In this liberating episode, Jeremy Shapiro, Founder and Facilitator of Bay Area Mastermind, shares how he and his mastermind groups have helped solopreneurs achieve the freedom to do what they want when they want, and with whom they wish to by becoming business owners. If you’re tired of being tied down by your business, you won’t want to miss this episode.
You will discover:
– How to ensure your team delivers consistent quality for your customers
– Who to hire first and how to dial in your ideal team
– A simple test you can do right now to find out if you’re a solopreneur or a business owner
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with a high demand mentor and coach to entrepreneurs, also serial entrepreneur himself, Mr. Jeremy Shapiro, who helps small business owners make the transition from solopreneur to business owner, a very important distinction that many entrepreneurs can easily miss when working in the business instead of on their business. Since 1998 through structured masterminding, one on one, coaching and consulting work, Jeremy has been helping entrepreneurs to discover their core strengths in themselves and their businesses and realize their true potential, combining passion and expertise to grow their businesses and attain the freedom they deserve. And he’s here with us today. Jeremy, I love this distinction of solopreneurs and business owners. There’s probably 1000 ways I could go with this conversation, but I’m wondering, if we just start, give us a little compare and contrast, what are the biggest differences between what you’ve dubbed as solopreneur and a business owner.
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, for our listeners who are familiar with Kiyosaki, his Cash Flow Quadrant, you know he he walks you through sort of these different stages of being an employee to self employed, over to business owner and investor, right? So those two pieces you and I are talking about here are that self employed like solopreneur side of things, versus the business owner. And there’s a really simple litmus test I like to use to determine where someone is at and keep in mind, this isn’t a black and white or binary choice here. We’re all on a journey from one towards the other side. And here’s that litmus test, if you imagine what would happen when you step away from your business for a day or a week, a month, a quarter, right when you come back to your business? Is it the same as when you left it? Is it better than when you left it? Or is it a dumpster fire, and you’re out of business? For most folks, it’s that latter category, and the thought of leaving for even a few days is terrifying to many earlier stage business owners. And so that’s really the quick test we use to determine just how much time someone could spend away from their business, totally offline.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. I love that. The irony behind that, someone could call it a tragic irony, is that most folks, when you look at why they started their business, they started for freedom and autonomy, right? And and I found many founders can can somewhat check the box on autonomy, at least in like the Frank Sinatra, like I did it my way, kind of a thing, but, but they really have not checked the box on freedom. What is it that prevents solopreneurs from stepping into that freedom?
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, so the real freedom that comes with starting a business, right, comes from is built around this idea of, like, freedom of time, or, as I call your optionality, right? You get to choose how you spend your time, who you spend that with, and what you’re doing. So that can mean you work with just the Select clients or projects that are really, you know, cool for you to work with, right? That could mean more time in your community, with family, pursuing hobbies, more time building a business or launching a new business. It just means you get to choose. So how do we get to that point? Well, that comes down to a few really key things, but the biggest blocks I find for our newer business owners or self employed business owners, is in the world of mindset, right? Because to get to that entrepreneurial freedom, we need systems and we need people. But if you’re in a scarcity mindset of, you know, feeling nobody else can do things as well as you can, right? Or thinking a new hire is just going to steal your business and run away with it, then you’re not able to get over that hump and start building out a team. And if you feel you have to be a perfectionist and do everything to beyond standard. Well, right? That’s great for a quality standpoint, but it’ll be limiting in terms of documenting systems and getting people who could run the systems that operate your business.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? I love that. You bring up the perfection thing, because it, I mean, it plagues some founders. Some don’t have as big a struggle with it, but one of the rules that I’ve found tend to be very helpful for folks in that space is, does it deliver quality in the eyes of the customer? Yes, right in the eyes of the customer. Have you seen that in your work? And how does it show up?
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah. So you know, I’ve seen this many times, right? A common path entrepreneurs take is they’re a technician, if you want to use E Myth parlance, right? They’re working for some other company doing something, and they go off and hang a shingle and then do it under their own name, right? Frank’s not your style, like you said. So you might be, you know, an electrician, and you open your own, your own company, doing that. But there’s so much more to running a business than just the technical parts of it, that, being said, the the quality standard that you hold yourself to is important, right? Like the company is your name, your personal brand, is all tied up in that. So you do want to deliver to your clients. We all do, however, there’s a line beyond that where you’ve already gotten the a plus, right? There’s no bonus or extra credit and so on, right? The first thing we usually work with folks to do is to actually document what success looks like, right? Define a successful outcome, and then create the system from there. When you have someone using that system to get your definition of success, one of the three things can happen early on, the most common one is, is you kind of miss the mark. You don’t quite get the success because your system wasn’t dialed in yet. But we iterate quickly at the beginning. The second thing that’ll happen sometimes is the system is good, but the person didn’t follow the steps, didn’t do it right or so on, and so you again, missed the mark. But what we’re moving towards is the ideal outcome, which is most common as you grow, which is you’ve dialed in your systems and your team, and now you’re meeting your definition of success that you are proud to have your name on, but someone else did so that they could unblock you.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, that’s so true. You mentioned, almost as an aside, in there, dialing in your team. And I’ve found that a lot of folks at this stage, they suffer from two very poor hiring strategies. There’s the warm body approach, right? Like, are you breathing? Are you upright? Can you help? You can help me? Let’s go. You can start today. Great, now, great, even better. Or there’s the proximity approach, which is like, you start by hiring like your niece for your social media, your uncle for your finances, right? And then you run out of nieces and uncles, so you go to the people that they know, that they know, and it’s just kind of whoever’s closest to you. Is that a great way of getting your team dialed in?
