Are you a frustrated founder stuck at $1M, staring at the ceiling at 3am wondering why nothing seems to work? I’ve been there.
In this live Focus Hour session, I share my raw, unfiltered journey from being 50 pounds overweight, numbing with alcohol, and nearly burning out my business to breaking through to 8 figures – all by learning one crucial truth: business problems are personal problems in disguise.
Focus Hour: Vision & Values
Watch LinkedIn Live: https://www.linkedin.com/events/founderhourlive-stopspinning-st7363610474489237505/theater/
What I’m really about is growth – personal growth, business growth, and as a founder, how I can really help is helping other frustrated founders grow and learn how to grow and break through areas they’re stuck in.
If you’re a frustrated founder and you’re here today, welcome by the way. I know what this is like – you’re staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, stuck in a loop. You’re straining your family to carry your team, and you’re probably wanting growth, but it feels random and distant. For me as a founder, I’ve gone through many seasons where I felt like, if I quit, everything falls apart. If I keep going, all fall apart.
The Reality of Being a Frustrated Founder
Let’s get real as a founder – your freedom vehicle. We all become frustrated founders at one point or another because we don’t want to do the job anymore. We don’t want to work in a business, or maybe we have a great idea, or maybe we have to. Either way, that freedom vehicle starts to feel like a prison, and every decision, crisis and dollar ends up being on you. And you think if I push harder, it’ll finally click.
This happens for many founders between – it can happen at any point from the beginning to eight figures. I’ve seen it along the journey. I know for me, I really felt this, and this became very real to me and a very pivotal moment in my life when this was crushing was between $300,000 revenue and a million. It was that cresting $300,000 to get to a million that really almost broke me.
For me, I was answering support emails and processing payroll at midnight – that was my life and my situation.
My Personal Story
I just want you to know – if you’re here, if you’re this person, I’ve been there too. This is a little bit my story. I was 50 pounds overweight, numbing with alcohol every day. I was building a successful company that was growing, that was working kind of, not at the rate it could have, but while honestly failing myself, and I was feeling alone. Something stuck, and I was just spinning out.
I remember telling my wife – I’ve shared this in some different posts that I’ve put out, but there was a very distinct moment where I told my wife like, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I feel alone.—like I’m pushing this thing forward alone, and I don’t know where to go. It’s like I don’t know what to do, and I just don’t like it.”
Really, what ended up happening is, I just kind of survived through it, medicated through it, and most of my evenings ended in Netflix, whiskey and guilt. My wife was so loving, and with me the whole time, but she knew I wasn’t healthy. She knew I wasn’t doing well, but our life wasn’t really set up to do things differently.
Why I’m Here
The honest truth is, I lived every moment of this pain that I just shared with you, and I’m on a mission here, and I really want to help you and any other founder that’s around grow through that pain instead of running from it.
My Transformation Timeline
This 2022, I labeled as “Frustrated Founder.” That was kind of the pinnacle, the peak of my frustration, of my pain, of this season. This is where I was 50 pounds overweight, doing anything for anyone in terms of work and business. I was taking on all kinds of work that wasn’t taking me anywhere, and it was bogging me down and crushing me.
I would call myself looking back, I would say I was a functional alcoholic. My mom would use those words, and which is true. I remember traveling and thinking, “Okay, if we stay at this Airbnb, is there a liquor store nearby so that I can get some whiskey if I want it?”
I’m saying that, but you may have actually felt that too, or thought that. I hope that by sharing that maybe it even gives you permission to own that for yourself.
I just went wandering, just numbing
Constant sinus infections, which I found out was because I was drinking so much. My business was about $300,000 at this point, and it was struggling.
Fast forward. This picture is almost a year ago. This picture is kind of a transformation of me. That’s me and my son Peter, right before a Phoenix Suns game. That 50 pounds gone – lost it.
- I’m sitting here creating content, sharing with you.
- I’m on LinkedIn.
- I’m creating posts.
- I’m sharing my thought leadership.
- I’m providing strategy for clients.
- I’m creating a new program.
- And I’m doing what I’m best at.
