ENTREPRENEUR TO MILLIONAIRE MYTH #9 – YOU AND YOUR TEAM’S “HARD WORK ETHIC” IS A STRENGTH

Learning how to “work hard” is a virtue that has been around for thousands of years. There is nothing wrong with that thinking and action – unless you’re an entrepreneur or business leader trying to break free from incremental results and create explosive revenue and profit growth and business wealth with your offerings.  

In this article, I’m going to share with you how a characteristic that has been driven into every child by a well-meaning parent can be just the thing that’s holding you back from maximizing your success.  Read this article to the end to pick up some strategies and ideas in how to transform what can now be a success blocking weakness into the business strength it should be. 

Who hasn’t heard one of these sayings?

• Success takes hard work.
• Success comes to those who work hard.
• Hard work is the gateway to success.

You might even have a poster in your office that shows the proverbial hamster on the wheel.  Now you don’t have to take it down. I don’t want you to waste a three-dollar poster if it motivates you better than coffee.  However, I do want you to shred it if that type of thinking and what you’re doing is not producing amazing results. 

Oh, I know, you’re from the new school – “Work smarter, not harder.”  Please, don’t get me started on that one as – “Yes, but you’re still working!” 

BACKGROUND OF “HARD WORK IS THE REAL SECRET TO SUCCESS” 

Where did this “Hard work is the secret to success” idea come from?  It came from our ancestors and those who worked hard – manually. They were farmers, ranchers, herders, laborers, etc. They earned their living, they bought things, and they survived by hard manual work.  News flash – manual labor is not the most critical requirement for success-driven entrepreneurs, but the myth survives.  

Working with thousands of CEOs, leaders, and individual performers, it is a joy to see how hard people work, their dedication, and overall sacrifice to achieve.  However, it is also sad to see how, in most cases, they could have achieved ten times the success and only work half the time.  

But for most of those people, and maybe you, will never change and therefore never scratch the surface of the highest levels of success for one simple reason – their “hard work” ethic is giving them small or incremental results.  Why change from being a “grinder” when you have experienced some form of accomplishment from the grind? Small results can “feel” good and feeling good is in short supply in tough times. 

What I discovered starting 25 years ago and from thousands of client sessions is that most leaders and employees would rather work and grind than think and leverage.  If you’ve been one of the thousands of readers of my new book Entrepreneur To Millionaire, then you might have picked up on that key point. It didn’t take me eighteen years to write the book. It took me eighteen years to identify dozens of sleepy areas in every company (not the employees) that, if LEVERAGED, the business could produce huge numbers of sales, much greater revenues, and even ridiculous profits without … ready for this? … 

… WORKING AT ALL!

Yes, that’s right! Without doing any more work and without spending another hour or dollar, your business could attract more new clients and generate more new contracts with much higher margins, with no additional effort, and sometimes even less work.

Just this week, working with a bright entrepreneur running a nice multi-million-dollar business, he wanted much faster more profitable growth. So, we mutually developed a strategic and formal partner program.  In the past, this company, employees, and salespeople have been doing all the work.  They were the ones burning the resources, wasting the money and effort to open doors with new prospects and clients.  

This gentleman had read my book and he had an epiphany from reading Chapter 11 Partnering For Demand.  He said to me, “We work way too hard, spend too much time and money trying to break into accounts. There has to be an easier way.  That chapter was the answer I’d been searching for.”

He went on to say that he and his team had fallen into the trap of “work hard” if you want success. So they did – month after month and year after year. His revelation was this ̶ what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?  What if you could have greater results without working at all?

I warned him that setting up strategic partnerships will be hard work. However, once they’re set up and running it requires little maintenance to keep them going.  Think of an orchard versus plowing a field.  The field must be plowed, planted, nurtured, and harvested every year. That’s hard work. The orchard, after the first few years, can start producing bountiful fruit year after year. 

But is hard work really hard work? Here is what you should change. 

When we think of hard work, most people think of what they do all day.  Instead, the hard work you should start concentrating on is learning the principle of leverage.  By that, I mean how more things in your business – not your employees – can start doing the hard work of attracting new prospects, generating new clients, and retaining those clients for life – all of which produces no-cost growth.

Many clients have shared this powerful learning point  ̶  the hardest work of all was learning how to stop doing the work themselves and leveraging other parts of the company. Again, not the employees – I can’t say that enough. Hard work can only take you and your team so far.  Leverage, on the other hand, can scale, repeat, and achieve heights that are not possible by yourself or employees – and to even do it for free. 

THOUGHTS TO OWN

What I hope you just read and learned is that in many cases, ideas that have been drilled into your head or adages you have heard all your life can be the exact thing that is sabotaging your success.  I hope you will take a minute to question some of your mental models and sayings that are on most motivational posters or cliches you have heard. 

ACTION RIGHT NOW

Pick one chapter from the book Entrepreneur To Millionaire to focus on implementing this month so that you can achieve more and not “work harder”. For example, read about partnering or read Chapter 3 on Business Modeling.  Of the last 1,000 companies I’ve worked with, there has always been something to tweak or to transform about their existing business model that can eliminate “people work” or produce greater results with no work at all.  

With your team (or by yourself), ask each person to explain your company’s business model.  Don’t be upset if you get different answers from different team members.  It’s not their fault they can’t articulate the model – it’s yours.  Then analyze, discuss, and strategize how to change or improve the design or execution.  You will be surprised at how small changes can create powerful results. 

Please reach out and contact me if you would like some help. Our goal is to help a million entrepreneurs and employees to become millionaires.  If you already have seven figures in your bank account, then let’s help your employees achieve that goal too. 

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AUTHOR BACKGROUND

Kent Billingsley is the founder and president of the Revenue Growth® Company, LLC (TRGC). He is a published author, international keynote speaker, and business transformation expert. He has become America’s Revenue Growth® Architect by helping thousands of entrepreneurs and CEOs (representing over a million employees) generate several billion in new sales, as well as tens of billions in new revenue and profits for large corporations. He has personally designed, built, transformed, and turbocharged several thousand organizations in 36 countries. Over the last 20 years, his proprietary content and trademarked programs have helped thousands of entrepreneurs and employees become millionaires and multimillionaires by “creating wealth” inside their companies. He can be reached at [email protected].