How do you, how do you do that?

Well, the thing is, is I always tell everybody, you need to design the business around you, right? where most people have the business design their own life and the business controls everything.

And so that's how that exercise came out.

I was getting rid of, like I had a multimillion dollar agency that I hated.

And I literally took an interview with someone else, another company, and they asked me two questions.

What do you want to do every day? What don't you never want to do again? And so that's how that exercise came about.

And a lot of times, every couple of years, I go through the same exercise.

So I wanted to hear your story about that and if you see that with other business owners as it pertains to these identity shifts.

Yeah.

But I need a project manager that can manage themself, right? And just be honest with them, say, "Look, I suck at process.

I need you to be able to create this." Now, if they're at a manager, it goes back to, like, you need to evolve to an architect.

So you need to start removing being the bottleneck, and how do I build a system or a layer of systems so people can make better decisions without coming to me, right? That's really it.

Yep.

Then if you're an architect, how do you start building people that can architect the systems that you're already building? And then if you're a CEO, you know, and not...

And that's one thing I want to tell everybody.

Some people may only want to reach architect, and that's perfectly fine.

So can you take us on that journey just a little? Or it's really more of an odyssey, I would say.

Yeah, I mean, just...

This is how little I knew, okay? My first client asked me to send him an invoice.

I didn't know what an invoice was.

What? And there was no Google.

Uh-huh.

Right? So, like, I just had to figure it out.

So then what follows after architect?

How do you get someone to give that up?

So, well, I just think, and as we're talking about these identity shifts, I want everybody to know that Operator and manager are the worst levels.

You just need to get out of those.

But if you want to stay at the architect, the CEO or the owner, that's perfectly fine.

All of you don't have to get to the owner level.

But going from a manager to an architect, it's really about, I think the breaking point is you get so fed up with making every single decision.

Like every little thing is coming through you.

An agency that can fix only one system this quarter, which goes first and why?

Do you talk about that in the book as you grow a business?

Yeah.

So one of the things I had to learn... we need to take the floaties off your team.

Right.

Yeah.

And we need to throw them in the deep end and let them swim.

And I, I was, I had our event a little while ago and I was telling people about a situation that I have in the book where it's kind of Think about, we try to stop every kind of fender bender that we see coming because we've gone through it.

so when did you go from the guy that was running the company to the guy or working in the business to the guy that was working on the business and then you took the next step which was you know i've done this well enough to be able to train other people how to do what we have done within our organization to their organizations

How do you get, how do you get out of it? We kn- we know that there's some things that, some tactics we need to do, but, like, when you're in that place, when an owner or founder is stuck in the work, how do you move past that?

So I got to that a couple times.

[chuckles] And, and, and as we're talking about these identities, you can go back and forth as well.

Um, and what I learned with, with going through all this, and you have to go through every single level if you wanna make it to the top, and you don't have to go through all of it.

But what I learned was you have to figure out where you wanna go and what do you not wanna do.

So when I was at that level for the first time, I think I was around the 2 million mark, and I was just completely miserable.

From the outside, it looked like it was fantastic, and my wife was like, "You're miserable.

Um, but how much, uh, how much, uh, is trust a component of this? Like you, if you don't trust those people to, you know, carry forward your vision and, you know, take themselves down the path, how do you build that up?

How do you get people pass up? Because obviously that's a constraint that, you know, is going to keep you from going anywhere.

So you have to kind of throw your team into the deep end without floaties.

And I was telling our group of our community last week when I was speaking to them, I said, you got to be okay with fender benders, but avoid the train wrecks where you have to let them know where we're going.

What do you expect from them? I always, people that report to me, they can manage themselves.

That's the key.

And I have systems in place to allow them to make decisions without coming to me because when you're the operator or the manager, you're the bottleneck.

And especially with AI, AI enhances everything.

What's one move they can make in the next 30 days to really kind of start this climb of yours?