At the time I was doing anything for everyone – everything from video production to support emails to web design development. I was spread so thin. I’ve got a clear 10-year vision, and one-year goals. Totally different situation. I work out 3 to 4 times a week, and I eat a macro-based diet. It’s pretty intense, and you don’t have to do that. But I’ll tell you it’s changed my life and my performance.
Now we’ve broken through 1 million dollar a year business, and I’ve got business family team really following my lead in a whole different level than it was before.
The Breaking Point
I remember one night – actually a lot of nights – but I remember this moment happening a lot of times, 3 AM staring at the ceiling. My family was strained, my team was confused. I was personally depressed, and I was realizing I wasn’t just losing traction in my business. I was actually losing my life, losing traction in my life.
My wife was distant. We’ve always been very close, honestly, but compared to now, emotionally distant. I didn’t create space for her because I was filling up so many other things. My kids were watching me fade away. They didn’t know any different. But the truth is, I was watching them watch me fade away. I honestly just hated who I saw in the mirror.
I saw something from Andy Frisella this morning that I think is totally worth sharing, because it’s just so relevant. He says: “You don’t change when you’re comfortable. You don’t change when it’s kind of bad. You change when you hate your life so much you feel disgusted with yourself.
- When you look in the mirror, and you can’t stand what you see.
- When the way you’re living makes you sick to your stomach.
- When the cost of staying the same feels worse than the pain of changing.
That’s the switch—the breaking point. That’s when things change. So if you’re there now, good! It means you’re ready. Ready to rebuild, ready to create the life you actually want. Disgust isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of everything you ever wanted.”
That’s where I was at at this moment.
The Real Problem
All the advice was, “Don’t work in your business. Work on it, Simon,” and it’s good advice. I love Michael Gerber. I love The E-Myth, and the advice was great, because it’s true – you shouldn’t spend all of your time working in your business, you should work on it. But the truth is, no matter what I did, I could never get out of that trap.
Turns out, it doesn’t matter what books you read – systems, processes – I couldn’t get out. I don’t think systems can fix a broken founder if they’re active in the business. Business systems can’t fix a broken person in this way. Maybe it can fix a broken employee, to be honest, but the truth is, as a founder, your relationship with the business – you are so closely tied to it. If you are struggling, your business is probably going to be struggling. At least that’s my story and my experience.
That’s when I realized what I had going on wasn’t just a business problem. It was actually an alignment problem. It was actually a business problem that was actually a personal problem in disguise.
My Focus and Mission
This is where I’m really leaning in. This is the edge, the focus, the differentiator of my story—and what I’m coming at is that I want to help you fix your business by helping you grow yourself. I want to help you grow your business by helping you grow yourself.
The problem was my vision, my habits, my leadership – none of it matched who I wanted to be. I was saying one thing over here: “I want to grow, make 10 million dollars, write a book, whatever it is.” Over here I’m Netflix, and still drink a bunch of whiskey, feel like a piece of shit in the morning. You’re not living an aligned life, Simon.
I think what I see in a lot of founders that are struggling is that’s their life too. Not everyone’s like this. If you aren’t like this – cool, congrats. If you figured this out already, if you are dialed, if you are living, and I see these founders too – congrats, that’s a huge win. But this isn’t the case for everyone. A lot of us really struggle. I actually know a lot of founders, and have watched founders, and had mentors that I know have been through this exact same story.
Rebuilding From the Inside Out
I rebuilt from the inside out. This is crazy because I work with a lot of clients that come to us because they want to grow their business. They want to work with a partner who knows how to market and grow a business.
The truth is, the best growth systems are growth from the inside out, and the clients that we have been the most successful with that have been the most successful with marketing in general, are the ones who already are aligned at the core. The ones who just want to throw money and bodies at the problem, they actually have a deeper problem that they need to solve first.
Same thing here with the founders. If you’re stuck at ceilings, there’s a lot of ways to break through that. But if you don’t address the core issues, you’re going to keep finding yourself spinning.
When I rebuilt from the inside out – my vision, my habits, my health – something powerful happened, and my marriage got stronger, and I started actually living again. I started being clear and understanding and thinking, and growing in a new way. It was this moment where only after I started working on myself did my business grow, and that’s the year that we broke a million dollars.
