work on your business, not at your business

Summary

Jerred discusses the critical shift from working at your business to working on your business, emphasizing the importance of building a scalable enterprise rather than just creating a high-paying job for oneself. He shares his personal journey from being a one-on-one fitness coach to scaling his business through leverage, technology, and team-building. Jerred introduces a framework with three key questions to assess scalability and outlines five strategic focuses to achieve business growth and sustainability.

Key takeaways:

• Only 9% of businesses reach $1 million in annual revenue, often because entrepreneurs build jobs instead of scalable businesses.
• Jerred’s framework for assessing scalability includes three questions: Is your product fulfilled by a team or technology? Can you handle a tenfold increase in customers? Do you have a documented process for client acquisition?
• Leverage is the key to scaling a business, involving the use of other people’s resources, technology, and capital to grow.
• Focus on “who can do it” rather than “how to do it” to effectively delegate tasks and scale operations.
• Invest in automation to save time and reduce manual labor, allowing for more strategic use of human resources.
• Create evergreen content that remains relevant over time to leverage media for long-term business growth.

Transcript

the 9% statistic that should wake you up

Did you know that only 9% of businesses will ever hit $1 million in annual revenue? And I think the reason why is very clear. A lot of people are building themselves a really good job, but they’re not building a true business. So let’s dive into how to build a business over a job and the importance of each one.

And I think the best way to kind of illustrate what this looks like is kind of talk about my journey of when I first built myself a job. So I started early on in the fitness industry with one-on-one clients, just trying to get people in the door, so to speak. I did actually start online. I did a lot of coaching in person, but then I started more entrepreneurial online.

And what would happen is I would market and sell, and then I’d get a full roster, and I wouldn’t be able to handle anyone else. And I tried hiring coaches and things, but the leverage just wasn’t there. And so what happened was I very quickly capped myself with the ability of what I could do, and I was working a lot.

my early days of building a “job”

I would have a handful of clients, kind of higher end, they’d pay a little bit more, and it was good, but I would spend most of my time just fulfilling on that. And the, I don’t wanna say this makes things worse, but I actually really enjoyed doing that, so I didn’t really wanna focus on the marketing or the selling or the growing of the business.

I was just happy to have people who were interested in my coaching service and so that I could do that thing. But at some point, I was like, look, I gotta put on the big boy pants, it’s time to scale. And that’s when I really started to look at leverage. And the three questions I have every business ask to know if they are already using leverage, because there’s no one tip I can give you.

I can’t say, hey, go use HubSpot, and it’s gonna transform your business when we get into kind of like the very concrete, nitty gritty details here. But there are three questions I can ask so you know if you are already doing scalable things. And the first question is, is your product or service fulfilled by a team or technology?

So for instance, for this, one of my companies, Garage Gym Athlete, a bulk of the fulfillment is through technology, the application itself. And then I have a team that actually populates most of the things that are within the technology, so the fulfillment of that product or service is by technology.

the 3 questions that reveal your leverage

Now, if you run an in-person or brick and mortar, if you’re doing all the work, you’re seeing all the people, you’re seeing all the patients, you’re seeing all the clients, whatever it is, that’s not scalable, right? It needs to be done by a team. So the first question, is your product or service fulfilled by a team or technology?

The second thing, and this is more of a thought exercise, if I gave you 10 times the amount of new customers, let’s just say this month, say on average you got 20 new customers a month, and the next month I give you 200, would you be able to actually fulfill on those, or would you be able to figure it out?

Do you have a repeatable process on the fulfillment side to where like, yeah, if you gave me that influx, I would do X, Y, Z, boom, we’d be good within that 30 day window and I’d be able to handle all those clients. It’s another good, you know, just thought process, thought exercise for you. And then the last one is, do you have a documented and repeatable process for new client acquisition?

And that one’s really important because if you’re gonna scale, you can hire the team so you’re not having to do the fulfillment, you can have the systems to be able to increase your capacity very easily, but if you don’t have a way to repeatedly get new customers, it’s very hard to hire people. It’s very hard to feel comfortable hiring people because you’re always gonna be like, I don’t actually know how to double my customers or triple my amount of customers or leads, and if you don’t know how to do those things, it’s very uncomfortable to try and hire people and go down the leverage path.

