How To Escape The Valley Of Death

To quickly recap - 

If you’re working hard but profits aren’t increasing, it’s important to resist the urge to throw more time, people, or money into the problem. 

Adding more resources won’t get you out of the hole… it will just make the hole bigger.

Instead, you should - 

• Reduce complexity in the business - K.I.S.S., and
• Reassess your foundations (undoing and rebuilding areas from scratch if they’re not set up to scale)

On to my third piece of advice:

3. Step back.

I can virtually hear you yelling at the screen as I write this.

What do you mean Barry? How am I supposed to step away when I’m so damn busy?? Huh? HUH??

Look, as counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s absolutely required.

Truly observing what’s *really* going on with your business requires a bird’s eye view. You just can’t do it from the trenches.

Because when you’re in the trenches, you’re dealing with problems in such a reactive way that you actually solve them out of their correct order. 

Let me explain.

You could say that a business journey from one dollar to $1 million (and beyond) is really just a chain of problems to solve. 

You solve one, then another pops up. Then you solve that. Which causes another to pop up. And so on.

By the time your business is really booming, you’ve got problems sprouting other problems like old potatoes. And your business is complex, so it’s easy to lose sight of how the problems relate to each other. 

This is important...

Kind of like the Butterfly Effect, a problem in accounting could be impacting your delivery team. An inefficiency in your marketing efforts could be strangling your sales process. And so on...

From the trenches, your chain of business problems feels like a messed up jumble. And each problem is trying to get your attention.

Just say the problem at Chain Link #12 is a really noisy bugger. 

It’s in your face, annoying you every single day with the power of 5 hungry three-year-olds. 

So you hop in at Link 12 and solve that one. Tick!

But the problem at Link 12 was mostly caused by the problem way back at Link 3…

So you haven’t resolved the root of the problem. And it’s going to grow back. 

Oh, if only you’d had the perspective to solve the problem at Link 1 first...

If only you had stepped back to see the big picture.

… Get what I mean? 

If you want help freeing yourself up to step out for that bird’s eye view, hit reply and let me know. 

I’ll hook you up with a resource that our Opulence members use to free up 10+ hours a week.