The EntreMD Podcast

Why Entrepreneurs Get Stuck After Crossing $1M in revenue

February 12, 2024 Dr. Una Episode 403
The EntreMD Podcast
Why Entrepreneurs Get Stuck After Crossing $1M in revenue
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Embark with me on a transformative journey through the lifeblood of entrepreneurship—growth, pitfalls, and the exhilarating climb to success. Picture this: my own venture, Entremity, started from humble beginnings, accelerating past the $260,000 revenue landmark by embracing the collective wisdom of group coaching. But it's not all smooth sailing. We're tackling the tough stuff too—burnout, failing systems, and the illusion of growing revenue masking dwindling profits. It's a candid look at the evolution each entrepreneur must undergo, transitioning from a hands-on business operator to a visionary leader who secures sustainable expansion without the personal toll.

Now, let's talk about the game-changer: building the right team. I open up about the pivotal moment when strategic hiring became non-negotiable, the profound sense of relief when I first delegated, and the palpable freedom that followed. We're not just filling positions; we're cultivating thinkers, outcome-driven dynamos who can steer the ship, allowing you to focus on charting the course. Navigating the inherently messy waters of entrepreneurship becomes less daunting with a strong crew by your side. If you're on the cusp of that million-dollar milestone, teetering on the edge of overwhelm, or simply seeking to amplify your business's impact, this episode is your call to action—the potential of a capable, outcome-focused team awaits.

Additional Resources:


When you are ready to work with us, here are three ways:

  • EntreMD Business School Accelerator - If you are looking to make a 180 turnaround in your business in 90 days, this is the program for you.
  • EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
  • EntreMD Business School Scale - This is our high-level mastermind for physicians who have crossed the seven figure milestone and want to build their businesses to be well oiled machines that can run without them.