So those are the three questions you ask yourself. Now we’ll get into like the five things that you need to focus on. And the first one is just leverage in general. Everything I just mentioned is a leverage thing. So leverage, and I’m gonna kind of go, everything I mentioned is kind of leverage over the next couple of bullet points here, but leverage is how you scale.

why leverage is always the scaling answer

Like that is it. It’s being able to utilize other people’s resources to scale your business. That’s why employees come into play. Or if you’re taking your money and putting it in the markets, you’re leveraging your capital to go earn more money for you, right? So you have to be focused on leverage at all times.

And the goal of this podcast is not to make you a master of leverage, but it’s for you to know that leverage is the answer. If you’re asking a question about scaling, the answer is leverage. Now you just need to figure out what that leverage is in for your business. So hopefully me telling you that can set you down the path of reading all the books that you need to on leverage or doing all the research you need to on leverage and realizing that is the answer to your scaling problem.

The second thing is thinking about who can do something and not how to do it. I know that’s still hard for me sometimes today because I know how to do a lot of things. I have a lot of skills, technical skills. I just have a lot of skills and I enjoy doing some of these things, but you have to wrap your mind around who can do this and not always how can I do it.

thinking “who” instead of “how”

The last thing is hiring people, which is kind of within the who, not how and the leverage, but we are oftentimes scared to hire people because of the cost. I tell a lot of people who are on the cusp of hiring, maybe they have one or two employees and that’s not really the scary part. The first employee can be scary.

The first or second can be a little bit scary, but when you get to four, five, six, seven people on your team, that’s where you gotta go back to those questions I asked you. Do you really know how to acquire new customers? Do you have it documented in a repeatable process for new client acquisition?

hiring without killing profit

Because being able to scale that up and having that really robust is how you can feel comfortable hiring new people. Like you know, okay, when I bring on a new person, here’s how I can make them the most effective possible. Where a lot of people make mistakes is, let’s say you get to a certain point where you have some profit to where you can hire an employee and you hire the employee and all that really happens is the profit shrinks, but the business doesn’t grow.

And that’s the worst place to be in because we’re not utilizing employees to the best of your ability. And so making sure you know you have that documented in a repeatable process for new client acquisition. The fourth thing, invest in automation. I have a big recommendation for HubSpot in general, but anything that, you gotta start leaning into technology.

Like if you’re having an admin or an assistant or anybody do a lot of manual data entry things, you’re in a day and age where these things need to be automated. So invest in automation, don’t be scared of it. It saves a lot of time and it saves a lot of human capital so you can focus on either having the people who are in those seats do other bigger, better things or getting rid of them and saving on the overhead, depending on what the person’s doing.

automation & content as leverage

And then the last one, I really highly encourage people to start creating content media. That’s the last one in another form of leverage. And how you need to think about this is how can this content be relevant for like today, tomorrow, five years from now, 10 years from now? Like how do we actually make our content that relevant?

For instance, this podcast right now has that in mind. If someone’s looking to build a business instead of a job and they’re looking to scale, they’re looking to pull that lever and they watch this or listen to this, they will know that I’m telling you the answer is leverage and that’s the path you need to go down.

Will leverage change as technology changes, as time goes on? To some degree, yes, but the answer is always going to be the same. Leverage is the answer. And then all of these other things will still be true. Those three questions I asked at the beginning are great litmus tests for where your business is at and how healthy it is.

joining the 9% who break $1M

So what I’m trying to do is create evergreen content. And so now think about that in the terms of your business, not something that’s flashy or gonna get you the most views on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. Be okay standing the test of time unless you are just a content producer, an influencer who makes money that way, maybe it’s different.

But if you are just a business owner looking to create content for your business, start solving problems with content that can be evergreen, that’s good forever. And then start pushing that out. Once you do that, you will be light years ahead of everyone, but it might take some time for that to be true.

Now start working on leverage, start building your business and let’s get you in that 9% who hit 1 million. Try harder.