Building A Billion Dollar Business 101

I decided to re-commit to my business a month ago, after a few years of what I call the entrepreneurial rumspringa. Now, I ask myself just one question everyday: what's the constraint?

In the last 3 years I attempted to start 5 different businesses, all while listening to business podcasts, and taking business courses. This period could be summed up as an era of financially paralyzing shiny-object syndrome, since those distractions came at a cost. It's not a coincidence that I have not made any financial progress in the last several years while I've been stretched across multiple areas of interest. Thank goodness that I finally learned that the dabbling has to end if I am going to go far.

Also over the last few years, I have had many conversations with entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs about what leads to success. SO many people believe that success is largely luck, which doesn't sit right with me. There's a saying that "success leaves clues," which means it's gotta be a lot more than just luck, if clues = patterns of behavior.

All people have the same 24 hours in a day, so how are some people running billion dollar businesses and others get stuck for years at a time? From what I can tell, the entire formula for success -- whether it's done accidentally or intentionally -- is to remove the constraint of the business every time it gets stuck. This holy-grail concept is simple but not easy. Success requires that one both *recognizes* what is stopping the business growth and *refuses* to work on anything else until that thing is resolved. Most people cannot handle this. I heard someone say that being in business is like sitting in your living room with a trash fire next to you and being fine with it. And it's true! And not only is it true, but it's a skill to learn.

Every time I ask my small business owner friends if they know what their constraint is, they list 10 things at a time. I have yet to see someone in that category tell me outright "my constraint is x." I get the impression that small business owners, for the most part, would rather be naive to their constraint than be forced to identify it. Rather than narrow it down to just one bottleneck, they are more comfortable tackling multiple issues at once, even if that stalls their growth. The more I talk to them, the more I see how insanely common it is for this archetype to be ADD at full speed in multiple directions at once. This has helped me recognize it in myself, and I'm determined to put an end to that madness, cause I want that bag more than I want to indulge that ADD, if you know what I'm sayin'. I truly can't stand the idea that I've spent enormous amounts of time on work that could have literally just *not* been done at all, and my financial situation would not have changed a bit.

And I get it--it's UNCOMFORTABLE to try to name the ONE issue in a business. It requires that you stop to think and make a proper assessment, while knowing you could be totally wrong. It requires that you sacrifice things you *want* to be important cause it *feels* like it should be.

So what do I do to make sure I am working on the constraint and not just working for the sake of work? I meditate on it. I have started a practice of meditating every day on what the constraint is so that I can stop doing so much dumb work that leads to nothing. Even if there's 1,000 things on fire and they all need doing--doesn't matter to me anymore. It's a little bit counter intuitive because I have to STOP working and let my brain decompress until I can think clearly again. Sometimes it takes an hour to see the constraint, and sometimes it takes 5 minutes. If I have just finished a big project, I will full-on lay down until I know what's next. I started doing this several months ago and I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm starting to make progress after 3 years of stalling.

I have never removed more constraints from my business "at once" as I have in the last few months of being intentional about it. Just last week, my business's annual revenue grew a whopping 15% because of those intentional changes I made. Ya'll, I have been grinding every single day for several years now with no progress, to the point I started to believe that it was my market. Nope, no market issue, just me removing constraints so that my buyers can buy.

I think of solving the constraint like a hunt now. In business, once the bottleneck has been removed, it can quickly "jump" to another weak spot in the system. I find this fascinating. You can have one bottleneck today, remove it, and have a new one tomorrow. A really good chess player can see 7 or 8 moves ahead, and I think it's the same for a great CEO. After you train your mind to see the ONE constraint, you can start seeing the impending constraints behind it. Because, remember, there's not 1000 simultaneous constraints--there's just one at a time. If you're still reading this, THAT is the most important take away here. There's one bottleneck at a time only. Don't kid yourself that there are multiple constraints happening at once.

tl;dr work that doesn't solve the constraint of the business is wasted work because effort ≠ impact. We should always be working on, or searching for, the ONE constraint. If we do, our businesses will grow and we will be successful.

13 comments

Building A Billion Dollar Business 101