Entrepreneurship

The Four Mindsets Every Founder Needs to Build a Better Business

We’re all familiar with KPI (Key Performance Indicator) a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company achieves its objectives. I couldn’t find one that made intuitive sense to me, so I developed the Ultimate KPI™, a behavioral framework for tracking and encouraging constant improvement.

The Ultimate KPI l™ is a concrete way to practice making replaceability part of your job. Remember that being replaceable does not mean being replaced. You’re not trying to make yourself or those around you obsolete. You’re not trying to put people out of a job. 

In fact, irreplaceability is the enemy. Really. It renders you stuck. It means if there’s no one else who can do what you do, you are a liability. If what you know only lives in your head, there’s no transparency, no transfer of knowledge, and most importantly, no growth for you or the business. 

Replaceability means practicing detachment, relinquishing the notion that you and you alone can “do that thing” or “solve that problem.” Replaceability removes bottlenecks. It means you and your team can work on more substantive projects.

It allows growth. 

The process of making yourself more replaceable involves first analyzing how you do what you do.  

• How do you go through various processes?  
• Where do you allocate your resources? 
• How do you spend your time?  
• What requires your attention but not your expertise? 

We can answer those questions using The Ultimate KPI™. 

Think about the 20 things you do regularly, activities, tasks, projects, reconciling bank statements, leading the team, brainstorming, podcasting. 

Did you know that every one of those tasks fits under one of four mindsets? 

Cog, Engine, Engineer, and Inventor.

The cog focuses on the minutiae, the boring, the prescriptive. They’re doing the requisite tasks necessary to get the company through the day. In terms of flexibility, they’re in a cage. They can’t go anywhere because if they do, the business will grind to a halt. And forget the notion of freedom. Cogs are barely able to keep their head above water.

Many founders recoil at the notion of being a cog. I get that. It sounds neither glamorous nor impactful. So the way to cast off the mantle of cog-ness is to acknowledge that you may very well be suffering from terminal uniqueness. 

Granted, you might’ve been unrivaled when you started the business, but at some point, you stopped being as singular as you imagine. No disrespect. I’ve been there. You started doing the work of cogs because it had to be done. There are other people and tons of automations that can do cog work. So maybe ask yourself, why are you doing it? Because anyone, even you, can jump that line and become the engine. 

Now you’re the driving force in the business. You are not a part of the engine. You are the engine. You still have to be there, wherever there is, so freedom at this point is elusive. You can’t go very far without the business halting, and your focus is firmly on the organization’s work. But, you’ve got enough headspace now to get interested in other work, ideas, projects, pursuits. But you can’t because you are otherwise occupied. 

But possibilities are the fuel that propels you to go from engine to engineer. Here is where you’ll discover the difference between working in the business and working on the business. Your hands-on engagement gives way to the cultivation of ideas. It’s more about using your voice instead of your hands. Maybe you go back and forth. Perhaps you spend more time brainstorming, but projects get done whether you are physically there or not.

Engineers focus on challenging scenarios and accelerate meaningful growth. You see some real possibilities in terms of freedom and flexibility. You can self-identify as free-range. Mostly. There are still limits. But many people happily roost here. They hit what I call the “good enough” line. There’s freedom, check. Focus? Check and some flexibility, and it’s good enough. But the problem is that good enough is a trap. 

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some Gordon Gecko, hungry hungry hippo baloney. It’s about your mental enrichment, which, come on, will slowly atrophy if left alone. And good enough is probably not good enough for your competitors. When you accept that reality, it’s simple to jump the line to inventor. 

The inventor gets to focus on their genius, the things that bring them the greatest joy and have the most impact. They have the flexibility to work anywhere, anyhow, anytime.

A good way to think about the difference between Cog and Engine, then Engineer and Inventor is the difference between using your hands or your mouth. If you are engaged in Engineer and Inventor work, you’re talking. You’re brainstorming, you’re interacting with other people. You’re going back and forth. Then somebody else runs with it and makes it happen. 

The Cog and Engine are literally hands-on contributions. When your hands are involved, you have to be physically situated someplace; in an office, in front of a laptop, behind a cash register. 

