“The 3 Evil Es” That Almost Killed My Business
Summary
- Don't set unrealistic expectations for your business's growth; shifting from outcome-based to process-based expectations can prevent you from making hasty decisions that might harm your business.
- Avoid letting emotions drive business decisions; I recommend slowing down decision-making when emotional and making key decisions from a state of contentment and gratitude.
- Be cautious with expenses; don't hire or spend in anticipation of growth. Let the growth justify the expenses. This minimizes the risk of jeopardizing your business.
- Tackle one issue at a time, focusing on excellence in what you do, which will lead to more stable emotions and fewer unnecessary expenses.
- I believe setting wrong expectations is the most dangerous of the evils because it's based on beliefs that can be rigid. Reframe these as assumptions to remain flexible and open to change.
- Keep a high standard for your process and focus on over-delivering to customers, which in turn will keep your business's emotional and financial health in check.
- Remember, good process drives good results; focus on refining your business processes, and the outcomes will follow.
Video
How To Take Action
A good way of doing business is to focus on what you can control. Start with setting realistic goals. Don't think you have to make a million dollars in six months. The goal is to get better every day at what you do. This means take your time, work on your business processes, and strive for excellence, not just big numbers.
When you're making decisions, slow down. If you're feeling rushed or really excited, wait a day. Sleep on it. Make big choices when you feel calm and thankful. You'll think clearer and make smarter calls for your business.
Be careful with spending money. Don’t hire new people or buy stuff just because you think you're going to grow. Let the growth happen first, then spend the money. Think of your budget like a fortress – you want to keep it strong and secure.
Fix one problem at a time too. This will keep you from getting stressed and spending on things you don't need. Make sure everything you do is the best it can be. That way, customers will love your service, and you'll feel better too.
Remember, good work leads to good things happening. Keep practicing and getting better. If you do good work and treat people right, growth will come. Don't rush – take it one step at a time and watch your business get stronger.
Quotes by Alex Hormozi
"Good process drives good results"
– Alex Hormozi
"We want to be intolerant of anything other than excellence but focused far more on the process than the outcome"
– Alex Hormozi
"When you're making decisions, try and extend the space"
– Alex Hormozi
"Keep the expectations driven around process not outcome"
– Alex Hormozi
"When you reverse it the other way, you'll start making terrible decisions"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
what's going on everyone it's alex mosey uh ceo of alid prestige labs gym launch we've done 120 million dollars in sales the last four years and so today what i want to talk about is the three entrepreneurial evil ease of entrepreneurship all right so these are the three kind of ease that i that i see over and over again from the entrepreneurs that we work with directly in our portfolio companies but also in the entrepreneurs that i talk to in general the biggest mistakes that are made stem from these three evil ease and so what i'm going to do is i'm gonna i'm gonna walk through all three of them i'll tell you an easy way to try and at least attenuate the mistakes that you can make from them and then at the end i'll show you the one that i think is actually the the most evil of them all all right so the first e is expectations all right and the reason that this one is so evil is that most of the time us entrepreneurs we think that everything has to happen immediately right i had an entrepreneur not that long ago reach out to me and say hey how can you know if we work together how can you guarantee that i'm going to get to a million dollars a month within the next six months and they were currently i think doing a hundred thousand dollars a month um and that kind of expectation and mindset is literally what will destroy you in business because what happens is you set these arbitrary because all the goals are arbitrary for the most part right these numbers that in your mind make you feel good or make you feel accomplished and you set these things up there with not a huge path of getting there and you put an arbitrary timeline on it and then you try and force yourself into it and so it ends up happening is you take shortcuts you make hasty high risk decisions and most of the time you end up destroying the business and taking 10 steps backwards and so expectations that we set for ourselves and our teams we want to be intolerant of anything other than excellence but focused far more on the process than the outcome so if you could shift the expectations from outcome-based expectations to process-based expectations and then meet that with the intolerance of excellence right or tolerating only x links excuse me then you can help mitigate expectation evils right where you basically destroy your business as a result of thinking that you have to be a million dollars a month or a hundred thousand dollars a month or ten thousand a month or whatever that number is for you by x time right what i see again and again and again of the people who make way more money than i do is they have reasonable expectations that would be unreasonable to achieve based on process right i have a mentor right now who who always repeats