Show Notes
Andrea started her business 10 months ago as a side hustle. She thought she'd be further along. More revenue. More profit. Less time. She's considering quitting.
The wall is real. Around 9-10 months, the initial excitement burns off. The wins don't come fast enough. The inner voice says: call it a day.
Scott almost tapped out at nine months. If he had, he'd be in a corporate job today.
It's physics, not failure. Starting a business takes rocket launch energy. A side hustle splits that energy three ways: day job, family, business. If you're launching on a third of the fuel, the timeline is longer. Give yourself grace.
There are no bad goals. There are unrealistic time horizons. If you thought you'd be out of your job in a year, make it three. The goal isn't wrong. The timeline was.
The 30X training rule: If a task takes an hour a week, be prepared to spend 30 hours training someone to do it.
The control trap kills side hustlers. You only have a few hours. If you spend them running everything, you'll never get leverage.
When you're feeling defeated, stop. Look at your tasks. Is it $10/hour work or $1,000/hour work? If it's $10/hour, it's not meant for you.
The J-curve: Profitability dips when you hire. Then it rises. That's the trade.
The ones who break through aren't working harder. They're letting go of work they were never intended to do.
Congratulations. You are right on schedule.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
I was at an event last week and when I got done speaking, someone came up to me and she introduced herself as Andrea. And Andrea basically had a situation that I've seen all too many times and maybe you can associate with it as well. And here's her situation. She basically started her business 10 months ago as a side hustle. And what she told me is that she thought that she would be further along.
in her business than she actually was at that given moment. And she told me that she was putting in the hours, she was doing the work, but she had this perception that the business would be further along, that it would be easier, that the revenue would be higher, that the profit would be higher, that the business would take less time. And all of this felt overwhelming to her. And she was at the point where she was considering, like, do I keep going?
Or do I basically call it a day? And it's a very interesting question. And I want to answer that on this ⁓ episode today. So welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven figure businesses after leaving corporate America. My first one was the side hustle. I feel Andrea's pain. So that's why I want to address it here. Okay, so here's the deal. I think that a lot of people need to really
hear this and I hope that you hear this. If you're running a new business, if you're doing it as a side hustle, there's a wall that exists around the nine to 10 month period. It could come a little bit earlier, it could come a little bit later. And I've seen this wall happen to thousands of people. mean, I've helped over 2000 people work to start their businesses and it almost kind of comes with a cadence. Okay, this happens.
And see what happens is around that nine, 10 month period, well, basically the business becomes brutal. And the reason it becomes brutal is that you have burned through your initial excitement. The stuff that we launched with, the excitement, the hope, the joy, the dreams, they're gone. You've burned through that energy and the winds don't come fast enough. And then you get this resistance, this...
inner voice that comes to you and basically says, call it a day, punch out. And like I've said, I've seen this thousands of times. It is a pattern and it is a pattern that, well, I almost fell for at about the nine month period. That's how I know it's real. I live through this. My numbers weren't where they wanted, where I thought that they would be. I wasn't achieving what I thought I would achieve.
Basically what happened was I almost tapped out like I came so close and if I didn't I talk about in the book fix this next for real estate investors And if I would have tapped out then I probably wouldn't be here today. I'd probably be in a new corporate job Not living the dream life that well that we're all intended to live. Okay, like this is the this is the whole thing Now here's why this happens. You see starting a business takes rocket
⁓ Launch energy think about that for saying rocket launch energy it takes a lot of energy to get something off the ground Just just try to jump like gravity is gonna hold you down the same thing is gonna happen to your business Now a side hustle is Even worse and here's why that's because your energy the amount of energy that you have in a given day is split three ways your day job your family
and then this business that you're trying to launch. And if you're trying to launch a rocket on a third of the fuel, well, it doesn't mean that it's impossible. It just means that probably you gotta give yourself grace and that the timeline is gonna be longer and it's gonna take you longer to get to where you wanna be and the progress isn't gonna be as fast. So I think it's important that you acknowledge the physics that's taking place here.
And when you do that, you will stop beating yourself up and comparing other people. look, comparison is a real thing, right? Like you look around, you see people that maybe started around the same time that you did. Maybe they got lucky. By the way, if they've exceeded where you are, they probably have been lucky. But you know, it's the tortoise in the hair here. OK, there is no time horizon. You can say, I just...
I had this vision of being out of my job in a year. Well, make it three years. See, that is that is a time horizon that you set. Or maybe you're like, I really, really need this amount of income today. Well, you may not get it today, but there's nothing saying that you couldn't get it in 18 months from now. And in 18 months from now, it could be way beyond that number. But you have to just acknowledge the fact that you may not achieve what you want on your time frame.
