Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Today is going to be quick, but it is also a very important conversation. So let me start with a confession most entrepreneurs won't make out loud. A lot of us are addicted to being busy and we've dressed up that addition as ambition. And a lot of the people I know who are entrepreneurs, they wear the 60 hour week like a medal, like a trophy, they're so proud of it. We say, I don't have time, the way other people say, I'm fine when you ask them, hey, how are you? How's life?
Sometimes as a way to end a conversation before it even gets to the
[00:00:36] Speaker B: real thing, you weren't born to sit in traffic, work for approval, or wait for Fridays. You were built to be free.
Welcome to Rich and Remote, the show for the ones who dare to do life differently. Here we talk about building businesses that give you choices where you work, how you live and what you create.
This is for the entrepreneurs who crave freedom, financial freedom, location freedom, and freedom from everyone else's expectations. If you're ready to design a life on your own terms, you're in the right place. Rich and Remote hosted by Alex and Carla Booth.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: So happy Monday, Rich and Remote. Friends, today we are going to have a real conversation about productivity and what is the real reason why entrepreneurs burn themselves out. This is not going to be tip list like here are five productivity hooks to to reclaim your morning. It's not going to be like that. I want to talk about why you're actually working this much and why you're actually this tired. So if you're listening to this and you can relate, I am here to help. I'm Carla Singh Son Booth, one of the co hosts of Rich and Remote and I am in a very privileged position as also someone who owns an outsourcing company. So every day I talk to my customers, to my prospects, to people who are thinking about outsourcing, asking me questions, my friends who might hire their 100th person or maybe they're hiring someone for the first time. It is a very common thread to see these people complain about being burnt out. They would show me their calendars and it's so full and honestly, I have a little bit of a trauma response every time I see a very, very busy calendar because I've been there. Sometimes those days happen to me too. But if those days are kind of your normal and you've just accepted it, and if you feel like taking care of your health or planning your sleep, planning your workout is almost like a part time job and worse. And honestly, unfortunately A lot of people still fall into this trap. A lot of these people don't even make the money that they want to make. They are still working too hard to just get to like $10,000 a month. And if you total the amount of hours they put into their job, it seems like they're just working a $15 an hour job. So can you imagine someone working at, I don't know, Chick Fil A making the same amount of money as you? And here you are and you're, you're feeling very, very tired and burnt out and also a little bit pressured because maybe you have to keep up appearances. Right? So I want to talk about why you're actually working this much. And I don't think it's your calendar. I think there are things that are deeper than that. And those are the things I want to talk about in this solo episode because I've also been burnt out. I haven't. I'm not perfect. And I'm the eldest child of an Asian family. My parents passed away in my 20s, so I had to take care of my sisters. Actually, before I started my outsourcing company and before I went all in into an online business, I actually used to own corporate planning company where we would organize these huge events, these huge brand activation events, collaborations, press events. I even hosted and directed rock concerts as big as 9,000 person concerts. So I was very busy in terms of being busy being burnt out. I've had very long days, very long nights, and actually I told myself that I'm going to leave that industry and at least in the physical sense, I still own events company right now, but I have a full management team that handles the day to day operations. I just help out with strategy and with designing the team because it's a great way to exercise my marketing brain. The reasons why people are burnt out and overwhelmed, I think there's three things underneath it and one of them is just cold hard math. And the other two is about you, about who you are and how you feel. So let's get into it.
