The growth of a business will never surpass the growth of the business owner’s ability to think and perform.
At the beginning, growth is all about focusing on the right needle movers, being disciplined, and consistent execution.
This usually gets coaches to low 6-figures, before they find themselves as the bottleneck.. where growth plateaus as personal capacity gets maxed out.
To breakthrough that ceiling, the coach must transcend from using the productivity approach of an Operator, to that of a Decision Maker.
Enter productivity level 2 – where growth is about creating leverage, and knowing how to make quality decisions with time.
Speaking from personal experience and working with private clients at this level, MARGIN is the one ingredient that must be protected at all cost.
Because if you’re maxed out, with no time to work ON the business, no space to think, and no room to enjoy downtime with family… there’s zero room for growth, let alone growth at scale.
Here are 3 key pillars to generate and protect margin:
1 – Eliminate and simplify (Be ruthless with this)
Avoid expending any bandwidth and energy on thoughts and actions that don’t generate forward progress.
In most cases, that involves eliminating all sources of distraction, and trivial tasks that don’t belong at the top of the priorities list.
2 – Have a decision making framework
When there are endless options on what can be done, it is imperative to know how to decide what SHOULD be done.
Nothing pays more dividends over time than the ability to allocate our scarcest resource towards actions that provide outsized returns.
Protip: Never make decisions based on assumptions, especially when you’re tired or rushed. Make decisions when you’re fresh, with data in hand.
3 – Invest time to increase the value of time
A unit of time invested into increasing the value of time, will always be more profitable than the same unit of time invested into actions that are equal or below your current hourly rate.
Whether it be delegating, creating new systems, or learning how to do any of the above, budget time for these actions as a non-negotiable.
This creates a compounding growth in return-on-time-invested, which is what bridges the gap between level 1 and level 2 productivity.
To wrap this up – while the amount of time we have is fixed, the value of our time can flex and be scaled up infinitely.
Simply takes the right approach at the right levels.
Thanks for reading.