We had spent years before struggling. The company’s coming up to about 10 years in business, and the first solid 5 or 6 or 7 years, we struggled, stuck at around $300,000.
Four Truths You Can’t Ignore
Walking out of this, I think there are really 4 truths that I want to share with you, that you can’t ignore if you’re a frustrated founder:
1. Business is Personal
Every business problem is secretly a personal problem in disguise. I’ve already said that, but the truth is, business is personal to you as a founder. Your business is personal to you. The business problems that you’re running into aren’t just isolated, containerized, individualized, detached business problems. We do that emotional detachment as a way to cope with the pain. But the truth is, if your business is struggling, you’re struggling. If you can’t figure it out, it’s because you can’t figure it out. This is what I’ve learned. I’m not saying that just because I’ve heard that – I’m saying that’s literally was my problem.
2. How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything
Great founders can take mediocre markets, mediocre ideas, and still win honestly. The best founders perform in the worst circumstances. You can’t compartmentalize.
3. Align to Accelerate
You don’t speed up to slow down. That’s how I thought – run fast, and then coast, because it’s easy. You slow down to speed up, but when you get to the speed up, it’s not all on you either.
You slow down to speed up, and so if you want to grow, if you want to accelerate – you’re in your mind, you’re thinking, expand, accelerate, grow, build. Any of those words are on your mind. What you need to do is think: align, slow down, clarify, specify. The point is align to accelerate. I’ve seen it over and over, and we have a 4-step process that we run with our clients at Structure, our marketing agency.
I call it the acceleration loop. It’s 4 steps, and it starts with align – align, get clear. 2 is activate. So you activate those ideas, you start doing them, creating infrastructure, things around them. 3 is amplify – talking more about it, creating more content around those ideas. And 4 is acceleration, which is measuring, iterating, pruning, expanding and growing.
That is how we think about growth. That’s a growth process.
4. Relationships Determine Results
Nobody wins a championship alone. Every champion has a coach and a team. Just this morning I was listening to Nick Bare, the founder of Bare Performance Nutrition. He has a podcast and he has been doing this thing for maybe a couple of years now where every once in a while he does an episode on building the brand, and he shares his journey as a founder through building Bare Performance Nutrition to – I don’t know, it’s a large business now. I mean not large like Google, but large like $100 million. Maybe I’m not really sure but it’s somewhere near there.
He was talking about his races. He does endurance training, and endurance competitions. Crazy ones like the Leadville 100, which is the 100 mile race in Colorado. Lots of things like that. Marathons, crazy marathon times. Every time he sets out a goal – and let’s call it a project, it’s a goal, it’s a project, it’s a race – what he does is, he hires a coach.
This is wild to me, and he tells these stories about these events that he’s done, and every time he says, “and I hired a coach,” and it’s never the same coach. That’s the wild thing – he finds a coach that’s done it before, or has coached in that area before, or knows the terrain, or something like whatever it is. That person’s been there, done that, is experienced, they get it. They know how to replicate it again.
He goes and he hires one, and then he builds a team around him to support his journey, so he can follow through.
I think this is so key for founders
The key is because most founders just go at it alone. I did. I did for a lot of years, and luckily I had coaches alongside me, who mentored me and came alongside me, and helped me, even though I didn’t know how to help myself. A lot of it was fear of spending money for me – coaches cost money, and I didn’t want to spend money. I didn’t think I was honestly worth investing in, because I thought I could grow the business without growing myself.
What I learned looking back – I’ve had a lot of coaches. I’ll introduce you to them in a minute. What I learned is that every time I’ve had a coach I’ve grown faster. I’ve gotten where I wanted to, faster. I’ve become someone quicker who could accomplish the goal that I set out.
It’s really important to have that help
Have those relationships, have the coach and have the team. I’m not just saying this because I’m a coach. I actually do believe it.
The first business I ever started, my first client was actually a bartering agreement with a coach. Wild. They’re an executive leadership coach and they work with large companies like Pacific Foods, and Fortune 500 companies. But he agreed to coach me. So I was getting this elite level coaching at the start. It’s not the only time this has happened, but it happened that time, and has happened over and over.