So the first one is you don't have a delegation problem, you have an identity problem. So maybe you've read those books like Buy back your time by Dan Martel or Deep work by Cal Newport and maybe some productivity books, Atomic Habits. Right? And then you get lessons about delegation on top of the lessons that you get about time management and productivity. And then when people tell you to delegate, you know, they say, oh, you know, just hire someone. Just take it off your plate. Just talk to Carla. Proximity Outsourcing and they'll take care of it for you. And yes, we will. We will take care majority of the process. We'll find you a great manager or a great video editor or copywriter, and then you nod. But then you don't do it because you feel guilty. It's like a discipline issue. But what's really going on is that it's not that you're lacking the skill to delegate, it's just a belief that you don't have. Yet I cannot tell you. You will be surprised to know how many people have paid our upfront recruitment and onboarding fee of $995. And after we've done all the work of test testing, hiring, interviewing, preparing their profiles, my team takes about 60 to 80 hours doing that. Rounds of interviews, testing, proctored testing. Right after we've done all of that, they actually don't end up hiring someone. Sometimes I feel like they just froze. Some of them even ghost us. I'm not kidding. They will just pay the $995 and then they would ghost us. It's insane. We do all of the follow up, we call them, text them, email them, but I will never know. I will never know why, right? But I think deep down it is because you're not really missing the delegation as a skill. But it is because you decided that support is not for you. You decided that support is for other people. You decided that maybe real founders grind. You know, Gary V. Alex or Mosey said if you are not grinding, you'll never be successful. Or maybe that if you accept help, you're soft or you're cheating or you'll be exposed, posed as a grifter because you're not doing all the work anyway. So sometimes these thoughts don't even come up to the surface. But deep down, that's actually what's happening. A lot of people don't delegate and don't hire. They don't outsource because they have an idea of what a founder is supposed to do or what a business owner is supposed to do. And here's the quieter version of this. A lot of high performers actually secretly feel like fraudster. You already know about the term imposter syndrome. And a lot of us carry this. No matter how long you've been in the industry, somehow feel like a fraud. Delegating feels terrifying because handing off the work means someone else gets to see how the sausage actually gets made. And so doing it all yourself maybe keeps the curtain closed. So you just do it all by yourself. And the other Identity thing that I also notice is a lot of people feel like they have to to make a huge switch from founder or idea maker or visionary to a boss or a leader. So it could be tied to so many past experiences. Maybe they've had a job before. You've had a job before and you had a bad boss, so you have a bad idea what a boss is, you had a bad leader. Or if you grew up in a home where chaos is the normal thing, and your elder sisters or brothers or your parents. So anyone in your family who's supposed to take on a leadership role, maybe they haven't been a good leader to you and it just gave you a bad idea and an ick on leadership. And so it's almost like I'm not really a boss type of person.
I'm not really a manager type of person. I'm not that kind of person. I just have this idea. I just want to do my job. Well, if you keep saying that, then that's what's going to happen. Of course you're going to get overwhelmed. Of course you're going to get burnt out because you did not shift your identity from a doer to a leader. Right? You cannot do this business alone. Or if you do it by yourself, you're going to hit a very low ceiling. And even if you hit that ceiling and you did everything right, you're still going to burn out. So here's the line I want you to sit with. You cannot delegate a task. You've fused with your identity. If your whole sense of self is I'm the person who does this, then handing it off doesn't feel like relief. It will feel like erasing a part of yourself. That's why you keep taking it back. And you're very unforgiving. Even if you hire someone, you somehow take it back from them, or you complain and you frustrate the person that you hired. And I've seen this happen to some of my clients. This is why it's really important to work with a professional. Professional people like us, because we can give you advice and we can be transparent with you. Because hiring and outsourcing, you can succeed in it, or you can fail in it. But if you're not doing it all by yourself, then you have a much higher chance of succeeding. So before you hire anyone, ask yourself the harder question. It's not, hey, who can do this task? It is, am I willing to be someone who doesn't do this task anymore? What will I do with my extra time? Is there something Else that I can do that will still make me feel important and is also actually important to my company because that's the actual shift from doer to a leader. That needs to happen. And let me tell you, no virtual assistant, no project manager, no outsourcing company in the world can make it for you. You have to decide that by yourself. And so segueing on, the second reason a lot of people are so overworked and burnt out because their high standards is just their ego. Wearing a nice outfit, I see a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs say, oh, I have very high standards. I'm a perfectionist, right? They're so proud of it. And yes, it is something to be proud of. It's nice to have high standards. It is very respectable to have that. A lot of people know me as having high standards on a lot of things. I insist on quite quality in a lot of things. But there's also some things where I'm pretty okay just cruising along the standards river, right? So the next one is going to sting a little. But I say this as someone who's guilty of it too. In the past, we love to tell ourselves