work less, earn more...then what?

Summary

“work less, earn more” might be the dumbest goal on the internet. not because it’s impossible, but because the people who actually pull it off get there and realize it’s not what they wanted.

I coached a business owner for years. we built his leadership, his team, his systems. he got to the place where he didn’t have to work much. about a year later he called me. “Jerred, what do I do with my time? I can only golf so much.”

the goal was never less work. the goal is to work on the things that excite you. choose your projects. that requires leverage in three areas, in this order:

1. labor leverage. the hardest one and the longest one. building a team autonomous enough to run without you. requires real leadership, not delegation theater.

2. capital leverage. comes after labor. now you have time and surplus, deploy it into income-producing assets so money’s working when you’re not.

3. content leverage. the long game. media that compounds visibility for everything else you build. takes years to build, then pays forever.

build labor first. capital second. content third. the order matters. people who chase content leverage with no labor leverage end up famous and broke.

Transcript

why “work less, earn more” is a dumb goal

I honestly feel like one of the dumbest goals on the internet right now is to work less and earn more. I think the idea is appealing. It’s appealing to the people who don’t want to put in the work because you have to put in so much work to actually work less and earn more. So the people who it’s appealing to are the people who are the ones who absolutely can’t get it done.

But that’s not even the goal. The goal is not to work less. The goal is to work on the things that you want to work on. Choose your projects. Work on ideas that excite you. So if that’s your goal, let me tell you how to get it done. So I worked with a business owner for a long time and I’m talking about several years.

We worked on his leadership. We worked on scaling and growing his company and he did a really great job at implementing and he eventually got to a point in his business where he didn’t have to work all that much and we weren’t really working together all that much anymore because he had gotten to this place.

And he called me about a year later, like, Jerred, what do I do with my time? He’s like, I can only golf so much, like, what do I do? And the first thing I said was, well, as a business owner, your job is not to fill your time with golf. And so I’m going to be going over today what to focus your time on.

what to focus on instead, leverage

And it’s going to be for two people. So if you are looking to build yourself into the business owner who doesn’t need to do all that much, you’re going to be focusing on the three things I’m going to go over in this video. And then also if you find yourself in that position, you actually achieve being able to not have to do all that much in your business.

What activities should you be focused on? That’s what I’m going to be going over today. All right, so let’s dive into it. The main thing that you should be focused on as an entrepreneur at all times is leverage. Okay? Leverage is like a lever. If you can have more leverage, if you have a lever to pull, you can move more weight, right?

You can have more things happen for you with less work, less effort because other people are doing the things for you. And I’m sure you’ve heard about the different forms of leverage, but people don’t talk about kind of the order of operations it takes to truly build leverage. So the first one that you’re going to want to work on is the hardest one and it takes the longest and that is labor.

labor leverage, the hardest and most important

So labor leverage is just people doing things for you. And it sounds really simple. It’s like, yeah, if you don’t want to do that task anymore, just have someone else do it. Hire it out, right? But it’s not actually that easy and it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time because you actually have to be a leader.

You have to focus on developing your leadership muscle. You have to get your team to an actual autonomous place where they can make progress without you. If you think anything I just said is easy, you’re dead wrong. Labor leverage is the hardest lever to pull as an entrepreneur. First you start, things are erratic.

All you’re trying to do is make some extra money. You want to support your lifestyle, your family. You want to be able to grow the business and then you’re going to get capped, right? You can only do so much. So you hire somebody and you think that, okay, I’ve hired somebody, boom, got a form of leverage.

What’s next? But in all reality, if you’re not focusing on developing those people, you’re not being a, an effective leader. Labor leverage doesn’t last. And so I own multiple different companies and that’s not a flex. I just, it’s the truth. I own multiple different companies, but I’m not the CEO really of any of the companies and I also don’t own a hundred percent of any of the companies.

And the reason is because I truly understand leverage. If I was the operator, CEO and operator of all of the different businesses that I own, I would be super time poor. I wouldn’t have this question or luxury of, oh, what should I do with my time? I would be too busy doing all these different things.

And so in order for me to pull the labor leverage, I’ve had to give, give up equity in multiple different companies, decide that I’m going to be a partner either in a minority stake, a majority stake or whatever the case is. I’ve done that multiple times throughout different businesses and it’s worked out really well, but it is not easy.

capital leverage, how to use money as a tool

Just like a building a marriage, building a marriage is awesome. Having a great marriage, but it takes a lot of paying attention, right? You have to be a good human. You have to actually focus on having a good relationship, not just the getting married part, right? And so the same with hiring employees, you don’t always have to give up equity for labor leverage to be a thing.

But I also have companies or people in different companies who have really high salaries and they have really high salaries because they’re pulling some labor leverage that I’m incapable of or I no longer want to do. And so you see the trade off there is ultimately money. Like I’m giving up equity, so I don’t get as much, I don’t get to pull as much profit for a business or I’m paying a huge salary to somebody or just a big salary to somebody.

And when I do that, I take home less money, but it gives me the ability to focus on other types of leverage. So leverage, labor leverage is the hardest one. I didn’t want to gloss over it and just be like, yeah, hire more people than move on. But ultimately you should be focused on labor leverage, always trying to be a good leader, making progress in that area.