It’s important to note that the goal is not necessarily to eradicate cog activities. There are certain businesses where the cog work is the thing you do; carpentry, landscaping, bread baking, rock climbing instructor. 

The business cannot operate without the Cog, because it’s not just essential to the business, it is the business. So there is a place for Cog work. We just don’t need to get bogged down in it.

Also, it’s always going to be one task, one mindset. There is no grey area.  

For example, you may enjoy doing something and feel like it’s clearly Inventor work, but if it requires you to be someplace, it’s going to be the work of an Engineer. And it has to be identified as such.

Remember, each mindset contributes equally to the smooth operation of any business. But who is engaged in these activities can be the difference between a scalable business and a stalled one. 

If the founder is doing Cog work, there is no leadership. 

If the Engine holds on too tightly to any system or process, there is no transparency. 

If the Engineer is working in the business, instead of on the business, there is no forward motion. 

And if the Inventor is doing anything other than contributing a vision, the business will not grow. 

Putting it Into Practice 

I created an actual “pen to paper” planner to help you organize your productivity journey It’s called The Ultimate KPI Planner, which is so not clever but entirely accurate. 

Here’s how to use it:

1. Write down 20 tasks, activities, projects you perform regularly.
2. Identify each activity as either cog, engine, engineer, or inventor. 
   1. Cog – Is it manual and repetitive?
   2. Engine – Are the tasks essential but frustrating?
   3. Engineer – Are you working IN the business or ON the business?
   4. Inventor –  Does a project require your unique focus? Is there flexibility to work on it anywhere?  Does it allow the freedom to explore outside the business? 
3. Pick 16 things you will no longer do at year’s end. 
   1. Use the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent must be offboarded in order to grow.
   2. Is the activity excessive, unneeded, unnecessary, inefficient, irrelevant? 
4. Determine the Replacement Plan
   1. Optimize – offload or eliminate
   2. Automate – software system or process optimization
   3. Outsource – delegate internally or externally
5. Monitor Continuous Change (Kaizen) 
   1. Monthly check-ins – with yourself and your team 
      1. How many tasks are gone, reassigned, outsourced? 
      2. Set a goal and if you do not reach it, go back and reimagine The Replacement Plan. 

The Replacement Plan is the holy grail of this practice. It makes zero sense to commit to a thorough house cleaning, and inventory the work you are doing, only to replace tasks with equally inefficient systems and processes. Or worse, get frustrated and fall back to your old ways; which would constitute a productivity relapse and those are simply awful.  

If you employ my OAO (Optimize, Automate, Outsource) Methodology, you will see forward momentum almost immediately.  The early successes you’ll feel will be the necessary fuel to keep you going on this road to focus, freedom, and flexibility. 

Caught in a Rip Tide?

My very first memory Is not a good one. 

I was five years old. I was in Puerto Rico, vacationing with my parents. My father and I went swimming in the ocean and got caught in a riptide. It felt like hours. It probably wasn’t, but as a five-year-old boy, I was sure death was upon me.

If you don’t know what this oceanic nightmare is, you should. 

First, we may call them riptides, but technically it’s not a tide controlled by the waxing and waning of the moon. Rather, it’s a rip current, a powerful, narrow channel of fast-moving water prevalent along the East, Gulf, and West coasts of the U.S. and even along the Great Lakes’ shores.

“Moving at speeds of up to eight feet per second, rip currents can move faster than an Olympic swimmer. Panicked swimmers often try to counter a rip current by swimming straight back to shore—putting themselves at risk of drowning because of fatigue.

Lifeguards rescue tens of thousands of people from rip currents in the U.S. every year, but it is estimated that 100 people are killed by rip currents annually. If caught in a rip current, don’t fight it! Swim parallel to the shore and swim back to land at an angle.”

Source: NOAA. What is eutrophication? National Ocean Service website, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/eutrophication.html, 10/05/17.

So if you get caught in that rip, it’s pretty much impossible to get to shore swimming against it. The frustrating thing if you have been stuck in one and then find out later is that the solution to surviving is to stop struggling, float, then effortlessly swim left or right about 30 feet. 