we have a high standards. You know, I'm just particular. I care more than most people. Maybe, you know, maybe you're right or maybe it's something else. There's a real difference between high standards and the private belief that no one can meet your standards but you. The first one is discernment, right? Thinking that, oh, I just have high standards, but thinking that no one can meet it but you, that is pure ego. And let me tell you guys, ego is expensive. I can count the amount of times that ego has served me well. Most of the time it did not. Because for me, ego doesn't help in letting me see the truth, right? Letting me be objective. So it just doesn't make you work more. It also makes you higher down. A lot of people actually don't realize this. When you believe that you're the smartest person in the room, you unconsciously screen out anyone who might actually be smarter. A lot of people would hire from us and they would reject the people who are super smart and such a good fit. And I notice it is because they're exactly the people who threaten the story that you're indispensable. So the best way to go about this honestly is to hire people smarter than you, right? Hire people that fill your weaknesses. Because you cannot do this alone. All of those big businesses, all of the people making money, making way more money than you think is Possible, they had to do it and they had to hire other people who fill their weaknesses. Even the famous people. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, right. Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, whoever these partnerships are, they all complement each other. So you hire people that you can out think and then you're surprised you can't take your hands off the wheel. So think about what that does to the ceiling of your company. If you can't tolerate hiring people better than you, then your business can never get bigger than the inside of your own head. So unfortunately, you might not be super conscious of it, but you've capped it on purpose and you just called it standards. And what's worse is you're also frustrating this person that you might actually magically ended up hiring successfully. They might actually be the perfect person for the job, but you're not giving them enough chances to shine. You're also not praising them while motivating them. Well, you also don't know how to onboard them because. Because you have so much ego that also you're nitpicking them. If they make a little bit of mistake, you turn that voice in your brain that says, ah, I was right, I was right. They cannot do it right. Only I can do it right. So this one is actually a very dangerous trap. And the thing is, it is a very hard thing to consciously recognize and fix. And this is why over and over again I talk about meditation and journaling and, and sitting with yourself and being silent and really thinking things through. Because it is in these moments that you actually realize what is good for you and what's actually happening. Because if also if you're doing all the go, go, go your 60 hour weeks, then you won't have enough time for introspection and to actually think about what's going on. This number two trap, your high standards, your ego, it is actually costing you more than you think. So the gut check here is simple and let me tell you, it is uncomfortable. When was the last time you hired someone who was genuinely better than you at something important? If you can't remember, that's not a hiring problem, that's a mirror. The founders who scale are the ones who get excited when they're the dumbest person in the room. So that takes practice, guys, but it means the room finally upgraded, right? So sit with that for a bit.
All right, and number three, and the last reason why you're working so much is sometimes it's not you, sometimes the offer is a trap. And this is what I was saying in the earlier Notes where I said that it's just pure math. Right. Basically spent the two segments talking to you about you.
I'm just telling you this is what's wrong with you, blah blah blah.
So let me give you some relief because this third one isn't about your psychology at all. And it is very, very obvious and you're going to be able to understand right away. Sometimes you're not burned out because you're doing it wrong, but you're burnt out because of what you're selling. It's just math. Some offers scale and some offers are prisons with good revenue. So I've noticed that certain business models just hit a lower ceiling. So coaching, consulting, anything done with you or done by you, those have a natural ceiling baked right in because you have to be in the room for the value to get delivered. And then some offers also scale slower than other offers and I'm aware of that. So for example, my offer is managed outsourcing. Right. It is, I would say, a high ticket subscription. My clients subscribe between 20 to 40 hours a week. They do a payment every 28 days and each payment is somewhere between 1500 to $3000 a month. So that's good. It's easy to get to seven figures because they're paying that much per month. I only really need 60 clients, 60 to 80 clients and of course manage my attrition to get to seven figure company which we were able to do after one year because of the offer. Right, right. It is scalable. Now I also understand that my offer is less scalable or scales slower compared to say an E commerce company. Right. That may have really good access to supply. So I've had a lot of E commerce clients that hit seven figures in a month or in two months Right. After spending a lot of money in ads. So other offers that personally I don't like coaching and consulting. I think that even though I personally do a little bit of coaching, a little bit of consulting. Yeah, you can pay for my app if you want my eyes on something, you know, if you want my advice, sure. But I don't really offer it. I don't really advertise it. It's not really my main business model. So the highest paid lawyer that I personally know is still poorer than a fairly average e comm store owner that I personally know. So I know that my lawyer friends, you know, they sell time. It's brilliant, expensive time, but it's time.