Now the second one that you are going to want to focus on is going to be capital. So people ask me all the time because they know I invest in single family homes and real estate. They’re like, what do I do? And a lot of times people were asking me at the wrong time. So you need to first get through this first stage of just being a solo entrepreneur, building up and earning marketing sales, all of those kinds of things, building, building up your business to some degree.

Then you focus on labor leverage. Okay, now I get people in here. I’m going to have other, uh, you know, people doing things for me. I’m either going to give up equity or I’m going to have these high salaries. So ultimately I can pull out, uh, more and more. And then once you get to that point, then you move to capital leverage, not before those.

content leverage, planting seeds for the future

So this is sequential. This is all a sequential, uh, you know, method here after you kind of have that. Now you take your additional capital revenue that you are pulling in personally, not through the business and you can start to invest in others, other things like single family homes or you can buy another business.

I mean, there are so many different things that you can do with your money, but ultimately me personally, I’m looking for ways I can put my money into investments that are going to continue to pay me in what this does when you focus on capital leverage is it gives you a little bit more, uh, you know, freedom and flexibility.

So just a quick example, if I was making $10,000 a month, um, say I was taking home $10,000 a month and you know what? I want to be able to get investments that are passive that bring me $5,000 a month. So I ultimately can pull less from the company and build up more labor leverage. Like that’s a decision.

It’s a decision that ultimately has me earning the same, but gives me more, more leverage because I can pour more here. I can take bigger swings and more risk because I have income sources from other places. So after you’ve built up labor, labor leverage, you start to build up capital leverage and then you’re trying to build both of these at the same time.

This is where investing takes place. Like I said, a lot of people ask me, they’re six months into entrepreneurship. They’re earning an extra $500 a month. They don’t know what to do with it. And they’re like, Hey, what should I invest in? How about nothing? How about yourself? How about your business?

We’re not talking about trying to buy a single family home right now. We’re not trying to invest in, in ETFs or Bitcoin right now. You’re not at that place. You need to get to a place where you have labor leverage, then you have so much profit coming in. You’re not really sure what to do with it. Boom.

how to layer these 3 types of leverage in sequence

Capital leverage. You’re creating income streams that can support you so you can take more risk. All right. Now the last one, the final one I’m going to say is content, also known as media. And that’s what I’m doing right now. So I have been building businesses, companies for well over a decade. And how I’ve done that predominantly, yes, I’ve been creating content, but I’ve predominantly done it through paid advertising, email newsletters, and audio only podcasts.

So I haven’t shown my face a lot. I haven’t done a lot on social media channels like YouTube or Instagram until really the last, as of recording this, the last several weeks, several months maybe, I’ve been working on this stuff. And it’s strategic in nature, you know, just some kind of behind the scenes, like why am I all of a sudden doing a YouTube channel if I don’t really need to?

It’s because I want to build content leverage. So I’m trying to build pieces of content that would be helpful for people who follow me, something I can send to people to help them get over a hurdle, like my buddy who doesn’t know what to do with his time right now. Ultimately, I’m trying to plant seeds for the future.

I don’t expect anything to go viral or to pop off, but I have the time now to be able to invest in something else, and I want it to help my companies and not just myself. So I’m focusing on creating content. My content are the seeds that are just seedlings right now that I know will eventually turn into oaks as I get better and better at content, as I know what to create, as I know what people want to hear, and then that content will become more helpful.

the real goal: choose what you work on and why

This will take years. It’ll compound over time. You don’t have to do this same thing. You could focus on creating software. You could focus on different forms of content, just like blog posts or other things that are going to help your company. But ultimately, that’s what I’m focused on right now. Now the content one, you can focus on at any point in time.

If it’s going to kind of become your full-time job, you’re going to make sure that you have labor in place, capital in place, then you can do content. That’s exactly what I’m doing now. Because this whole work less, earn more idea that’s all over the internet is really just kind of dumb. I think it’s stupid.

final thoughts, build leverage and chase hard

What are you going to do? My buddy who, after several months of golf, is like, I don’t really know what to do. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to you. Sounds awesome. But if you don’t have a mission, you don’t have a vision, you don’t have a purpose, you’re not sure what you’re doing, you’re going to feel lost.

Life’s just not going to be fun if you don’t have some sort of mission or something that you’re building. And so when you are focused on building leverage at all times, you know you’re doing something good for the company. And so even after you get to that point, if you ever get stuck and you’re like, okay, what am I even supposed to be doing as an entrepreneur who’s growing a business or as an entrepreneur who already has an established business?

Like what should I be doing? The answer is build leverage. You should 100% be trying to build leverage and it can be in any of these pillars. You can go back to labor capital, you can labor leverage, capital leverage, content leverage. You can go back to each one of these buckets. But if you ever feel lost, you’re not sure what the goal is.

The goal is to build leverage. And when you have more leverage, you will have more time freedom. You have more financial freedom and you build leverage through trying hard and systems and operations. All right, now go build yourself some leverage. Try harder.