What’s going on everybody, Greg Hickman here and in this episode I want to talk about discipline and structure. Let’s get it going.

So today I actually want to share a piece of content

I wrote what I shared in our Facebook group probably about six months ago. I was going through our content archive, looking at looking for some inspiration and I came across this piece that I wrote that got a fair amount of engagement.

And then I also emailed our list with this information and I wanted to share it here. Uh, so you know, if you’re watching this on youtube, obviously you’re going to see me kind of reading this email because I want to read it as I wrote it because there’s really no need to add a limit. So, uh, no drawing on the iPad today or any of that. If you’re in your car listening, stay tuned. Listen, listen. In plugin dial in. Here we go. Right? So, um, this whole concept is about discipline and structure. So let’s dive in. The most successful entrepreneurs through history and the ones I personally follow are great at two things.

Discipline and structure. For example, discipline to say no to the countless opportunities that will derail them from their goal to delay instant gratification for longterm gains and success. Get up every day and work on the right things. Treat their body and mind like a million dollar racehorse. Make tough decisions. By structure, I mean how they structure their days, their weeks, their months, and their years. How they protect themselves from distractions, how they organize their business. For the most simplicity. How they guard that simplicity with, with every ounce of energy possible, hiring the right team members to give them leverage and installing the right systems to create predictability and freedom. The problem is that most of us hate structure, right? That’s why in many cases you started your business in the first place. You didn’t like reporting to the man, all the corporate meetings, all that stuff. At least that was a part of why I started.

I wanted to be in control, right? Freedom has a price. Guess what it is? Discipline and structure. If you want to grow a real business and freestyle here, when I say real, I mean you can like take a vacation for a month and your business still grows, not just start stagnating and falls apart. Now we’ve been in stages where that’s the case and we’ve changed some things and I’m back to like, I could take a week, two weeks and we’ll be okay, but not a month, right? So real business to me is that the business runs and even grows without you. Back to the script here. All right, so if you want to grow a real business, it’s going to be hard without structure, without structure. You can have more of what you probably have now, ups and downs, highs and lows and rides on that good old struggle bus if you want.

The freedom you set out for fall in love with structure structure is designing, planning, constructing foundations and the skeleton to support and enable the results that you’d like to achieve. Think systems, automation, process procedures, hiring, onboarding, leading, coaching, documenting cetera. But Greg, that stuff is not sexy or fun. Well, guess what? It’s hard, right? I repeat. Discipline and structure, discipline and structure, discipline and structure. Success is not accidental. It comes from discipline and structure. Sustainable businesses require leverage. Leverage can be things like team automation systems process, but the most important form of leverage for you right now in those early stages as the owner is declaring what your structure is going to be. Finding that structure. So this is a post that I, like I said, I sent this as an email to our list and I also, I posted in the Facebook group and got out a lot of engagement here and again, like this was six months ago and this, this still rings really true.

As many of you guys know, like we were behind the scenes building funnels and automation for some really big name people and we got to be inside their meetings and how they operated were so was so structured how they structure their meetings. Like there was a set agenda, how they send their emails. There was an agenda, there was a process for everything, right? Each and every person knew where they needed to be, when and what their roles and responsibilities were, and then they showed up consistently time and time again to do the work. Right. They were very disciplined and specifically in areas where, you know, like I said, delay instant gratification for longterm gains and success. You know, as you start gaining momentum in your business, right. I’ve found that this happens pretty frequently around that 20 k a month mark. You start to feel like things are going really well.

You’re on top of the world, you’re making the most money you’ve ever made and new opportunities will present itself right. And sometimes if you don’t have your vision clear enough, uh, and you lack the discipline, you might be jumping on opportunities that sound good right now but will completely derail you from the momentum that you already created and your long term objectives. And so getting clear on, you know, all right, I’m going to not do this, which will, which would be instant gratification because I’m going to stay focused on this plan that I’m in the middle of implementing and I don’t want to derail myself from that because I know that the longterm gains of that are going to far outweigh any sort of win from this short term instant gratification. And as an agency owner, this is really what ends up happening with, you know, you’re trying to work on getting your business, getting the right clients and any old client comes by and is willing to give you money and you have to sit there and make a decision like, do I take on this client right now that is not a good fit, but they’ll give me some money to take on that amount of work, which is actually going to prevent me from going out and getting more of the clients that I do want.

And it’s a real interesting balance and it’s unique for every single person in the situations that, uh, you know, is obviously unique to each, to each business owner, you know, depending upon what sort of cash reserves you have and your tolerance for risk and all of those things. And so it’s a little bit of a finesse game when you make that transition. But if you want to, if you look at anyone that you follow, you will find that they are very disciplined and have a lot of structure in how they run their business, how they heck, how the heck how they run their families, right. I have a, some of my mentors and people that I look up to kind of as a, not in the business side like man, like they’re an amazing father. They take care of their family, like their children literally have slps and like checklists that they go through in the morning.

My son’s a little bit too young for that at the moment, but you better believe he’s going to have a morning routine in a laminated piece of paper and every morning he’s going to check it off with a dry erase marker. We’re going to have him super disciplined and super structured and we’re going to provide the structure for him to operate within so he can be successful, right, and you need to start doing that for yourself in your own business. You probably even do it for some of your clients already, but you need to actually start having your own discipline on your own goals and setting your own structures around how you operate daily, weekly, monthly, and um, you know, within your business and the different departments of your business. So discipline and structure. Guys, if you want to really take your business to the next level, get unstuck or kind of break through that glass ceiling that you’re currently dealing with. It’s time to embrace discipline and structure.

If you’ve been looking to grow and scale your agency, but you’re tired of trading time for money, custom projects, and relying on referrals alone, it can be hard. That’s probably why. If I gave you five, 10, 20 new clients right now, you are, your business would break. I struggle with the same thing for a while until I figured out a better way. So I created a special experience called foundations to help you package up your knowledge and experience into a profitable online program, launch your automated sales system and systemize your fulfillment. You’ll work directly with me, my team, and a group of entrepreneurs just like you to implement the systems and get the help you need to learn more and see if it’s a fit. Just hop on over to myscalable business.com and schedule a call with us today.