Show Notes
You captured the frictions. Post-it notes on the wall. You know what's broken. So why don't you fix it?
The Resistance. Steven Pressfield calls it the invisible force that stops you from doing work you know you should do. The inner critic trolls that sit on your shoulder. They show up as procrastination, perfectionism, "I'll get to it next week," or "I need more research first."
In business, the Resistance hides inside four specific traps. If you don't know which trap you're in, you'll keep fighting the wrong battle.
Trap 1: The Control Trap. You or someone on your team becomes the linchpin. All information, decisions, and approvals flow through one person. You think you're maintaining quality. You've actually become the bottleneck.
Trap 2: The Variability Trap. The output depends on who does the work. One person does it this way, another does it differently. Results are inconsistent. Most people think this is a people problem. It's a systems problem.
Trap 3: The Memory Trap. Work depends on someone remembering to do something. Calendar reminders, to-do lists, Post-it notes everywhere. Every time execution relies on memory, you've created a point of failure. People forget. People get sick. Things fall through the cracks.
Trap 4: The Visibility Trap. You don't have the information to manage your business. Flying blind on financial data, customer data, operational data. You can't fix problems you can't see. You end up solving the wrong thing.
The diagnostic questions:
- Control: "If I disappeared for two weeks, would the business keep running?"
- Variability: "Does the output depend on who does the work?"
- Memory: "How much work relies on someone remembering?"
- Visibility: "Do I have the data to make this decision?"
Which traps are you in? Be honest—probably at least two. Maybe all four.
Over the next episodes, Scott goes deep on each trap: how to diagnose it, how to escape it, and how it connects to the SCALE framework.
The bottom line: Think about a friction in your business. Ask yourself: which trap is creating it? Control, variability, memory, or visibility? Once you know the trap, you know exactly what to fix.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
There are four traps that keep business owners stuck. I'm going to name all four in this episode, but here's the thing. I'm willing to bet you're in at least two of them right now and don't even know it. Maybe all four of them. We're going to find out. Now, before I tell you what they are, I need to talk to you about the real enemy because the traps aren't the problem. The problem is what's keeping you from escaping them.
Welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I've built multiple seven figure businesses after leaving corporate America. And this show is dedicated to helping you build a business that you love. In the last episode, I showed how to capture friction points in your business. Friction points are those annoying moments that slow you and your team down. And my recommendation was to use something simple as simple
as a post-it note that you put on your wall. Now, if you can make this as a game for your team, even better. And if you miss that one, go back and watch it because it's gonna begin to lay the foundation for what we talk about in this episode. Now, here's what I didn't tell you. Most business owners who capture these friction points, they never fix them, okay? They get the concept, they understand it,
Maybe they start putting up some post-it notes on the wall of things that they see in their business. Maybe they make a list. They know exactly what's broken, then they do nothing about it. Why? Well, there's a book called The Art of War by Steven Pressfield. And in it, he talks about something called the resistance. The resistance is this invisible force that stops you from doing the work.
that you know you should do. Maybe you want to call it the inner critic troll. They live inside everyone. They live inside every creator, every entrepreneur. Again, everybody that's trying to build something and those little trolls, they fight against your progress. They are so real. They show up all the time. They sit on your shoulder.
And it can come in the form of many different varieties. mean, maybe this is this little internal voice that you have that says, don't do this. This is going to fail. Okay. That's a clue. Maybe they show up as procrastination. Maybe it shows up as perfectionism. I have someone on my team that suffers from that. Maybe it shows up into like, I'll get into this next week, or maybe it's even, I got to do more research first.
But here's what I've learned after building multiple businesses. The resistance doesn't show up the same for everyone. In business, it hides in four specific traps. And if you don't know which trap you're in or that your process is stuck in, you'll keep fighting the wrong battle. The first trap is the control trap. This is when you or someone on your team becomes the linchpin of the business.