I couldn’t have made it through that first year, that first 3 months of business without that coach. Then I didn’t have a coach for like 5 years. I remember getting to a point stuck. I’ve written about this too – it was sometime in the fall, and it was a holiday. My team wasn’t working, but I remember I was, and I was stressed out, and I was pacing around actually our bedroom with my phone researching, trying to figure out what to do, because I remember being in such a stuck spot. It was about 2022, 2021 somewhere in there.
It was this moment and I decided, “I need help, and I need to reach out to a coach.” And they really helped me break through. It was a big push in that direction. They helped push me in the direction to help me get to a million.
My Question for You
Here’s my question: If I can break through, if I can grow, if I can transform, if I can get there, why not you? What’s holding you back?
Founders almost always think that their growth problem is strategy or sales. “Sales fixes all” – it’s true, it’s not wrong. But it doesn’t fix forever. I think that’s something to remember – “sales fix all” is true, but if you continue to self-sabotage yourself and your business, it’s never going to solve really the long-term problem.
What I’ve learned is that every business problem is a personal problem in disguise, and there are 5 domains every frustrated founder needs to align before they can fully accelerate. I don’t say “master,” because it’s not that you’re perfect. It’s not that you conquered this. It’s that they’re aligned, that you see them working together, that you see that one takes you to another, that you see that getting where you want to go requires having these things in place.
The Five Domains
1. Vision: Do You Know Where You’re Going?
Do you know where you’re going, or are you just hoping your next month won’t be worse? There’s a difference between proactive growth and reactive growth. What I want you to see is if you’re stuck, one of the first things is getting proactive, getting clear, getting ahead and stop reacting to fires and months and revenue spikes and drops.
2. Values: Is Your Business Built on What Matters to You?
Not just “We believe X” and these are our standards that we don’t follow when we put them up. So people say them, but nobody knows they are. Is your business built on what matters to you? Like how much money you want to make, seriously. Where you want to live. How much you want to work, what kind of work you want to do. Who you want to hang out with. How many people you want to manage.
Or are you just chasing new trends just to survive? What often happens is because we don’t have values, because we don’t have standards, because we don’t believe – we don’t name what we believe, or we don’t believe anything hard enough. We just chase, chase, chase trends. Chase things to keep something right, to solve problems. There’s always a new trend or technology or something to band-aid it. But the problem is, you’re chasing. You spend your life chasing. It’s a lot of energy spent.
3. Identity: Are You the Leader Your Business Needs?
Or are you actually just an overpaid firefighter? I like this one because this really gets to – are you a frustrated founder or a visionary CEO? The question is, who do you want to be?
A lot flipped for me between 2022 and 2024, 2025, where I decided I am going to become Simon 10.0. Version 10.0. So pretending I am 1.0 right now. What is 10.0? What does that look like? That was vision.
I had to go, “Well, what’s my vision? Okay. Well, what are the things that matter to me in there? Okay.” What can I do right now? Oftentimes this is the crazy thing about vision and values – values just comes out of vision. Vision makes this massive gap that then you want to close, and you have these questions where you go, “Why am I not doing those things right now?”
I literally just went through this again. I’ve done this many times, but my coach pushed me to create my 10-year vision, and I did it, and I wrote this thing – I don’t know how many pages, 10 pages. At the end of it, I looked at it, and I went, “Well, I could do that now. I could do that now. I could do – well, I have to wait 10 years to do some of these things.” Some of them take 10 years to build, some don’t.
Are you being the person that can get you there? If you’re not, that’s okay. But start now, start doing some things now.
4. Systems: Do You Have Rhythms That Help You Grow?
Or are you running on fumes and spinning out? What anchors you? You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
I can say I want to make a million dollars a year personally, but if I don’t have systems, if I don’t have rhythms, if I don’t do the things that it takes to get there, it’s never going to happen. So what are the rhythms? What are the things to help you grow?
Let me tell a story
Not too long ago my family went to San Diego for a week, and we took our kids to SeaWorld and played on the beach. It’s really fun, because it’s hot here in Arizona and Phoenix, and it was great to get out and do something a little bit different. But it was really hard, because it was a hard week, and looking back, I just felt totally spun out and lost the whole time.