To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

Well, hello, hello, my friend, Welcome back to another episode of the Entremity podcast and, as always, I'm super pumped to be in your ears. And today we're going to talk about something that really could be an absolute game changer for you, some of you. You are right in the middle of what we're going to talk about. Some of you, this is something that you are headed towards, and so this is going to save you a lot of pain and suffering. Um, some of you have actually experienced this and come on the other side of it, but this principle holds true and you're going to get to this point again, and so maybe you didn't understand what happened the first time. Uh, this time you're going to understand it and you're going to be ready to handle it. So what we're going to be looking at is really the thing that makes people get to a point in business and get stuck. Okay. So, for instance, in the beginning stages, you may have um gotten this really great idea for a business that you want to run and let me use Entremity as an example right? So, um, I you know, yes, there's this idea um that physicians need to acquire um business skills so they can run really successful businesses and so they can help a lot of people and they can create financial freedom and time freedom for themselves, which is amazing. Um, it does take, um you know, a lot to get it off the ground. It is very doable, there's a framework to do it, but it does require work. And so a lot of times in the beginning there's that hurdle, right Getting to the first hundred thousand dollars in revenue, and there's a lot there to do with visibility, right, like, um, getting your name out there, putting yourself in front of people who don't know you, letting them know what you do, making offers, doing all of those kinds of things. Okay, all right, so we did that and we crossed the hundred thousand dollar um milestone. And then the following year, um, it's really kind of around doing a little bit more of the same right, but revving it up, and you already have some credibility to go off, some visibility to go off of, but you're you're really amplifying that maybe you go from, like I did, one on one coaching to group coaching and all of those kinds of things to just, you know, expand the bandwidth you have to to create these results. And so we did that and it got us to our first two hundred and sixty thousand dollars the following year. And then you know you keep going and all of those kinds of things. But typically, um, you can get away with doing a lot of things yourself, leaning on, you know, maybe one team member and then a bunch of contractors and all of those things, and you can really get your way to a million. Or you can get your way to two million, maybe even Um. But typically when you get to a million to two million, it looks like now nothing is working, and I'll explain what I mean by that. And so maybe when you started off your business, you're like you know, I'm tired of being burned out, I want to be my own boss, I want to create my own hours and all those kinds of things. And when you were at a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, even, it was like, oh, this is amazing, right, because maybe you're bringing in more revenue than you've ever bought it, you're taking home more than you've ever taken it in Um, but you're working less and it's wonderful. But as you get to one million, two million there about, you start experiencing the familiar signs of burnout and you're like, wait a minute, uh, what did I do? I escaped the burnout somebody else created and I created, and I created my own burnout, right, um, you start noticing that the systems you had that were wonderful. We're creating amazing results for your clients, and I mean it was just beautiful. Now the systems are falling apart, in a way, things are falling through the cracks. You're getting complaints you've never gotten before and you're like what in the world? Okay, and then for some people, you even notice that your revenue is going up, and even when you talk about it, you realize that your revenue really is a vanity metric, because even though the revenue has gone up, the expenses have gone up faster, and so your revenue is higher, but your profits are less Right, and so it's just like wait a minute, like hold up. What in the world is going on? Right, what is going on? And you know there are many things, there are many factors here and many things to talk about, but I want to focus on one of those things today. Um, and the root of this particular problem that triggers this is that your business may have evolved much faster than you have, and the business requires a different kind of leader, and your evolution is required to become the kind of leader who can lead that company, who can take you to the next level while creating time and financial freedom, while not burning hours, while having systems that are involved in all of those kind of things. Right, so so? So, this is the way I want you to look at it. Okay, now, one of the biggest problems that creates this problem is that we don't have the right teams. So we may have started off by ourselves with a few team members maybe eight team members and a bunch of contractors but a lot of times, the people we hire in the beginning phases of our businesses are people who can do tasks. They may be excellent at it, but they're people who do tasks. They're people who are producers. They're not necessarily your thinkers, and so, while they take a significant amount of things off your plate, you are still stuck with all the thinking. You are the only person really driving all the results, and now your business is at a place where it requires more than one person. Okay, so this is a way to look at it. In the beginning of your business, maybe you're a 20% activity, and when I talk about 20% activity, this is based off of the Pareto principle, which says that 20% of your activities will create 80% of your results, and 80% of your activities will create 20%. And so, as an entrepreneur, as a leader, one of the things you want to do is you want to live in the 20%. Why? Because 20% there are fewer activities, but they're more high yield activities, right. The problem with the 80% is just so many things but it creates so little results, right. So we don't want to live there. We want to live in the 20%. So the thing about the 20% is there's no standard 20% activity. That 20% evolves as your business evolves, as you evolve as a leader, right? So in the beginning of your business, there are things that you did that were part of your 20% responding to every single thing on social media, doing all of your social media thing, editing your videos, all of that Like, maybe you did all of that and that was good and well, because your content, the conversations you were having, the offers you were making all of those things were the things that were driving your results. But as your business gets bigger, some of those things then become 80% activities, where you now need other people who will do that. Right, and so I want you to start thinking that way. So a lot of times when we get stuck at that million or two million, is because now a different 20% is required of us. But we're still doing the 20% from way back when. And those 20% things probably still need to be done, but they need to be done by your team so you can up level the 20% activities that you're doing right. And so, for instance, you know when I think about what I do at this stage in my business, you know, if I want to live in my zone of genius and live in this 20%, my core activities really are around coaching. Right, like the direct coaching that I do is around content creation. And when I say content creation, I'm talking about, you know, for my podcast, my YouTube channel, creating curriculum for the on-trendy business school, creating the frameworks, creating the books, like all of that is all about that's downloading all this IP that I'm walking around with in ways that are, you know, like higher and higher level, ways that will help my people get bigger and bigger results, right. So there's the coaching, there is the content, and then there's a collaboration, and collaboration really is with two groups of people. One is with my team, where I understand it is my, it is my responsibility to catch, to cast vision. It is my responsibility to coach them up, to hold them to the higher standards possible, to help them. You know, help me accomplish the vision while accomplishing their vision right, and so we're creating this really beautiful win-win situation. And the other part of the collaboration is really around. You know, building relationships with people who have all the people I need to talk to right, like, my mission is to help 100,000 physicians Well, I don't know 100,000 physicians, right, but I know all these people who lead communities of physicians, people who are stakeholders in the healthcare space, people who are