All of the information flows through you. All the decisions are made by you. All the processes require your approval. And look, it's okay. Okay, maybe not all of them, but a significant number of them flow through you. And internally, you might be telling yourself, look, I'm a good leader because I'm trying not to put work on my team, or I'm doing this to maintain quality.
But what you've actually done is turn yourself into a bottleneck. And I've talked about it on this show before. And there's a specific question that I ask business owners to diagnose if they're in this or not. And I'm going to save that for later because I'm going to put all four of the diagnostic questions together. But first, I need to tell you about the next trap that shows up that's completely different, but it's just as dangerous. And the second trap is the variability trap.
This is when the output of the work that your organization puts out in processes and workflows, when that work depends entirely on who's doing it. One person might do it this way. The next person might do it another way. And the results are completely inconsistent. Now, the thing to point out here is that it doesn't matter how they get to the end result.
The end result needs to be the same. It needs to look the same, feel the same. It needs to be consistent. The individual steps to get there can be a little bit different. That's fine. But the output needs to be consistent. It doesn't matter if it's an internal process, an external process, whatever it is, consistency is the key. And guess what? When you don't have it, it shows up as a trap. And it doesn't matter how much you train your people.
It doesn't matter how many times you show them how to do something. What matters is that every time it shows up differently, you are in this trap. And so it's sneaky. Now, most businesses think the variability trap is a people problem. And it's not. It's a system problem. And again, I'm going to give you the diagnostic questions in a minute. The third trap is the memory trap. This is when you...
or your team needs to remember to do something and it shows up everywhere. Calendar reminders. How many of you have calendar reminders? You're like, I gotta do this on this day. That's a memory trap. To do list. How many of you have to do lists that you make every single day or on this day you gotta do something? That is a memory trap. Post-it notes. Like, post-it notes all over the place. Don't forget to do me, little notes.
It's those pieces that we all do this, but every time work depends on someone remembering, you've created a point of failure. And that's so important to recognize in your business. That is a source of failure when somebody has to remember to do something on a given day. And by the way, this could even be as simple as, hey, just a reminder, once a week, you have to log into this one system to do this one task. They will forget.
they will forget and something else happens. People get sick. They go on vacation. And when they do, things fall through the crack. Now you might be thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute, you just told me to use Post-it notes to capture these friction points. And now you're going to tell me Post-it notes are a trap? No, there's a difference between capturing a problem using a simple method like a Post-it note and putting it up on the wall.
as opposed to relying on a Post-it note for some memory execution. Okay, I've been in businesses where I look and somebody's computer has all these Post-it notes all around it. Okay, all these things that they have to do. That is a system of disaster. Okay, the Post-it note that you're capturing friction points on, that's for improvement. The other one basically is screaming potential failure.
And while it's not the only thing that kills businesses, when you're forgetting things, that's a problem. The fourth trap is the visibility trap. And this is when you don't have the information you need to manage your business. You're flying blind, flying by the seat of your pants. Maybe you're lacking financial data, customer data, operational data. I see it all the time in marketing when
when somebody is showing me some ads and I ask, who is this for? And they say, well, it's for, I don't know. Or who is this for? And they tell me it's for this person, this person, and this person. If it's more than one person, you're in trouble. So the real danger with the visibility trap is that you can't fix problems that you can't see.
And if you don't have the data that you need to make decisions for your business, you could end up solving the wrong thing. I talk about this in my book, Fix This Next for Real Estate Investors, and I called it the survival trap. It's when you're chasing the wrong problem. So here are the four traps again. The control trap, the variability trap, the memory trap, the visibility trap.
And here are the diagnostic questions that I promised you. For the control trap, I want you to ask yourself, if I were to disappear for two weeks, would the business keep running? And if the answer is no, you're the bottleneck. You're in the control trap. And the same thing could apply to one of your employees too. Could one of your employees disappear for two weeks? Try four. That's a problem.
For the variability trap, ask yourself, does the work output depend on who does it? Is there someone on your team that does this thing a little bit better than the other person, but yet they both have to do the job at different times? If you've said yes to that, then your process and your business has a potential being stuck in the variability trap. Because the output should be the same regardless of who does the work.