When I look back on it, one of the big things that I realized, and I told my wife, is I was so out of sync. I think I worked out once in the gym, and it was kind of short. My diet was all over the place. I mean, we’re eating out. Not bad food, but some of it was. I wasn’t getting the same nutrition. The sleep – I mean, we were in a hotel room, so the sleep was kind of bad.
I’m not complaining here
What I’m saying is, I have rhythms that anchor me. If I am going to play at this level up here – Simon 10.0, 10 million dollar level – the problem is that when I spend extended amounts of time in environments that I can’t – that I spin out in, or I struggle in, or that my body starts to – I don’t know, can’t keep up, and when I – you get my point. I can’t perform at that level.
That’s really what this is about – your environment and your rhythms that keep you growing, and keep you stabilized and keep you going on a day-to-day basis.
5. Relationships: Do You Have the Right Team?
Or do they look to you for every answer, every time? This is really about your culture. It’s about your community, it’s about your standards. It’s about the people around you. I could even just call this community.
The point is that you’re not doing this alone. You can’t grow alone.
You’re going to need…
- A team around you.
- A coach to help you.
- Friends that elevate you.
Building the right team is really important
At my company Structure, my lived experience here is we built up a team. At one point I think we were about 10 people, and it was a little overbuilt at the time for our revenue. For a couple of reasons. One, we had poor systems and operations that required a lot of people, and a lot of handholding and a lot of steps. They weren’t efficient enough – it just took a lot of work, and for me to survive we had built it up.
Really, it needed to be simpler
So that was a mistake on our part. I totally see it. The other one was we had a big contract with a client that was a multi-year deal that we built our team so that we could deliver that contract. We actually hired to do pre-work for the contract, because it was a big front-loaded thing.
The bummer is, the contract actually didn’t work out and we had to let go of a number of those team members. What I learned, though in that process of building and going down is we had people that rose up and were great and leaders, and we had people that left on their own, and this is normal for every business. But what I’m saying is, there were a lot of times in that process where I realized that I was carrying my team, and I wasn’t empowering them.
They weren’t working on their own off of my clear vision, values, identity and systems that I had built around us, that they could operate in. It was just chaos.
So do you have the right people that can help you build that, or that are willing to work in that, that you don’t have to carry? That’s on you. Some of that’s on them. But there’s a lot to explore there.
Your 10-Year Vision: A Practical Tool
I want to jump into your 10-year vision as a tool, as a takeaway tool for you, because we talked about these 5 domains. What I want to do is pretty much every week or every call, I want to dig into these a little bit more, and share more with you on them. The first one I want to tackle is the 10-year vision. It’s just the right place to start. Every workshop that we’ve done with every client to grow their business, every founder to clarify their vision starts with this conversation. This exercise, and everything flows from here.
The Goal
Your 10-year vision. The goal is to align your business around a big vision of the future. The vision is where you’re headed, and why it matters. Most frustrated founders are stuck because they’re working in the business without clarity on the business. Without a clear vision, honestly, you’re just building a machine you can’t control that goes nowhere.
The goal here is to create an inspirational, detailed, and actionable 13-1 for your life and work. Your 13-1 is your 10-year vision, 3-year mission, 1-year goals. We just called it 13-1, because it’s kind of a package that works together that you can run with.
Business is personal, and your business is an expression of your life and your vision, good or bad. So it starts with you. Your 10-year vision? And how does your business fit into that. We don’t want to compartmentalize it and just do like, “what’s the business 10-year vision?” No, this is you. Inside of you is the business. You can do another 10-year for the business, but we’re going to look at the whole picture.
Getting Started
Start by multiplying your revenue and income 10x what it is now. This is the easiest way to imagine a 10-year vision is, you have an anchor that you drop, which is 10 times income.
So if you’re making a $100,000 a year right now, personally – $1 million. If you’re making a million personally – $10 million. If you’re making 200K – $2 million. Those are easy jumps just to make and say, “what would life look like if I’m making 200K a year now, and I build my life around a $2 million dollar income, what’s possible?”
Now that’s your anchor. I don’t want it to be your limiter, but it is a good way to really get started and go from there and figure that out.
