14 rules for scaling a business without burning out your life

Summary

I’ve built multiple seven-figure businesses without sacrificing my marriage, my kids, my training, or my sanity. that’s not by accident. that’s a set of rules I keep coming back to.

here are 14 of them:

1. know your one thing. stop chasing parallel goals.
2. reverse engineer the goal into the actual weekly actions.
3. track only the metrics you can influence.
4. hustle the process before you systemize it. you can’t delegate what you don’t understand.
5. design your calendar around focused work, not reactive work.
6. build a life bigger than your business so the business has something to serve.
7. recover hard. you can’t compound effort if you can’t recover.
8. delegate outcomes, not tasks.
9. say no to opportunities that aren’t on the one thing.
10. fall in love with the boring work that compounds.
11. systemize the high-frequency stuff before the high-stakes stuff.
12. quarterly resets beat annual plans.
13. assume nothing you build today survives without iteration.
14. protect your standards. that’s the actual moat.

the through-line is focus. scale without focus is just stress with a bigger spreadsheet.

Transcript

why scale is breaking most owners

I’ve been building digital businesses since 2011. I’ve scaled multiple businesses to beyond seven figures, and I’ve done all this while not really ever working weekends or nights or really even long hours because I want to keep my life. I got three kids, I’m married, and I want to give them as much as me as possible.

So today, I’m gonna go over what I’ve learned, the 14 rules of scale while keeping your life. All right, rule number one is going to be All right, rule number one is going to be know your one thing. Entrepreneurs have a bad tendency to chase shiny objects over and over again. You have to know what you’re chasing, whether this is a big someday goal, like a vision for your life, or just a current strategy that you need to stay focused on for the next quarter.

But you need to know what your thing is right now and in the future so you don’t get lost chasing multiple different directions. Because the man who chases two rabbits catches neither, and I firmly believe that you need to stay focused on one course of action until you get success in that area. All right, number two, reverse engineer everything.

And I mean everything. If you want to have a certain amount of customers, you need to start backwards from those amount of customers or the amount of money. So if I want to make $100,000, I need to go back to how many customers do I need? Okay, if I need to have this many customers, how many sales calls do I need?

If I need that many sales calls, how many leads do I need? If I am going to get leads, how much content do I need to produce? So on and so forth. You need to reverse engineer every single one of these because at every point I mentioned there, there’s gonna be some sort of conversion rate. I put in X amount of output, I get Y conversion rate.

So now you know volume. You know exactly what you need to do. Reverse engineer everything so business can become mathematics and you’re not sitting around guessing. This is the same for your life. What do you want your life to look like? Do you want to be debt-free? Do you want to live in a big house?

Do you want to have a nice car? Do you not care about any of those things? What do you want for your life? And reverse engineer what you need to do to get there because it is easy to just keep doing the work and end up somewhere 10 or 15 years from now and you’re like, oh crap, I was just working. I was just chasing.

I don’t really know what I was after. I’m not sure what I’ve actually built. Don’t be that person. All right, number three is going to be track what matters. I see this with entrepreneurs all the time. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, you only need to be tracking a handful of metrics, probably one to three metrics.

rules 1 to 4, focus and reverse engineering

As your team grows and other people can help you with the metrics and you automate more and you have these dashboards you can look at, you can start tracking more. But what I see is people want to track everything and a lot of it’s useless. If you know your web traffic, cool. What is that helping you with?

Are you specifically trying to get a certain conversion rate by adding more traffic? Do you have any current traffic strategies that you’re implementing to try and get more web traffic? Or are you just pulling this report and looking at it for no reason at all? You really need to only track what matters because metrics and tracking are very important when scaling a business.

But if you can’t influence that metric or you’re not actively taking steps to try and influence that metrics, you don’t need to know it right now. You really don’t. So only track what matters within your current strategy and also only track what you can actually influence. Number four is hustle then system.

So you need to nail it before you can scale it is another way to put that. I like to do everything manual, solo, whatever it takes the first time around. I want to really know how I need to hustle, what work needs to be done. I want to feel it. I want to know what it takes before I delegate it out.

So I’m going to build, I’m going to hustle. I’m going to do all the work. Everything’s manual. And then from there, I’m going to dive into building a system so we don’t have to worry about that again. So whether that’s someone else is doing it, whether or not there’s a process involved, an automation doesn’t matter.

We’re going to do it first. We’re going to nail it. Then we are going to try and scale it. So that’s what you need to do. Hustle and then turn it into a system. Don’t try to do them at the same time. Know exactly what the process is. If it’s effective, we don’t want to scale something that’s ineffective.