There's no bad goals. There's unrealistic time horizons. And so this is really the point here is that what we have to do is in order for us to achieve what we want to achieve, we have to really get really good at kind of letting go of some of these things that we have built into our own system. Now, here's what really got me going and helped me to get beyond that little wall.
And it's something that really I've seen other people do as well. And so to me, it's really the way around this. And that is to leverage other people. Now, what I mean by that is you cannot do all of this on your own. And I see a lot of business owners, and I talked to a lot of business owners who they're solo preneurs. They're like, I do everything myself. I don't want employees. Well, there's a limit to how large you're going to grow. That's just the reality. And that's fine.
as long as that fits into your goals and your strategy and what you're trying to accomplish. But when you're launching a business as a side hustle, you only have a certain amount of time. And what you have to do is you have to get really, really good at giving up control and letting other people do the work that you hired them to do. Now, this is normally where I get pushed back. People are like, ⁓ hold on, hold on, hold on. You just said hire somebody.
I don't want to spend the money. Let me address that in one second. I'll get there. Now, the next pushback that I hear if it's not about the money is I can't hire good people. Well, look, sometimes hiring people is hard. It's especially hard in the beginning if you've never hired somebody.
Because if you haven't gone through this whole process of what it looks like to onboard an employee, it's going to be hard for you because it's not natural. There is no class in the world, in a school, even in a university that teaches delegation. doesn't have, like I have an MBA, right? Like I've gone through it. No one ever taught me how to delegate.
Corporate America, as I rose through the ranks, did not teach me how to delegate. They would tell you, you have to delegate. But nobody ever taught me proper handoff and proper onboarding of people. But you see, this is where you have to put some rules in. I have a rule, the 30X training rule. If I'm going to bring you onto my company and I'm going to ask you to do a task that takes me an hour a week, well, then I need to be prepared.
to spend 30 times that amount training you to do that job. So if it takes me an hour a week, I need to give you 30 hours of my time, not in one week, over your period before I expect you to be where you need to be. And people don't realize that that's the time that it takes, but it does. Now,
I've talked a lot about these traps, these four traps that exist in every single business. I don't care if it's a small business, big business, whatever it is that exists in every single business. The control trap is where the owner holds in the work. Okay, they become the bottleneck, whether they mean to or not, they really do. And that control trap kills side hustlers faster than, well, anything else that I know. Because you only have a few hours.
And if you spend those few hours a day trying to run everything, you will never get the traction or the leverage that you need. Now, here's the way that I want you to reposition your mindset here because it's also a mindset problem. You can bring people on, but then you also have to address that kind of that inner critic troll that's with you. And here's what I don't want you to do, or here's what I actually want you to do is when you're feeling down, what I
Don't want you to do is kind of say like, I'm tired. I just want to quit. I don't want you to do that. What I want you to do is I want you to look at where you're spending your time. So when you're feeling defeated, when you're feeling like this is impossible, I want you to stop.
and look at the tasks that you're doing right now.
Is it $10 an hour work or is it $1,000 an hour work? Think about that for a second. See, if it's $10 an hour work, $20 an hour work, then that means that it's not meant for you. But if it's $1,000 an hour work, that's the work that you need to be doing. And what happens is we get stuck in this low dollar amount work.
That is work that other people can leverage. And this is what I was saying earlier when I was saying that, like most people say, I don't want to spend the money. I get it. Because like, you may not have a lot of money there to spend. But here's the reality is that if you onboard somebody who can do that lower dollar amount work, and you get them really, really good at that so that you can spend your time on the higher dollar amount work.
the stuff that's going to bring you back more dollars. Now you're trading off. And so what I want you to really think about and when people tell me like, I don't want to spend the money. The one thing that I tell them is think about this as like a J. Okay. So like your profitability might be on some line here and then you hire someone and the lower hook of the J goes down. That's your profitability. goes down before it goes back up again. So if you trade
$10 an hour work, meaning like you pay someone $10 an hour, but now you can go do work that's gonna come back to you. Maybe it's sales marketing, something that's gonna bring you back more dollars. The trade off is the leverage and the leverage is gonna give you the push, but you need to kind of understand that it's a process and it's not a fun process. The fun left when you had, the fun left when you had
the business launch. That was the exciting days. Then you get into the grind days that I call the muddy mile. Now, if you're doing tasks that someone else could be doing, the other part of this is that you're burning rocket fuel on the wrong things. And remember, we're talking about managing your energy here. So the breakthrough isn't more grind for you. It's really the better use of your hours. So
If you fall within this wall or you know someone that is, I want you to know this is a real thing. It happens. And this is where a lot of people check out. They check out right here. This is where they punch out, I'm done. And I don't want that. I don't want you to do that. I don't want anybody to do that. So if you know someone that's hitting that wall, you have a duty to pull them along with you and say, you're not quitting. Give them this episode. No way.