Eight Areas to Explore
You want to create vision around these 8 areas:
Home and Environment
What’s my home environment? What’s my life like? How many homes do I have? What’s the environment at the home like – bedroom, outdoor, indoor. Noise levels, smells, all that stuff.
Daily Rhythm
What’s your day look like on a regular basis? This goes back to what we talked about – do you have rhythms that help you grow? So it’s looking at what are those rhythms that are pushing you towards 10-year vision?
Marriage and Family
What does your marriage look like? What does your family look like? How many kids you have? What do you do to invest in your marriage? Invest in your kids? Are you closer? Are you farther away? What does that look like?
Health and Vitality
What does your body look like? Do you have energy? What does exercise, movement look like for you? What is that? Specifically? What do you want it to look like? How often?
Impact and Contribution
This is like philanthropy. This is like, what are you going to give to the world beyond just making money? All of this is your contribution to the world. It’s a little more specific on how do you give? What is the specific give back, pay it forward, component in your life? The reason that’s important is because of meaning. Purpose – it drives a life that isn’t just driven towards you. It’s driven towards others. That’s a really important piece to think about. Often we don’t think about that till we have money, but the truth is, it’s an important part of who you’re becoming, whether or not you have money or not.
Lifestyle and Adventure
This is a hard one for me, because I’m busy with my family and my work. But this is really important. What does lifestyle and adventure look like for you? What are you doing? What does adventure look like? Are you traveling? Are you going out of the country every year? Are you wakeboarding? Are you skiing? What do you do for that stuff?
Personal Growth and Legacy
What does your ongoing growth, ongoing future look like? What does that legacy look like as you go forward? What do you want to be known for? This is really important.
The Process
It’s okay if it takes a little bit of time. I just did this like a week ago, and it was so good to do it again. It’s amazing when you do this, you start losing yourself in your future, and it starts feeling really real, and then it can be really hard to come back to the day-to-day reality of your life. But then, what happens is this vision starts holding you.
This is really important
You can either push a vision forward, which is a lot of work, or your vision can pull you forward. I’m in a season right now where I’ve spent a lot of time pushing visions forward, and I’m trying to create a vision that pulls me forward.
That’s my challenge for you too. You may not even realize that. But a vision that pulls you forward is a lot more effortless. Growth happens a little more easily. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s very hard. But that’s where you want to be.
What I noticed when I wrote this vision – this 10-year vision of mine – I think it was like 15 pages, a lot of content, a lot of great dreams. I had this moment where I was like “I should do that now.” One of those things was like, I want my kids to be coming to me for advice. I want to do one-on-one time with them, and I want them to connect with me.
I was like “what the heck. I’m not doing that now, but I could.” I was like “dang, put it on the calendar.” Every week I’m taking a kid out – one of our 4 kids. We’re going to have 5. Taking a kid out and doing one-on-one time with them, ask them questions, learn about them, see what they’re struggling with, seeing what they’re excited about. That was something I could do now. And I made my vision real.
The 10-3-1 Model
What you want to do is use the 10-3-1 model to clarify your vision. This is the tool. It’s comprised of 3 things:
10-Year Vision (Your Trajectory)
This is how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of your business without getting bogged down by data and numbers. Typically 10x revenue and income. This is what we’ve done in our workshops, and it’s always a great exercise – mind blowing usually.
3-Year Mission (Your Target)
This is the detailed written description of you and your company’s desired future state over a 3-year period. Financially specific and time bound.
So you might say, “in 10 years we want to be at $10 million in revenue. And this is what this looks like. In 3 years, we want to be at $2 million in revenue, and that’s at this date.”
The cool thing is, the 10-year vision can be a little bit disconnected from the data and numbers. And that’s okay. You use that 10x revenue as an anchor. But what you really want to do with that 3-year mission is, you want to get specific enough that you actually know you can achieve that. You say “this is how much money we’re going to make in this amount of time, and we’re on a mission to achieve that amount of money in that amount of time.”
It’s not a fluffy mission statement, like “we were on a mission to eradicate poverty from all the areas of the world.” Great mission – do it. But that’s not your mission statement, because it’s not specific enough to get behind. That would be more of like a purpose statement. That’s your purpose is to do that. But your mission is to make money by a certain date.