And the store owner sells units and those units don't even require them to be awake. The one Built a business and then the other one built a very impressive and very well paid job. This is why a lot of my friends in the coaching or the consulting industry, I work with them to create scalable offers. And I tell them if there is a way that you can duplicate and multiply the impact that you make with your clients, I want to help you develop an offer for it that you can easily scale and you can even outsource management to. I've done this with a couple of my clients and even though in a previous consulting company one of my clients was making 20 to 30,000, but then she's so tired and sobered out because of course she's selling her hours. When she started to develop an offer that's almost also like a high ticket subscription, there are months that she doesn't have to close a new client, she doesn't even have to post anything on social media, but the money can still come in. So there are really good offers like that. SaaS is a very, very good offer that is really scalable, right? That's why a lot of the billionaires right now literally became billionaires because of SaaS or some sort of SaaS. Right? So when your offer doesn't scale, working harder sometimes feels like the answer. Yes, that was the truth. And a lot of people don't grow out of their original offers. More hours did equal more money. And so you keep pulling that lever long enough after it stopped working and you grind yourself down trying to out hustle a structural ceiling that literally hustle cannot move. So I have a friend who's also in the consulting space and she's so tired, she's so burnt out and she knows that even though she's been closing really good clients, getting a lot of offers and speaking, consulting, mentorship and everything, she also knows that this might be her limit. So my invitation to everyone who can relate to this is let's have a conversation, send me a DM and let's brainstorm an offer that is scalable. I'm happy to do that with you guys. I hopefully it makes sense for us to work together, but if not, I'd be very happy to just be able to help you out. So I think that right now what you need to do is you have to ask yourself honestly, is my offer something I could scale if I fix my habits, or is it something that will never scale no matter how disciplined I get? Because those are two completely different problems. And applying willpower to a math problem just gets you a burnt out but well behaved version of Someone stuck. So here's what ties all three of these together and it's really the thing I want you to leave with. Delegation, ego, and a non scalable offer. They look like three separate problems, but they're the same problem. Wearing three different masks. Every one of them makes you the load bearing wall of your business. I've had my friends say this, my clients say this. Yeah, I know. I am the bottleneck. Yes, that's actually the main problem. You become the thing that everything rests on. And being irreplaceable may feel like a success, but it actually functions like a cage. All right, so here's my challenge for you this week. Imagine you disappeared for 30 days. No laptop, no phone. Gone. What happens to your business? And more importantly, is that answer a source of pride or is it a warning? Because the goal was never to build something that runs on you. The goal goal is to build something that runs because of you. And one day, something that runs just by itself. You can now stop being the hardest working person. You don't get any special medal or prizes for that. And of course, I want you to live that rich and remote life. Ideally not exhausted, ideally with great health, great skin, great sleep. All right, so that's the episode. If I hit a nerve, then good, sit with that nerve and send me a dm. If you want to chat about it, tell me your feelings or comment on this podcast. And of course, if you like this episode, I hope that this has helped you. Please, please drop us review. It will really, really help my team. We work a lot. All of these free resources, of course. Also check out our newsletter, richandremote. Com and I'll see you next Monday for another episode of Rich and Remote. See you.
Thanks for listening to Rich and Remote, where freedom isn't a dream, it's a decision. This is Karla, this is Alex Booth, and this is our journey to our dream rich and remote life. If this episode inspired you, share with a friend who's ready to live life differently too. This is perfect for entrepreneurs who crave financial freedom, location freedom, and freedom from the opinions of others.
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