I'm not letting you do it. And if you're doing it, I want you to come back to this episode anytime that you're feeling challenged because look, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen more than you think. Come back to this one and go, am I doing this? See, the ones who break through are not the ones that are working harder here. They're the ones that have let go of that lower dollar amount work. They're the ones that have let go of the work that you were never intended to do. And by the way, if you're listening this far,
And you're like, this is the wall that I'm at right now.
Congratulations. You are right on schedule. Now, if you have a business question, business challenge, I want you to head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. I read every single submission and I will see you in our next episode.
I was at an event last week and when I got done speaking, someone came up to me and she introduced herself as Andrea. And Andrea basically had a situation that I've seen all too many times and maybe you can associate with it as well. And here's her situation. She basically started her business 10 months ago as a side hustle. And what she told me is that she thought that she would be further along.
in her business than she actually was at that given moment. And she told me that she was putting in the hours, she was doing the work, but she had this perception that the business would be further along, that it would be easier, that the revenue would be higher, that the profit would be higher, that the business would take less time. And all of this felt overwhelming to her. And she was at the point where she was considering, like, do I keep going?
Or do I basically call it a day? And it's a very interesting question. And I want to answer that on this ⁓ episode today. So welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven figure businesses after leaving corporate America. My first one was the side hustle. I feel Andrea's pain. So that's why I want to address it here. Okay, so here's the deal. I think that a lot of people need to really
hear this and I hope that you hear this. If you're running a new business, if you're doing it as a side hustle, there's a wall that exists around the nine to 10 month period. It could come a little bit earlier, it could come a little bit later. And I've seen this wall happen to thousands of people. mean, I've helped over 2000 people work to start their businesses and it almost kind of comes with a cadence. Okay, this happens.
And see what happens is around that nine, 10 month period, well, basically the business becomes brutal. And the reason it becomes brutal is that you have burned through your initial excitement. The stuff that we launched with, the excitement, the hope, the joy, the dreams, they're gone. You've burned through that energy and the winds don't come fast enough. And then you get this resistance, this...
inner voice that comes to you and basically says, call it a day, punch out. And like I've said, I've seen this thousands of times. It is a pattern and it is a pattern that, well, I almost fell for at about the nine month period. That's how I know it's real. I live through this. My numbers weren't where they wanted, where I thought that they would be. I wasn't achieving what I thought I would achieve.
Basically what happened was I almost tapped out like I came so close and if I didn't I talk about in the book fix this next for real estate investors And if I would have tapped out then I probably wouldn't be here today. I'd probably be in a new corporate job Not living the dream life that well that we're all intended to live. Okay, like this is the this is the whole thing Now here's why this happens. You see starting a business takes rocket
⁓ Launch energy think about that for saying rocket launch energy it takes a lot of energy to get something off the ground Just just try to jump like gravity is gonna hold you down the same thing is gonna happen to your business Now a side hustle is Even worse and here's why that's because your energy the amount of energy that you have in a given day is split three ways your day job your family
and then this business that you're trying to launch. And if you're trying to launch a rocket on a third of the fuel, well, it doesn't mean that it's impossible. It just means that probably you gotta give yourself grace and that the timeline is gonna be longer and it's gonna take you longer to get to where you wanna be and the progress isn't gonna be as fast. So I think it's important that you acknowledge the physics that's taking place here.
And when you do that, you will stop beating yourself up and comparing other people. look, comparison is a real thing, right? Like you look around, you see people that maybe started around the same time that you did. Maybe they got lucky. By the way, if they've exceeded where you are, they probably have been lucky. But you know, it's the tortoise in the hair here. OK, there is no time horizon. You can say, I just...
I had this vision of being out of my job in a year. Well, make it three years. See, that is that is a time horizon that you set. Or maybe you're like, I really, really need this amount of income today. Well, you may not get it today, but there's nothing saying that you couldn't get it in 18 months from now. And in 18 months from now, it could be way beyond that number. But you have to just acknowledge the fact that you may not achieve what you want on your time frame.
There's no bad goals. There's unrealistic time horizons. And so this is really the point here is that what we have to do is in order for us to achieve what we want to achieve, we have to really get really good at kind of letting go of some of these things that we have built into our own system. Now, here's what really got me going and helped me to get beyond that little wall.
And it's something that really I've seen other people do as well. And so to me, it's really the way around this. And that is to leverage other people. Now, what I mean by that is you cannot do all of this on your own. And I see a lot of business owners, and I talked to a lot of business owners who they're solo preneurs. They're like, I do everything myself. I don't want employees. Well, there's a limit to how large you're going to grow. That's just the reality. And that's fine.
as long as that fits into your goals and your strategy and what you're trying to accomplish. But when you're launching a business as a side hustle, you only have a certain amount of time. And what you have to do is you have to get really, really good at giving up control and letting other people do the work that you hired them to do. Now, this is normally where I get pushed back. People are like, ⁓ hold on, hold on, hold on. You just said hire somebody.