The question to ask for the memory trap is how much work gets performed that relies on someone remembering to do something. And then the last question for the visibility trap is do I have the data to make this decision? So here's my question for you. Which traps do you see in your business? Be honest, you're probably in at least two of them.
and I might challenge you in all four of them. And over the next few episodes, I'm going to go deeper into each one of these traps. How to diagnose it, how to escape it, and how it connects to the scale framework that we discussed in episode 52. That's two episodes ago, I talked about the scale framework. And here's what I want you to do right now. Think about a pain point in your business.
Think about a friction, something that you might capture on a Post-It note, something that frustrates you with your business. Think about that and ask yourself, which trap is creating this friction? Is it control, variability, memory, visibility? Once you know the trap,
you know exactly what to fix. And if you have a business question, I want you to head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. I read each and every single submission and I will see you in the next episode.
There are four traps that keep business owners stuck. I'm going to name all four in this episode, but here's the thing. I'm willing to bet you're in at least two of them right now and don't even know it. Maybe all four of them. We're going to find out. Now, before I tell you what they are, I need to talk to you about the real enemy because the traps aren't the problem. The problem is what's keeping you from escaping them.
Welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I've built multiple seven figure businesses after leaving corporate America. And this show is dedicated to helping you build a business that you love. In the last episode, I showed how to capture friction points in your business. Friction points are those annoying moments that slow you and your team down. And my recommendation was to use something simple as simple
as a post-it note that you put on your wall. Now, if you can make this as a game for your team, even better. And if you miss that one, go back and watch it because it's gonna begin to lay the foundation for what we talk about in this episode. Now, here's what I didn't tell you. Most business owners who capture these friction points, they never fix them, okay? They get the concept, they understand it,
Maybe they start putting up some post-it notes on the wall of things that they see in their business. Maybe they make a list. They know exactly what's broken, then they do nothing about it. Why? Well, there's a book called The Art of War by Steven Pressfield. And in it, he talks about something called the resistance. The resistance is this invisible force that stops you from doing the work.
that you know you should do. Maybe you want to call it the inner critic troll. They live inside everyone. They live inside every creator, every entrepreneur. Again, everybody that's trying to build something and those little trolls, they fight against your progress. They are so real. They show up all the time. They sit on your shoulder.
And it can come in the form of many different varieties. mean, maybe this is this little internal voice that you have that says, don't do this. This is going to fail. Okay. That's a clue. Maybe they show up as procrastination. Maybe it shows up as perfectionism. I have someone on my team that suffers from that. Maybe it shows up into like, I'll get into this next week, or maybe it's even, I got to do more research first.
But here's what I've learned after building multiple businesses. The resistance doesn't show up the same for everyone. In business, it hides in four specific traps. And if you don't know which trap you're in or that your process is stuck in, you'll keep fighting the wrong battle. The first trap is the control trap. This is when you or someone on your team becomes the linchpin of the business.
All of the information flows through you. All the decisions are made by you. All the processes require your approval. And look, it's okay. Okay, maybe not all of them, but a significant number of them flow through you. And internally, you might be telling yourself, look, I'm a good leader because I'm trying not to put work on my team, or I'm doing this to maintain quality.
But what you've actually done is turn yourself into a bottleneck. And I've talked about it on this show before. And there's a specific question that I ask business owners to diagnose if they're in this or not. And I'm going to save that for later because I'm going to put all four of the diagnostic questions together. But first, I need to tell you about the next trap that shows up that's completely different, but it's just as dangerous. And the second trap is the variability trap.
This is when the output of the work that your organization puts out in processes and workflows, when that work depends entirely on who's doing it. One person might do it this way. The next person might do it another way. And the results are completely inconsistent. Now, the thing to point out here is that it doesn't matter how they get to the end result.