Now my experience was probably way more traumatic than I even recognize now. My throat seems a little tight, and my breathing is elevated whilst writing would indicate that the experience has not left my consciousness. 

But the thing about the memory that eats at me the most was that we could have gotten out of it so easily if we had just known what to do. 

Now, if you haven’t figured it out already, rip currents are the perfect metaphor for an entrepreneur struggling to scale, pivot, succeed, win or survive. 

Far too often, I see business owners swimming against the current like the last line in The Great Gatsby, 

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Oftentimes it’s of their own making. They’re doing things that feel hard, but they keep doing it because they think they’re supposed to or don’t know that there’s a better way. And that better way might be right next to them.

The strongest part of a rip current is the direct line between the water’s edge and the sandbar opening. It’s a naturally forming myopia. The direct line. But it’s also the most dangerous. Business owners who struggle in this space inevitably fail. The force is too great. The goal feels like it has to be the shore. All they care about is getting out of the water, getting back to the shore, and getting their feet on dry land. 

If they shifted that focus to something smaller and more productive, like, “How do I get unstuck?” Suddenly, the receding wave makes its way through the sandbar opening and meets up with water at its own level. Its pressure immediately drops. It simply requires patience and an understanding that thrashing around only makes the situation even direr. 

People drown when they needlessly struggle in the water or expend all of their energy swimming. To survive a rip current or any crisis in the water, you have to keep calm, and you have to conserve your energy.

And we see this in business too. Some people are so focused on the goal, make a million dollars, open 50 locations, expand to seven different countries that they lose sight of the solution right in front of them. That is stopping them from taking the first step that they need to make to get to that eventual goal. 

The most effective way to fight rip currents in your business is to follow basic swimming safety rules: 

1. Never go into the ocean or try to solve a problem alone. 
2. If you aren’t a strong swimmer or number one in a Google search, stick to shallow waters until you’re more fit. 
3. Ideally, it would be best if you only swam in areas where a lifeguard can keep an eye on you. Accountability can save your life and your business. 

Not me.

Do you know what you miss out on when the singular focus of your company is scaling?

Life. You miss out on life.

So I’m getting out of the scaling business. It’s time.

My expertise helped many people and grew my business fast and well. I’m damn good at solving problems, and when my clients presented my team and me with complicated, intriguing dilemmas, we solved them. It felt terrific.

Did I help everyone who joined my group coaching program?

Absolutely not, and BTW don’t ever let anyone tell you that they are 100 percent successful either. In fact, don’t let the “purveyors of scale” trick you into thinking that:

Scaling is something other than making more money. It’s not. It’s making more money. We can create a taxonomy around the notion of growth that hits on deep, meaningful ideologies, but scaling intends to create more wealth in the end. Let’s all stop pretending it’s something grander. And instead of asking yourself if your idea will scale, ask yourself, “Will it be meaningful?”. Then proceed accordingly.

You’re doing “it” wrong No one has, sells, or promotes a universal approach that works seamlessly. We humans are unique and flawed. Our businesses are borne out of that individuality. The shit that works will speak clearly to us, not be prescribed by someone with a sexy pitch deck.

Instagram is Real Life. We live in a society that is enamored of illusion. And that sense of make-believe comes at us 24 hours a day. No one’s intermittent fasting regime is that successful. No one’s Lamborghini is without engine trouble. No one’s kids are that well behaved. When we compare someone’s virtual outside to our very real insides, it diminishes our self worth and establishes bizarre, unattainable points of reference.

The hustle is not time-consuming. Yes, it is. And I’m arguably the world’s most productive man. The hustle, which produces scale, comes with a hefty price that may be impossible to recoup — teaching your kid how to ride a bike — watching your Mom show your daughter how to crochet. Registering first-time voters or harvesting your first (and only) cucumber.

Authenticity is a marketable commodity. When anyone tries to tell you how real or humble or grateful they are, run. Actions are more valuable than intentions, so watch how thought leaders behave. Don’t just listen to what they say. No one should have to sell how real they are to you. Gross.