decision makers, and all these, like these are relationships that I need to cultivate, right, so. So the other stuff is is noise, right, like they, all these other this, all these other things that really my team takes care of, right, so that I can sit in this area and, you know, like, do the work that only I can do and do it at the highest level. I keep evolving, keep doing it at a higher, higher levels, like I invest so heavily in being able to upgrade my leadership, upgrade my ability to create visibility, upgrade my understanding of business and business concepts so I can simplify it and so that, as doctors, this becomes something that is readily accessible to us, and you know like to be able to sit in that. There is no way to do that without team. Without team, I'll be stuck addressing every single customer service thing, addressing every single email. You know, like creating my content myself in, in, in, in Canva. I would like. There's so many things that just need to come off my plate and not to get people who would do tasks, but people who I can delegate outcomes to. For instance, in my private practice, I can meet with my practice administrator and I can delegate actual outcomes. This are the number of patients we want to see this month. This is what we want our gross collection ratio to be. This is how many reviews we want to have the how. She can figure out the how because she's a high capacity team member, right, I don't have to deal with the how, and so when we have our meetings, we're talking about outcomes, we're talking about this, we're running through strategy and all of those kind of things, but she's not a task, she's not a producer, she's not somebody who just runs tasks. She's someone I can offload the task and the thinking of the task to write, and so one of the primary things that keeps people stuck when they get to that one, maybe two million dollar mark is that they do not have the team that allows them to offload what is now the 80% so they can adopt the new 20% right. And so I want you to, as we talk about this, I want you to think about you know, like, how do you do that? I want you to think about you know, like, your role, how you are leading, what kind of team you have, the things that you have on your plate. Are you in your 20%? Are you in your 80%? Like, where are you? What is your next critical hire? These are things you need to think about if you truly want to have, want to grow your business, you want to have a significant impact, you're in hyper growth and all of those things you cannot escape. The team team is so important. So, for instance, in the on trendy business school, there is a tier of the on trendy business schools called scale, and this is for entrepreneur, physician entrepreneurs who have crossed the one million dollar mark or dangerous and close to it, and they're in hyper growth, and for, you know, since the beginning of the year. So we're talking about six weeks at this point, we have been talking about team and leadership. The entire time, like the entire focus of the first quarter of the year is team. Why, once that is in place, it is unbelievable how much like I don't know how to describe it right the amount of freedom to then up level right, it's unbelievable the amount that you create. So I want you to think about this. Okay, so I have homework for you. This is really an episode you're going to listen to, come back to listen to again and come back to, but what I want you to do is I want you to do an audit. Okay, so audit number one I want you to audit your team. What kind of team do I have? Do I have a team of people who are only people who can do tasks that I can't? Really, I can't delegate any outcomes to right, because I have to tell them how to do everything they cannot. You know, take an outcome and run and say, okay, this is the plan and go for it. Right, what kind of team do I have? That's number one. Number two you want to start thinking which of my team members are people who can be coached up where you know? Okay, have this person and they're hungry, they want to do more and they have the capacity to do more, but I've not been able to I haven't been a present leader to coach them up, to cast vision, To show them what they could be doing, to show them how to do it. You know, like I haven't been able to do any of those. So who are the people on your team who could come up to the next level? Okay, and then the third thing to think about is what is my next critical hire? Like, okay, I'm at this level, dr, you're right, I'm at a million dollars, I'm at one point, five million dollars, and you know, my books look good, but I'm miserable because there's so much on my plate I I can't. I don't even have white space to think on all of those kind of things. Who is the next critical hire? Like, this person is somebody that is not Someone who just does tasks, but this is someone who could be responsible for outcomes but, at the same time, the outcomes that they're gonna take off your plate is one hire that, once you get this person on board, it will be like a breath of fresh air, like breath of, I mean, like beautiful fresh air. Who is that person right, and you want to kind of document that on and what would they do, what would their job description be and all of that, and actually start looking for that person, start looking for it. Okay, so this is kind of the conversation I want to leave you with, because this is the deal I remember when I first started engaging in this process. You know well, for the second go around, because I did it for my practice a long time ago, but I did it again, you know, cuz you know, my private practice for the last two years has really run without me, right, I have a, I have a great team on board with that. And then, you know, with entree and D, I got to this point where I had to start doing this. I had to start doing this over again and, you know, get into that point and really bringing the team on board and doing the work and all of that, which is still, you know, like it's always going to be an ongoing process. But I remember Delegating the first time I got like a high capacity executive assistant and I got so much stuff off my plate that I almost became a little confused. I was like, what am I going to do with all this free time? Like, what am I going to do with it? Right, and of course I was evolving, so of course it didn't take me long to figure out what to do at the time, but it's that level of freedom that it creates for you, so that you can then ascend and do higher level tasks that will bring even bigger Results. Okay, so this is something that is available to you, so I want you to think about bigger results in less time, with no burnout, with more financial freedom, not only for you, but you know you're creating opportunities for your team, and now you've learned this, so this becomes something that you continue to do, better and better and better, so you can continue to have a bigger impact in less and less time. That is something that could be an absolute reality for you, and I want you to start embracing that process, and I will tell you about the process that it is somewhat messy, but if you're an entrepreneur you've made it to the million dollar mark then you do know that all of entrepreneurship is messy, right, we just learn to be okay with the mess, right, and just grow and clean up as we go, and so I want to invite you, even if it seems messy, even if you seems onshore, that you you started embracing that whole process. But because I'm telling you, once you figure out the team piece, business becomes so much more beautiful, so much more beautiful. When I talk to the doctors in EBS scale and I look at what they're building and the teams they're building, it's just phenomenal to see what happens once you start getting high capacity people on your team who can take outcomes, like you just say, this is a problem, fix the problem. You don't have to come up with the how you know. I mean like it's, it's fantastic. So I want that for you and, of course, if you're, if you're like doctor, when I hear you, but I really do need support on how to do this Like I don't even want to try to do this by myself. Well, of course you know that we're always available to support. So you can, you know, book a team, a call with my team to figure out how we can support you. It's on tramdcom forward slash call and we'll be happy to do that with you. Okay, well, as always, thank you so much for listening and please, for every physician entrepreneur that you know, this is an episode you want to share with them. They are going to thank you forever because this is one of the most painful parts of business. If it's not figured out, okay, so share it with the doctors in your life, share it with on social media. You can tag us hashtag on tramd and let me know the biggest nugget you got from this and I will see you, my friend, on the next episode of the on tramd podcast.

Business Evolution
Hiring the Right Team's Importance