the same thing he says good process drives good results and i just that's that's been something i've been trying to ingrain in my mind good process drives good results all right so that's evil number one the second evil is emotions all right the second thing that will kill your business all right if you look at the biggest ceos in the world you look at the bezos as you look at you know you look at you look at monger you look at buffett you look at all these guys right and what you may notice is that they are very devoid of emotion and it's not that they're like emotionless people it's more so that they try and stay as even-handed as possible with the decisions and this is just something that i've observed and so here's a telltale sign that you can tell for yourself if you're if you're suffering from this because sometimes it's hard especially for guys for us to be like i'm emotional right now right but like we're human we have emotions and so if you're if you're looking and you flip flop a lot on decisions as in you're presented the same data and one day you feel this way and another way you feel another day you feel this way and literally how you process the decision flip-flops all the time it's because you're being subject to emotions now if you look at the trajectory of a business and the and the the hundreds and thousands of decisions that we have to make as an entrepreneur you could see how quickly these thousands of decisions can spin this way or this way on this path based on your emotions and it can be the right way or the wrong way and so i'll give you here's here's two two pieces to this it's it's very difficult to eliminate emotions right but if you can detect when you are emotional then you can decrease the speed of your decision-making which is usually contrary to what most people do when they are emotional they speed up their decision-making process when they're in emotions all right and so if you feel urgency so for me these are these are things that are like red flags if i feel like i have to make a decision by today or whatever most times it's completely fictitious and made up in my mind and so what i try and do is extend the time horizon between uh the the feeling i have and when i actually decide to take action i can't tell you the amount of huge mistakes that i was able to avoid simply by sleeping it off right giving my myself 24 hours to think on it right and a lot of times the entire world looks different when you wake up in the morning and so that should frighten you because it frightens me how can the world look so different only you know after nine hours of sleep right it's because our emotional state's different and so this is a a tactic that i do like a lot um for managing emotions so the best decisions that we make for ourselves in my opinion or that i have made for myself have come from a state of contentment and so there have probably been a moment that's why when you go on vacation you feel like you have a lot of clarity it's because you're in the correct emotional state to make the right decisions because you're not operating from a place of scarcity right you're not operating from a place of have to you're not operating from a place of deficiency where i am not good enough right when you're operating from a place of contentment um and i'm not saying we're always content that's not my point right the point is that you could probably recognize those times where you sit back and you're feeling great you know you have a lot of gratitude for an experience or or things that give you perspective and so it's in those time periods where you should make big decisions for your life and then know that you made them in the proper emotional state this is something that i'm actively focused a lot on for me because the being in the correct making the right call is basically my only job now it's really just proper decision making and so when i sense myself in a well-rested content you know full of gratitude mood that is when i want to look at my most complex issues my most complex multi-variable you know decisions and say this is what i think the best course of action is and then sticking with that even when the the the trials and tribulations that are inevitably going to happen as a result of the decision later down the road and so that's my that's my hack is i can't get around emotion i try and extend time horizons whenever i feel urgency and then if um if i'm going to make emotions from an emotional state i try and go from a place of contentment and gratitude and if i do not feel that state i don't usually make the decision so think about that so if you have like moments when you're playing with your kids and you look back you're like man life's awesome that's when you make the decisions that you need to make about your life all right because from there you'll be operating with a much longer time horizon and that's i think my way i think this this is doing it that way will trick yourself into extending your time horizon which ultimately will lead to better decision making and the third e um of the third evils evil oops i'm writing down evil um is or are excuse me are expenses all right so the first two one is what you think should happen the emotions affect how you think it should happen and the expenses are the the the it's like the cloud and the dirt right are the things that that we incur along the way that increase the risk of it not occurring right so if you think about expenses in general they are liabilities they are risk that we take on and so if if our goal is as entrepreneurs is to increase our upside and decrease our downside right that is kind of entrepreneurship and business