The most important metric of success is your bank balance. Again, I call bullshit. Did you teach someone on your team to do things they never thought possible? Was it possible to help a client unravel an entrenched idea and change course? How many people thanked you for your insights? Were your employees able to construct a life that included, rather than excluded, their families? These are all the hazy accomplishments that genuinely define success for me.

Now, I’m not here to crush sour grapes or castigate the “coaching space.” There are talented coaches out there who legitimately believe in what they are doing, have methods that work, and who can create community even during these maddening times. A hearty Mazel Tov to each of them. You know who you are.

But I am The Replaceable Founder, someone who has put into place systems and processes that have allowed my own company (and maybe yours as well) to grow quantitatively. The experiment worked. It is possible for the founder to step away from a business’s day-to-day operations and still scale. But the machine needs to be fed, and that requires too much tending.

I could have been on a plane every week (when we went places). I could have worked on all kinds of marketing strategies to get more followers. I could have hired more people. I could have sent out more email sequences. But you know what, I didn’t want to. Chasing the scaling dragon was just not that important to me.

So, I said, enough.

It’s the self-aware founder who realizes when an idea, albeit a terrific one, has run its course. It’s not a failure. It’s not quitting. It’s a eureka moment of grace that illuminates a core truth.

I want to be more human. Yes, me, the guy who has built a few hugely successful businesses around the notion of harnessing technology.

I don’t want to manage from afar. I can, but I’d rather have intimate relationships with fewer people.

I want to invest my energy into scenarios that are meaty and complex. When I’m deeply interested in the problems I’m trying to solve, I’m on fire, in a good way.

I want to be there for people in a substantive, committed way. I’ve been volunteering as an EMT up in the Hudson Valley. As a country EMT, I’m with the patients longer than a city EMT where hospitals are not so far away. It’s kind of remarkable the connection you can build with someone who is hurt on a thirty-minute ride to the nearest hospital. I can’t solve all their problems, clearly, but I can be there, and simply being there for someone is a woefully underrated pursuit. I want to change that. I want to get better at that.

I want to be more me.

What it was like, What happened, and What it’s like now

This blog post marks the 100th piece I’ve written here on Medium. So I figured it was time to tell you a little story about how we got started. You know to memorialize that sh*t.

Thanks, BTW, for reading and following and sharing and all those other modern metrics of support. I really appreciate it.

Here goes…

My name is Ari Meisel and I am the Founder of Less Doing — a coaching program that helps entrepreneurs who have opportunity in excess of what their infrastructure can support, find focus, flexibility, and freedom in their business.

My Replaceable Founder Methodology delivered through online courses, one-day intensives, and through our group coaching program, enables entrepreneurs to become replaceable so they can scale their business.

My podcast, The Less Doing Podcast recently published its 400th Episode and has been downloaded 1 million times.

Although I began coaching individuals who were hungry for greater productivity for a long time now, I began coaching businesses in earnest two years ago. Our first year we hit the million-dollar revenue mark and we are on pace to surpass that this year.

But it’s a metric I don’t embrace as much as the results our clients get when they follow my Methodology. That’s success to me.

The Backstory

Imagine this. You’re 20 years old, you’re working on a project that you’re spending 18 hours a day, you’re young, you’re full of energy, full of vigor, and you’re working nonstop 18 hours a day. Hard-charging, being super productive, and three years of doing that, you find yourself with a chronic illness, and it nearly kills you. All the while, you’re building up debt and not getting things done. This chronic illness takes you from working 18 hours a day to barely struggling to get an hour of work on any given day. What do you do? I think most people would probably give up.

Or…

You find a new way of doing things in that one hour that you have.

Now, that was me when I got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and my response to that was creating a brand new system of productivity that would allow me to get a maximum amount done, actually more than I’d ever gotten done before in much less time.

If you ask somebody, who works a nine to five job, “what would you do? If you could only work till four? The answer is easy, “skip lunch,” but if you ask that same person, what would you do if you only had an hour of the day to get that work done?

It requires an entirely different kind of thinking. One that most people are not even aware of because the question isn’t what would you do? It’s what wouldn’t you do? If those things that you wouldn’t do still have to get done, who or what is going to do them for you?

