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Welcome back to the Business of Beers podcast. Your daily dose of strategies, tools and tips to help you build an eight figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers. Cool. Welcome everyone. Today I'm excited to talk to you about the four systems that I use to grow my business from pretty much zero in 2016 to over $50 million a year in revenue. And it's the same for systems that I'm going to use to continue to grow. They apply to any business. So no matter where you're at in your journey, these can help you. So if you got a pen and paper, great. If not, we can take in your memory. So what we're going to cover are each one of these blocks. I have this quadrant here and the first one I want to talk about and I think is the most important one is, is what I call the owner system. So as a business owner, right? The business will never outgrow you as an owner and how you view the world. And think about it like this way, we all have the same number of hours in a week, right? Like me, you, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, like Bill Gates, like all these guys who build these massive companies, we all have the same exact amount of time throughout the week and the day. So the question is like, well, how do some people get so much more things done and accomplished while others feel like they'll live on Groundhog Day, right? And it's just like over and over and over again. And so it really comes down to this first block, right, which is, which is this owner systems. And the first thing that I think about, and you know, I've experienced in kind of my own business and when I talk to business owners and we coach and help people, is this idea of what I'm going to call the hero versus architecture, alright? And the idea is that when you launch a business, when you get it off the ground, you have to be the hero, right? You gotta be the one who saves the day, who does everything, who puts out all the fires, who just like everything comes at you and you have no choice but to go and just like do whatever it takes to beat to be the hero. It feels good, right? It feels really good at the end of the day to know that no matter what came at you, you were able to solve it, you were able to fix it, and you are a superhero. And you grow your business through brute force, right? You grow it like you're like Superman picking up some car over some lady and throwing it off. And it's like brute force, and it works. Now, the problem, though, is over time, right? Like, as time goes on, you continue to kind of feel like the same way, and you're making progress, but you get this sense that, like, you want to grow, like, you're tired of being the hero, right? You're tired of saving the day. But the challenge is you've built your entire business around this mentality, and you've trained everyone around you that if they have a problem, you come to you and you will solve it, because you're the hero. And ultimately, the team that you've built kind of, like, relies on you, and everything goes up to you. And the only way that you can break this mentality and if you really want to take the business and, like, grow it up to here, is if you have to change to be the person with the mindset, and not just, like, your actions, but also the mindset around being the architect. And I think of the architect as the person who builds systems, right? They are the ones who goes out and they find other heroes that want to save the day, and they're able to put everybody together. Now, it sounds easy, right? It's like, it's easy for me to say that, and it's easy for you to think, oh, like, I could do that. But. But the challenge is you have to let things go. And this is where kind of this owner mindset and system really comes into place, where if you truly want to move from being the hero who saves the day and does everything themselves, to be the architect who assembles the team who builds the systems, that I'm going to talk about is you have to let people fail. You have to be able to hand off something to somebody and let them do a job. In my role, and it's 80%. I'm looking for people who can do it 80% as good as I would do it. And you have to be that that's okay, that's good enough, and that they can get better. They can get to 82 and 85 and maybe even 91 day. You never know. Maybe they could be better than you. But it's this idea that you have to agree that progress better than perfection and everything that you do, whether that is, like, how we go to hire people, how we build sales, how we do everything. Because if not, if you are perfectionist and you want everything to be to the exact T with, like, the same number of, like, whatever, like, ocd Level things like I've heard some crazy stories is you have to be okay with progress, you have to be okay with people failing. You have to be okay that, like, I am going to coach this guy on how to sell this job and I'm going to listen to him and he may not do what I tell him, but then afterwards we're going to, like, we're going to coach him and he's going to make the call back and he's going to try to sell it again, right? That is progress versus owners that get stuck at, I don't know, 1, 2, 3, 4, $5 million in revenue, something in that range. They are the ones who, as soon as that guy fumbles the phone call, they're taking the phone away and they're like, I'll just do it myself, right? And that's great for getting that one sale. But if your goal is to be the architect, if your goal is to say, I want to be the one who builds the team and builds the systems, it has to grow beyond you. And that's what this is all about today, is I'm going to show you kind of some of my systems. But this is like the thought process, all right? So think, think about yourself. And this is where I do it. Where am I the hero, right? I ask myself this all the time. Like, where am I the one who has to come in and save the day? And where can I let go of that? Because a lot of it comes down to me as being the owner and the owner system of, like, I need to sometimes, and I understand it's my baby and stuff, and I'm the one that built it, but sometimes you really have to let other people do it, otherwise you're just never going to grow, right? So that's the first one. The second part of this is you do this thing that I call an energy matrix. Now, an energy matrix is this idea that. We tend to want to gravitate toward. Things that fire us up, that give us energy, that pump us up, that, like, man, this is so exciting. And you're willing to wake up, you know, at 5 o' clock in the morning or 4:30 in the morning, you're ready just to like, fucking go because you were so