And once you know those things, you can start to put a system around it. Number five, your calendar is your strategy. Most people don’t realize this, but your calendar is the biggest game changer strategy you could implement in your business. Living minute by minute on your calendar, even though it can be exhausting at times, is a absolute game changer.

You have to do it. At some point, maybe you get to where this is not necessary. But early on, you have to dictate what needs to happen and you need to put it on your calendar. And one thing I encourage people to get really good at when they’re putting things on their calendar is time estimations for tasks.

rules 5 to 8, calendar and life-first design

So I don’t want to just put a block on my calendar that says administrative tasks, four hours, or buffer tasks, four hours. I don’t really like doing that. I want to know, okay, I have these three tasks. How much time do I think each one of these tasks are going to take? That’s a 15 minute task. That’s a 30 minute task.

That’s an hour long task. You’re going to start and suck at this if you just begin. You’re going to think something takes 15 minutes when it takes 45. You’re going to think something takes 45 minutes when it takes two minutes. And so as you develop this skill set of actually being able to know how much time something takes, now you can put it on your calendar and put the tasks on your calendar as opposed to these blocks that are kind of arbitrary and they leave too much open space for you not getting stuff done.

So your calendar is your strategy. Follow it. Have deep hours of focused work on your calendar so you can focus on your one thing. And then everything else can be scheduled out in 10, 15 minute, 30 minute increments so you know that you’re getting them done and you know exactly when that’s happening.

Now when you go to this level, you need to make sure you’re scheduling breaks or downtime because you are not a robot, okay? Calendar is a strategy but you are not a robot so you need to make sure that you’re factoring in those things as well. Number six, design for delegation. Anytime you’re doing anything, just start thinking about how can you not do this anymore?

From the second you start doing the task, even if you don’t have a team yet or you’re in the process, the infancy of scaling a team, you need to make sure you’re designing everything for delegation. And how you do that is pretty simple. You just need to immediately start transcribing the process, videoing the process, documenting the process so you will no longer have to do that at some point.

And it doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it’s your actual skill set that you are trying to get better at as your profession, if you have a certain way you do things in your company, document it. Document your sales process. Document every administrative process. And when you go to hire, it’s gonna be so much easier to delegate these things.

And your goal should be, I don’t have any mandatory jobs. When you don’t have any mandatory jobs, meaning you don’t have to sit like, oh, it’s Tuesday, I have to do this thing. You can really lean into creating bigger ideas, bigger business project strategies that you can work on. You can be more of the visionary.

But if you don’t make space for that and you don’t design for delegation, you’re just kind of always gonna have a job, which sucks, and you ultimately don’t want a job. You want a business. Number seven is along the same lines as number six, is when you repeat, you don’t wanna rethink. Okay, so this is more in the checklist vein.

rules 9 to 11, the boring work that compounds

Even if it is for yourself, I talk about checklists quite a bit. And the reason I do is because they’re important. There’s a reason that surgeons and fighter pilots use checklists. You know, a lot of medical professionals do. It’s because when you have a checklist, your room for error goes down and you don’t have to think about it each and every single time.

And I think as business owners, it’s the mental bandwidth that you’re saving that is the biggest, biggest secret, the biggest hack right there, is not having to rethink through the podcast, or rethink through the process. If you’re gonna record a podcast episode, have a checklist. Just a little like note in your phone or wherever, so you know exactly what the process is, so you’re not skipping steps and you’re like, oh crap, I forgot to turn on this camera or that light or whatever the case is.

You have a startup and shutdown checklist for your business at the beginning and end of the day. All of these little things, they don’t sound like they matter, but when you’re saving that mental bandwidth, you can use your brain power for more important things like growing the business. Number eight, align your team weekly.

It really doesn’t need to be more frequently than that. Make sure that you have a weekly meeting and in this meeting, you’re going over KPIs, you know what everyone’s doing and you’re aligning them to that one thing, that one goal that you have that I started with. Make sure that you’re aligning your team weekly.

And a great thing for quarterly, quarterly resets really in all honesty, like sometimes we’ll start off really good as business owners at the beginning of a quarter and we have a process, we have a system, but then things get busy, they get messy and things start to slide and the employees don’t hold to the standard.

Really, every new quarter is a great time to recheck that, reset that and be like, hey, we started to get a little lax on following this process towards the end of the quarter, this is our reset, let’s get back on it. And then after that, you align them each and every single week to the KPIs that need to be hit.

Number nine, do not scale chaos. A lot of times we want to do this, if we find a marketing strategy that works or whatever, we want to try and put as much time, effort and energy into it. But if you don’t have the back end of your customer success or your customer journey mapped out, you don’t want to scale that mess.