The whole idea of working smarter versus harder is particularly relevant here. No time restriction says you can not be more productive. It does not exist. I’ve seen so many different situations where people thought that they had no more time, and the time was their problem. Time is never the problem. It’s just about how you use it.

And that’s how I came up with the idea for Less Doing and The Replaceable Founder Methodology.https://upscri.be/6892b4?as_embed=true

Back in the day

I began helping people with their personal productivity and launched a product called “Overhwhelmology 101 attached here http://less.do/iqwyHI

It quickly morphed into a more business-centric product and The Replaceable Founder Methodology was born. Honestly, I thought I needed more team members, more software, more everything in the beginning, but then I started employing my own Methodology and things got pretty optimized, automated, and outsourced really fast.

One of the biggest things we learned when we were just starting out is that the best way to build a scalable, automated business organization is to break it up into pieces. An early mistake we made was investing thousands of dollars into an “all-in-one CRM” — it ended up being completely useless to us and continues to sit there gathering dust.

A smart, automated business has multiple moving parts which specialize in different business functions in your organization. Not only does this allow you to handle each business unit well, it also makes debugging easier — you have multiple points of failure that you can dive into rather than a single, massive, messy monolith.

For example, one of the companies we work with, ContentFly, has 73 different zaps running their entire platform AND company. 73! They have more zaps than they have lines of code.

People underestimate the sheer amount of powerful tools that are available, all flawlessly efficient.

Slack and Zapier is where it all begins — Slack should be the command center of your operation, with Zapier being the pipes that bring all the other services in, allowing you to manage/monitor it from one place.

After that, it’s entirely up to you. Airtable is our weapon of choice, and Typeform is a great way of creating front-end or lead-in interfaces. Stripe & PayPal can handle your payments, while MailChimp and Intercom can automate customer marketing & communication.

If you aren’t using all of these touchpoints, in favor of just one catch-all system, you’re missing out on so much value. Each of these tools does their own specialization in a way that no catch-all will ever accomplish.

All told, we haven’t even brought up the best part of this: synergy.

By enabling multiple touchpoints, you can actually enhance the capabilities of each individual one. Zapier, for instance, has several Built-in Apps that let you format, filter & transform data before moving them from service to service.

You can literally automate everything.

Why give up that incredible power just to get hamstrung to a single tool? It’s an age-old mindset and a lazy one — if you aren’t aggressively fine-tuning your processes and building a machine that can scale, you’re planning your own obsolescence.

How it Works

There’s one question I get asked by entrepreneurs all the time:

What’s the most important thing I can invest my money and resources to make sure my business grows?

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve probably asked yourself the same. I know I have.

It always seems like there’s not enough money or time to allocate to all those important things. And that’s problem number one.

Problem number two is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to help every entrepreneur out there.

The answer depends on the stage your business is currently at.

If you’re running a 100k MRR business and spending 80% of it on overhead costs, you’re probably going to want to automate as many tasks as possible.

On the other hand, if you’re only starting out and your business is still your side hustle, you’re going to need to get profit to make it full-time. Fast.

9 Stages of Growth

We’re going to be using Alex Charfen’s data for different stages of entrepreneurial growth.

Alex sums up the process nicely. Each stage of your business’ growth needs different things, so responding to a question of what you should invest in now depends on what your business needs now.

Growing Your Side Hustle to a Business

This is the first stage of the entrepreneurial journey. Usually, before we reach the $100,000 mark, we’re still at the part-time mark and our businesses are side hustles we’re looking to grow.

The main thing to do at this stage is finding product-market fit.

What does this mean? Should you invest in tech?

No.

All you need to do at this stage is put out feelers and see how people (the market, your audience) respond to your idea.

Let’s say you’re developing a new product that’s going to help 20–30-year-olds develop their careers much faster than with traditional channels.

You need to get out there and tell them about your idea.

You need to talk to your audience and see whether they think it’s useful and whether they even understand why they need your product.

The best thing to invest your money and resources into at this stage is creating content.