fired up about it. And then there's things that you do throughout your day and you own a business and they just drain you, right? It's like every time your phone rings and it's like the accountant or it's like a certain employee on your team, or there's something that comes up and it drains all the energy out of you. And that happens, right? And so the point of this exercise, and I think about this a lot, is like, we want to figure out where are we spending time that is draining us, and where are we spending time that fires us up. So what I like to do is do this time audit where I'll think about my day. I'll write, I'll get one of these little note cards, these little like, to do list things, or like, you know, like a. Like a post it card, and I'll. And in the morning, I'm gonna write down all the things I plan to do that day. All right, so, like, I'm having a meal. Like today I had. I plan on this live. I had a call with a real estate broker because they're bringing me properties. I'm working to fill out my next mastermind here in Philly in a couple weeks. So, like, here are all the things that I plan to do today, right? And then below it, I'm going to write down all the things that distracted me, calls that I had to take, things that derailed me, emails, like, things I didn't expect to do. Right? And kind of the point of it is like, back to this idea of being intentional. Like, we all have the same hours in the day, right? How do some people get more done than others? Is the ones who are very intentional about how they spend their time. And so if we don't have a good tracking of how we're spending the time, how the heck are we supposed to be more intentional in figuring it out? And so we want to categorize them and we want to figure out, all right, the things I spend a lot of time on and I spend no time, and then the things that drain me and the things that fire us up. Perfect. There we go. Cool. My chicken scratch. All right, so the first thing we want to look for is what are the things that drain us and we spend a lot of time on. So that's this box up here. All right, so we want to try to delegate those. Those should be our number one priority to delegate. So if you had to think through, like, what are all the things that absolutely drain you? It sucks and it takes a lot of time. Like you were spending all this time on something and. And you just hate it. Maybe for some entrepreneurs, it's like the back office, right? It's like accounting and reconciling stuff, and like, you're spending all this time on the weekends, and it just. It's no fun. And you're spending like 10 or 20 hours a week on it, right? That is the type of thing that you want to identify and you really want to get that off your plate as soon as you can. So that would be the number one thing that you would go through time, you'd figure out, what can I delegate, what can I get off my plate, what can I go? And maybe someone's on my team should be handling this and I'm doing it, but I shouldn't. Or maybe what are things that you could hire somebody for, right. That the role doesn't exist, but it should. For 12, $1500 a month, you can get an excellent bookkeeper in Latin America or the Philippines or somewhere. But we want to be proactive to figure it out. The next thing I'm going to look for as I audit, my time and my energy is down here. So this is gonna be all the activities that I don't have to spend a lot of time on. So like low time. But this thing, my thing won't zoom out, but they fire us up, right? So these are the things that we wanna figure out. How do we spend more time on these things? So for me, it's like deal making, right? I own 36 mighty shops. 34 of them have been, or no, 32 of them have been acquisitions where I've established relationships with sellers. And so some of these, because I know that franchisees want to sell to other franchisees and that I knew that, hey, if I could go out and like everyone would know me and everyone like me and I could help add value to other people, then when they were ready to sell, guess who they're gonna call? It's me, right? So intentionally, I spent very little time but very high impact working on creating those relationships. So for me it was like, all right, here are all the. I literally made a list. Here are all the shops that I wanna buy. Here are the owners. And I would just stay in contact with them, just text them, hey, how's this month going? What are you working on? You have any challenges? I'd send them, like, what's working for us? I'd wanna help them out, right? Cause I want them to like me and I wanna see them. See, like most of these guys were like, I'm friendly with. We'd also try to get lunch. I'd try to get dinners or beers every once in a while, maybe once a quarter. And I'd keep planting the seeds to find out when they're ready to sell. Guess who wants. And I mean, one deal you know, for us, could be worth $500,000 a year, like profit, right? So you think about, like, the time that I could invest in having a lunch, you know, five lunches with a guy over two years, that could potentially make me $500,000 per year by buying his business one day, right? That's the type of leverage that I'm looking for, right? The things that create absolute, massive, massive leverage, which are, for me, was acquiring these businesses that I knew that I could roll into my system and we could run our playbook and immediately turn this thing in from maybe 500 to a million plus, but that those relationships I had to create didn't take me 50, 60, 100 hours of work. They took very specific strategic meetings throughout the course of time. So the goal in this is, how do we take time from this bucket of stuff that we hate to do and kick that off to somebody? And then we take all of that newfound time and we focus it on the things that we want to max out, the things that fire us up, the things that create us a lot of leverage. So for me today, it's, you know, creating content, right? Like, I do this because this gives me massive leverage. And people are literally emailing me properties who watch my. My content like that. I'm, like, serious, seriously interested. Like, they're good deals. We have people who want to work for me, and they're talking about relocating from across the country to be on our team. There's investment opportunities, right? So, like, for me, creating content right now is like, my highest leverage thing that I could do, that then my team, then I can give these opportunities to my team, and then we can run with it. And so, you know, that's why I spend time doing this, right? For me, it creates a lot of leverage. So you got to figure out what it is for you that you want to max out.