how do you know what you're optimizing for? And by the way, you don't have to change what you optimize for all the time. It all depends on what you want. And that's how we find out what to optimize for. Ask yourself, what are you doing this all for? Some people start a business because they want to build something great. That's what drives them. They want to build something incredible. Now, we all want to build something great. But what is the number one driver for you starting this business in the first place? Why are you an entrepreneur? For some people, they just want to build the next big thing. They want that significance. They want to be able to point at it and say, hey, I made this amazing thing. That's what drives them. Some people start businesses or become entrepreneurs because they want freedom. They want to do their own Thing, be their own boss and take time off as much as possible, be with their family. Some people do it so that they can become really wealthy. And in this case, you got optimized for profit, because profit's what you keep. Now, some might argue that you can become really wealthy by optimizing for growth and building a successful company that has, you know, small margins, but one day you'll sell it for a very profitable amount. Now, that is one strategy. But every strategy has risks. And the risk of doing that is you might not be able to make it to the point where you could sell the company. You may not be able to survive a tough economic crisis because your margins are so thin, you may not last the competition, whatever it might be. So the point here I'm making is you need to really figure out why are you doing what you're doing. You got to really reflect. And this is stepping away from the computer, step away from devices. I like to go out in nature, go for a walk, maybe journal, sit on a park, Ben. And spend some good time alone in my thoughts. I'm not talking about 10 or 20 minutes. I'm talking about an hour or two, three hours. Go grab a coffee and come back and do another hour. The point here is that you want to allow yourself to really reflect. And this is kind of the planning or the sharpening of the saw before you start cutting the tree. You want to make sure you know what you're doing and you're spending your time on the right things, because you might find yourself doing things that are not in your best interest. You might be writing down in your journal as you're reflecting, hey, I want to be able to have more free time. I want to build a business that's, you know, financially viable. That gives me a certain level of comfort in my life. But I only want to work 15 hours a week. The rest, I want to do hobbies and exercise and be with my family. If you write that down and then you ask yourself, am I doing things that are optimizing for that in my business right now? A lot of us will say, no, I'm not doing that. I'm doing other things because I have conflicting ambitions. And this is true. Many of us want many things. We want to have a business that's highly profitable, that's, you know, a growth monster, that I only spend 10 hours a day. The thing is that it's really hard to achieve that, and it's much easier to achieve a goal that's just optimized for one thing. You only want to get easy for yourself. You want to make sure you can achieve this goal. So the point of the brainstorm, of the reflection, of the sitting on the park bench is for you to really make sure you know what you want. What is the top priority? You may want to know, want a lot of things, but rank them, what's number one? And then ask yourself, are you optimizing your business for that? Are you doing the things in your business to make sure you have free time? Or are you complicating the business? Are you doing things that are requiring your time? Are you putting things in your calendar for the sake of growth or for the sake of hiring more team members? Because some people feel significant when they have a lot of team members and are you shooting yourself in the foot?