Create content that’s going to reach and resonate with your audience. This can be blog posts, eBooks, videos, webinars — anything that adds more value.

Content is king, after all.

For example, I’m doing it with Facebook Lives to get in touch with the people who are my target audience, and to understand how I can develop my product to best serve their needs (product-market fit is all about that).

I’m still agile in my approach so I can change strategies and adapt my product to what my audience responds best to.

If you invest in tech at this stage, you’re still unsure of the product-market fit, and the chances of losing money by investing into the wrong thing are very high. It’s better to get in touch with your future customers and find the ones who need your product or educate them.

Of course, you can also add people to your mail list with tools like MailChimp which are free for up to 2,000 subscribers.

And this is another perk of creating awesome content — people will want to read more, they’ll want to stay informed on what you’re doing.

Promoting Your Ideas

When you’re at the $100,000 mark, that’s when you should start asking people if they’d like what you have to offer.

By then, you’ve gained their trust with valuable content.

And your main mission at this stage is spreading your voice, promoting your content even more until you’ve grown from $100,000 to $300,000.

If you want to invest in something when you’ve got quality foundations like the ones you’ve set with content, invest in technology that’s going to help you reach even more people.

Next Stop: Leveraged Sales

The next stop is definitely sales.

Sell as much as possible.

You’ve found the right kind of customers, motivated them with content, and it’s time to leverage that (and tech) to get sales.

If you’re doing it right, you may find that the best thing to invest in here is automating your sales process.

Why?

You want to be focusing on scaling your business and increasing sales, and you can’t do that if you’re still doing everything manually. That’s why we need some degree of automation to get leveraged sales.

Yes, I often talk about not needing CRM systems (customer relationship management systems) but they can be a good fit if you’ve got specific needs.

If you need something right now, improvise a CRM system to get leveraged sales with Trello and Zapier.

You can create corresponding boards with Trello, and automate the process with Zapier. The best thing is that you can get a lot of automation done with just free accounts.

For streamlining bookings and learning more about clients’ unique needs, check out Calendly.

At this stage of your business’ growth, you need to introduce some degree of automation to be able to generate even more revenue.

Creating Systems & Processes

Once you’re en route from $300,000 to $1 million, you can no longer say that you’ve got limited funds.

However, your needs change. You no longer need to push as hard on sales manually, or focus on getting your content out there.

What you need are systematization and processes.

You want to create systems and processes that reflect the methods that helped you reach this level of success. If you want to replicate them and use them to fuel your future growth, you need to make a system out of these behaviors and methods.

This is the point where you get a bit more into automation. You use software like Process Street to help you understand, organize and optimize your process and workflow.

You may also need more advanced communication systems to keep everything up and running successfully. Usually, entrepreneurs use Slack to communicate with their teams, and Intercom to communicate with customers.

The main goal of this stage is understanding what methods led you to success, and turning them into systems that will keep the machine going, bringing you even more revenue as you focus on different strategies.

Do We Need Tools to Grow as Entrepreneurs?

Honestly?

No.

You can reach your million in revenue without spending a single cent on tech, but it can be time-consuming. That’s why I encourage tech in moderate amounts to make the workload easier.

However, the main thing to remember is that you have to focus on things that bring immediate value and explain the benefits of your business for your potential customers.

After that, conversion becomes a piece of cake.

What It’s Like Now

Every week our small but mighty team gathers for a huddle call to check in about our monthly, weekly and daily goals and tasks.

If you’ve ever been to one of my Replaceable Founder Intensives, you know that we use Trello as our project management tool and as our focal point for weekly and monthly team meetings.

We sort the tasks assigned in Trello by team members and then each person gives an update on progress. It’s transparency and accountability in action. Every week. No excuses. So it’s not at all like this book club I used to go to where all we ever talked about is how we didn’t have time to read the book.

So, at this week’s meeting, Courtney our awesome COO shared her screen and the sorting and updating began, starting with her 25+ tasks. Then she shared what Joanna and The Amys are accountable for, and each of them had at least 20 tasks populating the screen. I love Trello for this; with each team member shuffle, the screen fills with a new assortment of color-coded “cards” that describe the array of responsibilities each team member is in charge of.