The end result needs to be the same. It needs to look the same, feel the same. It needs to be consistent. The individual steps to get there can be a little bit different. That's fine. But the output needs to be consistent. It doesn't matter if it's an internal process, an external process, whatever it is, consistency is the key. And guess what? When you don't have it, it shows up as a trap. And it doesn't matter how much you train your people.
It doesn't matter how many times you show them how to do something. What matters is that every time it shows up differently, you are in this trap. And so it's sneaky. Now, most businesses think the variability trap is a people problem. And it's not. It's a system problem. And again, I'm going to give you the diagnostic questions in a minute. The third trap is the memory trap. This is when you...
or your team needs to remember to do something and it shows up everywhere. Calendar reminders. How many of you have calendar reminders? You're like, I gotta do this on this day. That's a memory trap. To do list. How many of you have to do lists that you make every single day or on this day you gotta do something? That is a memory trap. Post-it notes. Like, post-it notes all over the place. Don't forget to do me, little notes.
It's those pieces that we all do this, but every time work depends on someone remembering, you've created a point of failure. And that's so important to recognize in your business. That is a source of failure when somebody has to remember to do something on a given day. And by the way, this could even be as simple as, hey, just a reminder, once a week, you have to log into this one system to do this one task. They will forget.
they will forget and something else happens. People get sick. They go on vacation. And when they do, things fall through the crack. Now you might be thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute, you just told me to use Post-it notes to capture these friction points. And now you're going to tell me Post-it notes are a trap? No, there's a difference between capturing a problem using a simple method like a Post-it note and putting it up on the wall.
as opposed to relying on a Post-it note for some memory execution. Okay, I've been in businesses where I look and somebody's computer has all these Post-it notes all around it. Okay, all these things that they have to do. That is a system of disaster. Okay, the Post-it note that you're capturing friction points on, that's for improvement. The other one basically is screaming potential failure.
And while it's not the only thing that kills businesses, when you're forgetting things, that's a problem. The fourth trap is the visibility trap. And this is when you don't have the information you need to manage your business. You're flying blind, flying by the seat of your pants. Maybe you're lacking financial data, customer data, operational data. I see it all the time in marketing when
when somebody is showing me some ads and I ask, who is this for? And they say, well, it's for, I don't know. Or who is this for? And they tell me it's for this person, this person, and this person. If it's more than one person, you're in trouble. So the real danger with the visibility trap is that you can't fix problems that you can't see.
And if you don't have the data that you need to make decisions for your business, you could end up solving the wrong thing. I talk about this in my book, Fix This Next for Real Estate Investors, and I called it the survival trap. It's when you're chasing the wrong problem. So here are the four traps again. The control trap, the variability trap, the memory trap, the visibility trap.
And here are the diagnostic questions that I promised you. For the control trap, I want you to ask yourself, if I were to disappear for two weeks, would the business keep running? And if the answer is no, you're the bottleneck. You're in the control trap. And the same thing could apply to one of your employees too. Could one of your employees disappear for two weeks? Try four. That's a problem.
For the variability trap, ask yourself, does the work output depend on who does it? Is there someone on your team that does this thing a little bit better than the other person, but yet they both have to do the job at different times? If you've said yes to that, then your process and your business has a potential being stuck in the variability trap. Because the output should be the same regardless of who does the work.
The question to ask for the memory trap is how much work gets performed that relies on someone remembering to do something. And then the last question for the visibility trap is do I have the data to make this decision? So here's my question for you. Which traps do you see in your business? Be honest, you're probably in at least two of them.
and I might challenge you in all four of them. And over the next few episodes, I'm going to go deeper into each one of these traps. How to diagnose it, how to escape it, and how it connects to the scale framework that we discussed in episode 52. That's two episodes ago, I talked about the scale framework. And here's what I want you to do right now. Think about a pain point in your business.
Think about a friction, something that you might capture on a Post-It note, something that frustrates you with your business. Think about that and ask yourself, which trap is creating this friction? Is it control, variability, memory, visibility? Once you know the trap,
you know exactly what to fix. And if you have a business question, I want you to head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. I read each and every single submission and I will see you in the next episode.