in general right then actively thinking about decreasing our downside our liabilities is a way of increasing the likelihood that our expectations are met right and so one of the biggest mistakes and biggest evils that will destroy entrepreneurial businesses is because they set massive expectations when they are emotional and emotionally deficient because they need to satisfy you know emotional needs that their parents didn't meet when they were kids they then incur expenses that they shouldn't otherwise have to meet these demands that are completely arbitrary and made up in their minds right and so i see this what happen all the time it's like hey we want to scale we just hired four more people so that we can scale it doesn't work that way get the growth first and then the growth will pay for the people don't put the cart in front of the horse the only exception to this is if you have like commission only uh you know reps like sales reps things like that but most other times 99 of other times when you are incurring greater expenses it's not like it's it should not be to quote anticipate growth right growth will pay the expenses and if you need to quote delay something for a smaller period of time so that you can shore up your infrastructure then you can do that and you would be amazed at how much flexibility there is right it's much easier to solve problems with cash in the bank with with contracts signed and you're an entrepreneur like solving problems is what we do right and so if you're in that state think about how much you eat like if you need to if you have the immediate demand right you will solve the problem and the people will come i promise you all right one of the biggest mistakes that i mean i've made this one so many times um i hired 25 support reps in anticipation of growth for our supplement company prestige labs two years ago and i currently now have four people that handle more business than the 25 did think about that and so what happens is when you anticipate growth you don't even know what the growth is going to look like and so you basically just put people there the culture of the team decreases the morale of the team decreases they're being less efficient and when you have lots of people you don't think about driving good process right you just think like we'll just throw more bodies at the problem and that's a horrible way to go about business it's also not a good customer experience in the long run and so if we can adjust our expectations to be reasonable and based on process not outcome by managing our emotions and making decisions from a place of contentment right so that we don't set these deficient expectations on ourselves and our business that we have to satisfy because we must be a certain way by this time then we won't incur expenses and risk that is undue and not necessarily that will that will likely destroy our business when it was a hundred percent based on our false made-up expectations about what we thought should happen should and so when i look at the things that undo entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial businesses these are the three evil e's expectations emotions and expenses and i told you at the beginning that i would share the one that i think is the most deadly and it's this guy in my opinion expectations because what we believe because these are basically beliefs just said differently right another way to say this and this is this is a really a really good way that i got from a different coach to reframe beliefs is she said if you just call all your beliefs assumptions they will be far more malleable and it's such a it's words matter right and if we call our beliefs assumptions they become far more changeable for ourselves and so if i say this is my assumption what do you guys think rather than this is my expectation what do you guys think see how different that feels but they function the same way right but one of them is approachable one of them is malleable one of them can take new feedback and new inputs and new data and the other one is a must a should a have to right and so if we can readjust our expectations right and be focused on our product over delivering delighting the customers right being intolerant of anything but excellence in the process and because of that our emotions stay more stable because we're not missing goals that we have to hit right which then create more scarcity more deficiency more more guttural feelings that then make us shorten our decision-making loops that cause poorer decisions and then cause us to make poor decisions that create expenses all right so this is a loop that self-reinforces and it can either be a virtuous or vicious cycle and so it starts at the top and spins all the way around and so those are the three evil ease of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial mistakes that hopefully you can use some of these tactics to to avoid all right don't don't hire before you need it let the growth pay for the expenses when you're making decisions try and extend the the space this is what i found effective for me and try and make decisions from a point of gratitude and contentment and then keep the expectations driven around process not outcome and if you can keep the high like keep your high expectations but keep them on process not on what has to happen because when you reverse it the other way you'll start making terrible decisions so anyways i hope that was valuable for you i hope that makes sense like you know subscribe all the all the dings and whistles that you know youtube folks are supposed to say so anyways lots of love keep being awesome i'll catch you guys on the flip side bye