(And, of course, each of these responsibilities equates to critical things that move the growth of the business forward.)

Lots of responsibilities mean lots of cards on the screen in front of us.

Then Courtney came to me…

She shuffled the cards again to reveal my activities for the week and suddenly the screen went from covered with cards to cleaner than Marie Kondo’s kitchen counter.

I had TWO, that’s right TWO critical items assigned to me:

1. Record a podcast episode.
2. Transfer my profit sharing from the business account to my personal account.

Yup. That’s it. Record my thoughts and take money out of the bank. That’s all I had to do this week to keep the business moving forward.

This is how it’s been lately.

I am doing less and less as it relates to the minutiae of the operation of the business and doing more and more as it relates to me simply being, for lack of a better word, the Inventor.

These days I’m pretty much just showing up as “the talent” for the business. I give talks, I show up on podcasts and give interviews. I meet with potential partners to explore larger growth opportunities for the company.

Do you know why I’m able to do this?

Well, we all agreed it’s because I am getting out of the way. I’ve put systems and processes into place that work insanely well without me.

I have become replaceable.

Can I get a “Hell Yeah”?

And here’s the kicker . . .

We had our best profit month ever last month, all because I’ve been able to successfully get out of the way and let my team do what they do best.

The less I do, the better the company is performing.

Let me say that again so it really sinks in for you because I know this is sometimes a hard concept to grasp…

I’m the founder and CEO and our numbers are proving to us that the less I do, the better the company is performing.

This scenario has been the dream for me too for a long time. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to get us here, and we’re still ironing out the edges, but it works, this Methodology I created. I have become my own best case study.

Life Lessons Along The Way

Work-Life Balance is something that comes up all the time and I’ve said many times before that I do not believe in work-life balance.

I particularly like Alain deBotton’s treatment of this where he says that there is no such thing as work-life balance because anything that is worth pursuing will take us out of balance.

We try so hard all the time to make it so everything’s good and everything’s right and it always seems so fleeting…because it is. I think we need to accept that sometimes in some way for some period of time, there will be things in our life that don’t work well.

When you think about the things in your life, it could be your business, your friends, your family, your children, your parents, your physical health, whatever it might be. To think that we can have all those things in line is crazy and sets us up for failure.

We live in a society where success is celebrated relentlessly and ordinary achievement is completely overlooked; even though ordinary achievements are all around us all the time.

I got all four kids in snowsuits and boots in less than twenty minutes, last winter. I brought a plant back to life. I made peace with my Dad. What is amazing for one person is not realistic for another person and also not necessarily what amazing looks like for them.

As entrepreneurs, we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations on a regular basis. Comfort for us is a very bad thing. It makes us complacent, it makes us bored. In some cases, it makes us self sabotage and we can actively seek experiences that make us uncomfortable.

Life assures us time and time again, that it will go out of balance. But we have the chance to fix it, amend it, change it. There’s always something with which to tinker. Always.

Tech Helps

Here’s a link to our tech stack https://gumroad.com/l/ldfree/ldfree

So Does Inspiration

Best Advice I Got.

Lean into doubt.

I’m NOT talking about self-doubt. No way. That stuff sucks. Self-doubt is a lack of confidence, tanking self-esteem, and a negative, albeit, egotistical way of looking at the world. It translates into, “Well, I know I’m messing up, I’m not going to do the right thing, but the world still revolves around me and my decisions.” Toxic shit.

No, I’m talking about doubt as an agent of change. It can be a middle finger to the status quo and honest interrogation of why people around you “always do it this way.” The push back you’ll inevitably get from that heels dug in mentality should be your invitation to doubt even more.

If you question or doubt, a system, decision, policy or process which others are fully invested. If someone in a position of authority feels challenged by your doubt, stuff will get stirred up and brought out into the open.

In the words of my favorite Jurist, Louis Brandeis,

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants;”

Things will change. Now I’m not saying that they will always change for the better. We need to put ourselves in a position to do the work, question the thinking, offer alternatives, and let the results go.

It is how we build up our doubt muscle.