1-Year Goals (Your Steps)
These are the clear, integrated steps that get your family and your team passionate about how the big picture and the day-to-day come together. This is really key. This is the most helpful thing for your team and for your day-to-day operations.
My mentor Scott has a model called the North Star. Really good. Check it out. What he does is he splits those 1-year goals into outcomes, and he says, to create like 3 or 4 outcomes for each goal. So you have tangible outcomes. If we achieve this goal, A, B, C, D will be true. It helps you get really clear on that. You can even make those your quarterly targets if you want.
I don’t mean to get too far into strategic planning here, but what I want you to see is seeing this picture, zooming out, start with your 10-year vision. Being able to think about your life, your work, your business in this way is game changing. It really is. We do workshops with clients, and this is a big process, and they pay us a lot of money to do this, because it’s very, very high impact. But you can do it yourself too. Just pull up a doc. Take a voice note. Whatever you want, and push that down.
How to Go Deeper
Thank you so much. I’m going to do this live every Tuesday and Thursday at 2 PM. Would love to see people here. I’ll keep teaching and talking and sharing, but would love to make this more interactive over time. That was my goal. So if you joined today, thank you so much. I appreciate you and have a great rest of your day.
Frustrated founder key points
The 4 Truths Frustrated Founders Can’t Ignore:
- Business is deeply personal (and why that’s actually good news)
- The best founders perform even in the worst circumstances
- The “align to accelerate” mindset changes everything
- Relationships truly determine your results
The 5 Domains Framework:
- Vision – Do you know where you’re going, or just hoping next month won’t be worse?
- Values – Is your business built on what matters to you, or are you chasing trends?
- Identity – Are you a visionary CEO or an overpaid firefighter?
- Systems – Do you have rhythms that help you grow, or are you running on fumes?
- Relationships – Do you have the right team, or do they look to you for every answer?
My Story:
At my lowest point, my evenings ended in “Netflix, whiskey, and guilt.” I was building a company that looked successful on paper while completely failing myself and straining my family. The breakthrough came when I realized I couldn’t fix my business problems with business solutions – I had to rebuild from the inside out.
The Result: Lost 50 pounds, reconnected with my family, broke through $1M in revenue, and now help other founders do the same without burning out.
Timestamps:
- 00:00 – Welcome to Founder Hour
- 03:05 – Why I Started This Live Series
- 07:14 – My Story: The Breaking Point
- 18:04 – The 4 Truths Frustrated Founders Must Know
- 25:00 – Business Problems = Personal Problems in Disguise
- 36:00 – The 5 Domains Framework Explained
- 43:00 – Building Your 10-Year Vision (Tool Walkthrough)
- 56:00 – Resources & Next Steps
Key problems addressed:
- 7:14 – Why do founders feel trapped between growth and failure?
- 9:05 – What does it look like when your freedom vehicle becomes a prison?
- 10:41 – How do you know if you’re in the dangerous $300K to $1M revenue gap?
- 13:01 – Why do founders end up medicating through their pain instead of solving it?
- 18:25 – What are the four truths frustrated founders can’t ignore?
- 21:05 – Why can’t business systems fix a broken founder?
- 21:49 – How do you recognize when business problems are personal problems in disguise?
- 24:47 – What does it mean to rebuild your business from the inside out?
- 25:29 – What are the four truths every struggling founder must accept?
- 27:54 – How does the “align to accelerate” principle work for growth?
- 28:48 – What is the 4-step acceleration loop process?
- 29:38 – Why do relationships determine your business results?
- 32:00 – How do you know when you need a coach versus trying to go it alone?
- 34:29 – What’s the real reason founders think their problem is strategy or sales?
- 35:55 – What are the 5 domains every founder must align before accelerating?
- 36:56 – How do you move from reactive to proactive business growth?
- 38:02 – How do you build a business based on your personal values?
- 38:49 – How do you transform from firefighter to visionary CEO?
- 39:33 – What systems and rhythms help founders grow consistently?
- 41:25 – How do you build the right team that doesn’t depend on you for every answer?
- 45:05 – How do you create a 10-year vision that actually works?
- 47:31 – What are the 8 key life areas to include in your vision planning?
- 51:43 – How does the 10/3/1 framework clarify your business direction?