Jeremy Shapiro
Oh my goodness. So you know, when we talk about systems, one important system in your business is your hiring system, right? And it might seem kind of meta there to have a system to get the people to use your systems. But like, this is the world of business. You want to scale a business. You want to sell a business. You need systems in place, right? So one of the strategies we love, especially if like the core roles in your business that you have lots of people doing, is to have what we call a hiring bench, right? So the idea is that you always have a flow of candidates coming through so much like a sports team when you need someone you know in the game, you’ve got a bench that you can pull from right notice, none of that was around proximity or just a warm body, that was around having a clearly defined job description and then hiring for that, because when you have systems, now you know who you’re hiring. So when you’re actually interviewing, you’re not just talking about a job title or a task. You can actually go over a system, and you can show someone the result you expect them to get, the highlights of how they’ll get there, but most importantly is how they and you will know if they’ve met your definition of success or not for a role. Right? Think back if you were when you’ve been hiring for a job in the past, maybe where you’ve hired folks when it hasn’t been clear what a good job is. No one likes to be in that situation. So do your hires a favor and make it clear up front how you and they can determine if they’re doing well or not.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s some folks listening that, like Jeremy, that’s great. I’m in we need systems. I’m completely overwhelmed, like there’s so many systems. How do we know where to start? So if someone wanting to make this, this move from solopreneur to business owner, how do they know where to start?
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, so when you’re a solopreneur, you’re doing everything right. You’re, you know, the the the chief, you know, executive. You’re also the bottle washer. You mop the floors, you cook the food, you do everything right. So if you simply look at things from like a time audit standpoint of where you’re spending your time. There are gonna be things you’re doing that are $10 an hour tasks, other things that are $100 an hour, $1,000 $10,000 an hour tasks, and so on. Obviously we wanna move you up on that chart so your time is worth more. So if we start with, what are the things you can hire for? What are those more entry level tasks that are sort of more systematized, the better for many folks, some of those roles are like bookkeeper and accountant, right? That’s usually a good starting spot, especially because these are often service providers and not employees, right? Secondly, depending on your business model, you might need like frontline customer service or customer support reps, that’s usually a great role that can even be virtual and completely outsourced. And these are the kind of roles that start that start to unblock you with one gentleman we’re working with who was very much the the architect of what we’re talking about, and in his business, if his customers were offline, like they were out of business until he got them back online, this meant that, like he had to be by his phone at all times. Now this is a guy who loved mountain biking, loved being out in the wilderness and nature and the outdoors, that that’s what recharged him. That’s what you know, got him feeling good. That was great for his health, his mental health, his well being. And he wasn’t able to do that because there’s not a whole lot of cell phone coverage out in the mountains where he’d like to go. So one of the first hires we helped him to figure out was getting a frontline customer service person who could answer that inbound phone call or email from one of his clients, that simple, small, outsourced hire provided eight hours of coverage a day during his business hours that freed him up to pursue hobbies and interests in his own well being, but also let him work on things like. Product Roadmap, job descriptions and systems and all the rest of the things he needed to be doing in the business, right beyond the interruptive answer of phone calls.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. And just as a model, it’s so true outsourcing kind of that admin function, hiring out the fulfillment function, and then focusing on both selling right? Is one of the best ways to grow your business, and then working on the business, not in it. When it comes to working on the business, for a lot of folks, particularly like the technician type, it’s kind of like this Ricky Bobby moment, like they sit in front of their computer and they’re like, What do I do with my hands? It’s a little awkward. One of the things that I noticed as I was researching the episode is that you do a lot of work with mastermind groups, groups of entrepreneurs that are going through this together. What are some of the benefits of doing that when folks are on this journey from solopreneur to business owner?