I don't want to spend the money. Let me address that in one second. I'll get there. Now, the next pushback that I hear if it's not about the money is I can't hire good people. Well, look, sometimes hiring people is hard. It's especially hard in the beginning if you've never hired somebody.
Because if you haven't gone through this whole process of what it looks like to onboard an employee, it's going to be hard for you because it's not natural. There is no class in the world, in a school, even in a university that teaches delegation. doesn't have, like I have an MBA, right? Like I've gone through it. No one ever taught me how to delegate.
Corporate America, as I rose through the ranks, did not teach me how to delegate. They would tell you, you have to delegate. But nobody ever taught me proper handoff and proper onboarding of people. But you see, this is where you have to put some rules in. I have a rule, the 30X training rule. If I'm going to bring you onto my company and I'm going to ask you to do a task that takes me an hour a week, well, then I need to be prepared.
to spend 30 times that amount training you to do that job. So if it takes me an hour a week, I need to give you 30 hours of my time, not in one week, over your period before I expect you to be where you need to be. And people don't realize that that's the time that it takes, but it does. Now,
I've talked a lot about these traps, these four traps that exist in every single business. I don't care if it's a small business, big business, whatever it is that exists in every single business. The control trap is where the owner holds in the work. Okay, they become the bottleneck, whether they mean to or not, they really do. And that control trap kills side hustlers faster than, well, anything else that I know. Because you only have a few hours.
And if you spend those few hours a day trying to run everything, you will never get the traction or the leverage that you need. Now, here's the way that I want you to reposition your mindset here because it's also a mindset problem. You can bring people on, but then you also have to address that kind of that inner critic troll that's with you. And here's what I don't want you to do, or here's what I actually want you to do is when you're feeling down, what I
Don't want you to do is kind of say like, I'm tired. I just want to quit. I don't want you to do that. What I want you to do is I want you to look at where you're spending your time. So when you're feeling defeated, when you're feeling like this is impossible, I want you to stop.
and look at the tasks that you're doing right now.
Is it $10 an hour work or is it $1,000 an hour work? Think about that for a second. See, if it's $10 an hour work, $20 an hour work, then that means that it's not meant for you. But if it's $1,000 an hour work, that's the work that you need to be doing. And what happens is we get stuck in this low dollar amount work.
That is work that other people can leverage. And this is what I was saying earlier when I was saying that, like most people say, I don't want to spend the money. I get it. Because like, you may not have a lot of money there to spend. But here's the reality is that if you onboard somebody who can do that lower dollar amount work, and you get them really, really good at that so that you can spend your time on the higher dollar amount work.
the stuff that's going to bring you back more dollars. Now you're trading off. And so what I want you to really think about and when people tell me like, I don't want to spend the money. The one thing that I tell them is think about this as like a J. Okay. So like your profitability might be on some line here and then you hire someone and the lower hook of the J goes down. That's your profitability. goes down before it goes back up again. So if you trade
$10 an hour work, meaning like you pay someone $10 an hour, but now you can go do work that's gonna come back to you. Maybe it's sales marketing, something that's gonna bring you back more dollars. The trade off is the leverage and the leverage is gonna give you the push, but you need to kind of understand that it's a process and it's not a fun process. The fun left when you had, the fun left when you had
the business launch. That was the exciting days. Then you get into the grind days that I call the muddy mile. Now, if you're doing tasks that someone else could be doing, the other part of this is that you're burning rocket fuel on the wrong things. And remember, we're talking about managing your energy here. So the breakthrough isn't more grind for you. It's really the better use of your hours. So
If you fall within this wall or you know someone that is, I want you to know this is a real thing. It happens. And this is where a lot of people check out. They check out right here. This is where they punch out, I'm done. And I don't want that. I don't want you to do that. I don't want anybody to do that. So if you know someone that's hitting that wall, you have a duty to pull them along with you and say, you're not quitting. Give them this episode. No way.
I'm not letting you do it. And if you're doing it, I want you to come back to this episode anytime that you're feeling challenged because look, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen more than you think. Come back to this one and go, am I doing this? See, the ones who break through are not the ones that are working harder here. They're the ones that have let go of that lower dollar amount work. They're the ones that have let go of the work that you were never intended to do. And by the way, if you're listening this far,
And you're like, this is the wall that I'm at right now.
Congratulations. You are right on schedule. Now, if you have a business question, business challenge, I want you to head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. I read every single submission and I will see you in our next episode.