Or if it involves a lot of you having to do the day-to-day tasks, you don’t want to scale that. You don’t want to throw more customers into the front end of the funnel when you don’t have the back end really mapped out and it’s not scalable. Because what this does is you’ll, maybe you have this influx of customers, but you’re not going to have people who want to refer to your business because ultimately you don’t have a good business.

rules 12 to 14, resets and protecting standards

They’re not going through a solid process so they don’t want to tell their friends about it because they didn’t have the best experience. So scaling chaos sometimes sounds fun, like hey, give me as many customers as I could possibly have and maybe you achieve that. But if you don’t have the back end taken care of, you’re going to give a bad experience to your customers and then ultimately they’re not going to want to repeat business with you and they’re not going to tell their friends about it.

All right, number 10, this one took me forever to do. You have to start buying back your time if you want to scale your business but also live the life that you want to live. So the second you can afford it, start buying back your time and know that this is an investment. When you buy back your time, one of the mistakes people make is golfing, right?

Like it’s like you buy back this time with administrative assistant, additional employees, whatever, and then you’re like, you know what? I think I want to go golf for five hours today. I’m not saying you can’t golf ever but ultimately you need to buy back your time so you can focus on growing the business and have a little bit more flexibility in your schedule so you can spend time with your family.

So you can quit working at a reasonable hour at the end of the day. Buy back your time and to be smart about what that time is used for. You can do two things with your time.

One, work on growing the business but two, also start to set placeholders for when you want to spend time with your family because if you get into this growth stage where you’re working nights, you’re working weekends, you’re putting in long hours and then you buy back your time and so other people are doing things but you’re keeping those hours because that’s just what you’re accustomed to and it’s like now you’re just focusing on big projects for the business, nights and weekends.

You’re still working nights and weekends and you’re not spending time with your family. So buy back your time and set the safeguards in place so you will be spending time with them. Number 11, stay boring. Really, I can’t put it in any more simple terms. Sometimes we want to chase shiny objects, we want things to get more complex, we want to niche out or we want to expand or whatever.

That’s not always necessary. I want people to grow their businesses but a lot of times the best growth strategy is to double down on what you are already doing. Do more of what you’re doing. Try to help more of the same type of people. Trying to expand in all these different directions honestly can cause a lot of chaos and ultimately if you try to do too many things at once, you could end up failing or damaging your existing business.

Number 12 is say no often. You gotta learn to say no. You can say no in a lot of different ways. You can practice saying no. Ultimately, you need to be saying no as often as you possibly can because you need to focus on your time. Time is your limited resource. You need to focus on protecting your time.

the through-line, focus is the moat

So say no, you can say no to opportunities the very kind way. Hey, it’s a no right now but maybe I can do that in the future. Say no to things that are trying to take your time. Even if that’s employees asking for five, 10 minute meetings here, people wanting to hop on a quick call, grab a quick cup of coffee.

If that’s not aligned with your one thing, learn a tactful way to say no. Number 13 is focus on data, not drama. I know a lot of entrepreneurs, I talk to a ton, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and sometimes they get focused on the current news cycle. They hear about a recession or they feel like something’s happening in their business.

What does the data say? Okay, what does the data say? If you feel like something like that’s happening, show me where the leads are not coming in as strong. Show me where you’re not having the appointments you want. Show me that data. And then after you show me that data, let’s go back to how can we influence this metric?

What effort or time or energy or monetary resources can we put behind it to influence this metric? So if we do all of those things, we’re making database decisions and then we start to influence those metrics and they don’t move, maybe there is a significant problem that’s bigger than you or I and we should be concerned.

But most of the time, people are just getting in their heads, they’re getting anxious for no reason, they’re being dramatic. And then once they focus on how to actually influence the metrics that are scaring them and they put the time, effort and energy into them and the money behind it, the metrics start to move, the data starts to move in a healthier place that they like.

And number 14, the last one, make sure your life is always greater than your business. And it’s very easy as an entrepreneur to get your self-identity wrapped into being an entrepreneur. But is that really your greatest achievement is growing a business? For most people, it’s not. I know I’m a father, I’m a husband, those things are way more important to me than being a business owner.

And so make sure that your life is bigger than your business. Make sure you are taking the time off, you’re making the memories, you’re spending time with loved ones. All of those things you’ll never regret, but you will regret spending an extra hour or two working each and every single day. At some point, you will.

So make sure your life is bigger than your business. If you can adhere to most of these scaling principles, you will be on a path to not only scaling your business, but scaling your business while protecting your time so you can live the life that you want. It is simple, but it is not easy. And to achieve it, you will have to try harder so you can live bigger.