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah. So the journey of entrepreneurship is similar between entrepreneurs right, starting in a similar place, going to a similar destination, but the way we get there is all a little different. I like to think of it that we all have different superpowers, right? We’re seeing success in our own way, right? Where all those Frank Sinatra’s you were talking about doing it my way, but it’s different between each person. So when we get like minded, growth focused, lifelong learners together in a room, everyone’s able to share about what’s going on in their business, what’s working, what’s not, where they need help, and so on, and get that true peer advisory and support from others on a similar journey. What I find is people typically bring two things into the room, right? One is the superpower this thing they’re really good at that most folks find challenging, right? You might be amazing at a pay per click advertising. You might be a phenomenal copywriter. You might be great at hiring, whatever it is or something you’re really good at, right? So you bring into the room the things you know, you know. The second thing folks bring in the room is this big question, right? Many entrepreneurs that find us and are looking for a mastermind group feel stuck or blocked or plateaued, there’s a question you’ve got that if only you had the answer, you could move forward. And so you bring into the room this thing you know you don’t know, right? And folks can help you with resources knowledge to get unblocked. But the real value when you get like minded folks together in a room like that is that third huge category, and that’s what you didn’t know. You didn’t know. This is where all the breakthrough ideas come from. The big pivots, those big ahas, new products get launched, new companies get launched, new sales channels get added, new marketing programs are added. It’s phenomenal. And that all comes from being exposed to the behind the scenes movements of other business owners and what they’re doing in their businesses that’s working and not working, right? You don’t know what others are really doing from the outside, but when people are openly sharing, you get that inside track, those shortcuts. You think about Chutes and Ladders, right? You’re finding those ladders that move you up a level, because others are showing you the way, the secret passages, as it were, and so that that kind of you know behind the scenes look is nothing you can find in books, right, and courses and mentors and coaches and anywhere else. So be intentional with who you surround yourself with. You’ll be surprised at what you find out you didn’t know. You didn’t even know. That unlocks that next level of growth in the business.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. I’ve been in a CEO group for for several years now, and I’m just thinking back through kind of my aha moments, and I don’t know that any of them had to do with me, right? Every single one of them was like, you know, this person having this problem, this other person having solved that I didn’t even know that I had that problem. So that those things you don’t know, you don’t know, such as such a powerful point. And yeah, I couldn’t agree more that mastermind approach is really the best way of rooting that out. It’s fantastic. So Jeremy, I want to dive into these mastermind groups a little bit more here in just a second, and how folks can can get in touch with you. But before we get there’s a question I ask all my guests. I want to fire it your way. I’m interested to see what you have to say. What would you say is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, you know so often when I talk to entrepreneurs, they feel lonely, right? Like they’re the only one out there doing this thing, right? And whether this is you know you as a business owner, or you as a parent, or just you as a human being, right? Like there’s millions of us who’ve been doing these things for 1000s of years, right? You’re not the only person to be going through all this. So you know, to answer your question, as an entrepreneur, I want folks to know you’re you’re not alone on this journey. You don’t have to be right. There are others out there who are doing this, who face the same challenges you’re facing today that you think are special to you and are unique to you. Others have been there and overcome that challenge and done it, and you can, too surround yourself with those like minded individuals. They can help you to get unstuck and get unblocked and know what’s. Around the corner, what’s coming. You can do it because others have as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. It’s so true. So there’s folks listening, and that’s exactly what they want. It’s exactly what they need. It’s all clicking into place. They’d love to reach out to you to find either more about the mastermind or some of your one on one, coaching, group, coaching, whatever it may be. How can they learn more about what you do? How can they reach out to you?
Jeremy Shapiro
Yeah, you can find everything about, you know, our mastermind groups, how to start mastermind groups, and all kinds of great resources as well. That’s all at bayareamastermind.com
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. bayareamastermind.com we’ll get that in the show notes for you guys. Jeremy loved this episode. So much gold in it. I say this every once in a while, and I mean it every time. It’s one of those episodes where if you just listen to it once, you’re gonna miss about half of it, though, there’s so much gold in there. If any of this struck anything for you, go back and listen to it again. I promise it’s gonna be so much deeper the second time. So check it out. Jeremy, thanks for being here. Pleasure having you. For those of you watching and listening. You know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Jeremy Shapiro
In his role as a mentor and coach to entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneur Jeremy B. Shapiro helps small business owners make the transition from “solopreneur” to “business owner” – an important distinction that many entrepreneurs can easily miss when working “in” their business instead of “on” their business. Since 1998, through structured masterminding, one-on-one coaching, and consulting work, Jeremy has been helping entrepreneurs discover the core strengths in themselves and their businesses and realize their true potential, combining passion and expertise to grow their businesses and attain the freedom they deserve.
Want to learn more about Jeremy Shapiro’s work at Bay Area Mastermind? Check out his website at https://bayareamastermind.com/
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