We do not attach ourselves to the outcome. We take pride in our investigation, in our curiosity, and our questioning. When we do this, we get better at the doubt game. Our questions become more pointed. We allow others to see the problems, not as something of their making, or their fault, but as an opportunity to get on the doubt train with you and develop more innovative solutions.

Where can you go to learn more?

Website: https://lessdoing.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arimeisel/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arimeisel

Twitter: https://twitter.com/arimeisel

Did I catch you working on a holiday? I know. It happens. We say, “I’m unplugging” or “No way I’m checking emails or doing work.”

But here we are — I’m writing a blog post and you’re reading it.

I carved out a little time this morning, before the kids wake up, to share a really cool story with you. So here goes:

Every week our small but mighty team gathers for a huddle call to check in about our monthly, weekly and daily goals and tasks.

If you’ve ever been to one of my Replaceable Founder Intensives, you know that we use Trello as our project management tool and as our focal point for weekly and monthly team meetings.

We sort the tasks assigned in Trello by team member and then each person gives an update on progress. It’s transparency and accountability in action. Every week. No excuses. So it’s not at all like this book club I used to go to where all we ever talked about is how we didn’t have time to read the book.

So, at this week’s meeting, Courtney our awesome COO shared her screen and the sorting and updating began, starting with her 25+ tasks.

Then she shared what Joanna and The Amys are accountable for, and each of them had at least 20 tasks populating the screen. I love Trello for this; with each team member shuffle, the screen fills with a new assortment of color-coded “cards” that describe the array of responsibilities each team member is in charge of.

(And, of course, each of these responsibilities equates to critical things that move the growth of the business forward.)

Lots of responsibilities mean lots of cards on the screen in front of us.

Then Courtney came to me…

She shuffled the cards again to reveal my activities for the week and suddenly the screen went from covered with cards to cleaner than Marie Kondo’s kitchen counter.

I had TWO, that’s right TWO critical items assigned to me:

1. Record a podcast episode.
2. Transfer my profit sharing from the business account to my personal account.

Yup. That’s it. Record my thoughts and take money out of the bank. That’s all I had to do this week to keep the business moving forward.

This is how it’s been lately.

I am doing less and less as it relates to the minutiae of the operation of the business and doing more and more as it relates to me simply being, for lack of a better word, the Inventor.

These days I’m pretty much just showing up as “the talent” for the business. I give talks, I show up on podcasts and give interviews. I meet with potential partners to explore larger growth opportunities for the company.

Do you know why I’m able to do this?

Well, we all agreed it’s because I am getting out of the way. I’ve put systems and processes into place that work insanely well without me.

I have become replaceable.

Can I get a “Hell Yeah”?

And here’s the kicker . . .

We had our best profit month ever last month, all because I’ve been able to successfully get out of the way and let my team do what they do best.

The less I do, the better the company is performing.

Let me say that again so it really sinks in for you because I know this is sometimes a hard concept to grasp…

I’m the founder and CEO and our numbers are proving to us that the less I do, the better the company is performing.

If you’re anything like our clients (which I’m guessing you are, because you probably wouldn’t be following me if you weren’t), then you probably see this scenario that I just described as the dream for you and your company.

And you know what? This scenario has been the dream for me too for a long time. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to get us here, and we’re still ironing out the edges, but it works, this Methodology I created. I have become my own best case study.

If you’d like to take a huge first step toward having this kind of freedom, why not join me in New York at my Replaceable Founder Intensives? I’ll only be teaching them LIVE three times this year. Take two minutes right now to secure a spot. Go to: less.do/nyc

And then, this time next year, I guarantee you won’t find yourself in the Target parking lot checking your emails while your kids pull on your hoodie, reminding you that you said, you weren’t going to be on your phone on vacation; wondering how you’re ever going to get out from under all the responsibilities you have foisted upon yourself.

You’ll be doing what you want, picking out LEGOs you’re gonna want to build and marveling at how big your kids seem to have gotten overnight. And you’ll be at peace.

Happy Replaceability Day!

If you want to become more replaceable, check out my free mini-course that teaches you the three main components. REPLACE YOURSELF