The curse of capability

I've built 3 businesses and helped many others do the same. It's almost always a slow and painful process — until you understand what's actually keeping you stuck.

In the last couple of years, you've started a business, and if you're like any other entrepreneur/founder, you probably thought it was something you were good at, and you had a goal of achieving financial freedom or at least getting out of corporate life.

You have many skills, you've done thousands of presentations, managed people, talked to 100s of clients, you figured that since I can do all that, the natural progression would be to open shop and start your own business.

You started facing one problem after another in your newly founded business. Your skills helped you navigate the first few hurdles, but all of a sudden, things started to get complex; every problem came knocking hard: not enough customers, difficult clients, and a limited support system around you, to name a few.

You would solve some of these problems, put off some, and you get stuck at some. Now, you feel stuck, the business is not growing, and you've no clue why. You try a couple of new things, try to seek help through books, watching videos, you try a few things, but none of it works. so you keep trying some more, looking for this new idea that will change the business forever.

The Trap — Why smart entrepreneurs build complex businesses

You keep choosing the hard things to do. You are smart, and your ability to handle complexity makes you look for complex things to solve. Complexity feels like progress, feels like you are putting in the effort, you are earning your keep. It feels good, feels familiar, it has worked before, it should work now.

Yet reality is unfolding a different story, a story of struggle, a story of pain and suffering, a story where nothing feels like it's working.

If anything, you are building a job instead of a business, you are doing the familiar, you are doing the things you've done in the past, to the extent that you are re-creating the past, you are recreating your old job in a new frame.

The Leverage Founder wins

Try looking at your business from another perspective for a second. Let's see it from an investor's point of view. Say you are given the following business to look at and see if it's a viable investment opportunity

• The founder is in it deep; everything depends on them.

• The underlying processes and systems of the business look very complex and interdependent; they are not very evident. If you ask the entrepreneurs themselves, they can't even point them out.

• There is no clear way that the business gets customers; it looks like it happens through fragmented ways, some referrals, some online, and no coherent system is in place.

You, as an investor now, will you invest in a business like this? I know I wouldn't.

But it doesn't have to be that way; there's another type of founder who is often overlooked, sometimes even portrayed negatively. Some call them simple, not capable, ignorant, or lazy. a founder who looks at the complex and says, "I don't want that."
I want a simple, straightforward way. I do this, and I get a ton of money. As simple as that.

Meet the type:

• Knows nothing about making things that move, builds the first mass-produced car — Henry Ford

• Knows nothing about animation, builds the world's most beloved entertainment empire — Walt Disney

• Knows nothing about flying planes, launches an airline with a borrowed jet — Richard Branson

Not being the expert frees you from having to be the best at doing something and keeps you curious, thinking about the problem and who can help you instead of how you can fix it.

It keeps you at the strategy level and allows you to ask for expert help. The ultimate form of human collaboration. Business is a team sport. Don't play alone.

Stress test your model

If you want to put your business on the fast track and you are now ready to ask who, not how, start by asking:

Whether your target is $100K or $5M, the question is the same.

If I keep doing what I'm doing right now consistently, will I get to $10 Million?

If the answer is yes, then you have a winning formula; however, in most cases, the answer is no. When the target is big enough, you know you can't do it alone, and that doesn't mean you need to add 10 people to your team.

If your current strategy won't do it, the answer is not to add more — more people, more channels, more tactics. The answer is to subtract. Strip it down until you find the one thing that works, then go all in on that. Here's the framework:

One traffic source, one conversion channel, and one delivery system. This should make you a million-dollar business before you think about adding more.

Founders fail not because they lack the opportunity, but because they are chasing ten things all at once and mastering none. The 1:1:1 rule fixes that:

• One traffic source to fill your pipeline

• One conversion method to turn strangers into buyers

• One delivery system to give them what they are looking for

That's it. That's your entire business strategy. Until you've mastered all three, you have nothing to scale.

The pivot

"What complexity are you holding onto right now because you like doing it - not because it's the right thing to do for the business?"

Ask yourself that. Regularly, over and over again.

Don't build your business around your capabilities; build your business around systems that are simple, surround yourself with the right people, which in turn makes the business easy to scale.

The most dangerous thing a capable person can do is to try to prove they can handle something that never should have been built in the first place

Simplification is a prerequisite of scaling; you can't scale complex, simple scales.

Having a complexity that you feel is holding back, or suspecting one? Shoot me a reply and let me know why you think it's holding you back. I'll shoot you an email with my best ideas, and we can have a coffee chat about it.

Stay awesome, happy building.

Best,
Bialy