Most founders think they have a team problem. Deadlines missed. Quality slipping. Constant firefighting. Sound familiar?
But here’s the brutal truth I unpacked in this week’s Focus Hour: Your team isn’t broken. They’re a mirror, reflecting exactly what you’re showing them.
Whether you’re leading a startup team, managing a growing company, or trying to get your kids to eat their broccoli – this principle will punch you in the gut. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The Mirror Principle: Your team reflects your standards, not your expectations. Your confusion becomes their chaos. Your absence becomes their avoidance. Your inconsistency becomes their infrastructure.
Trust is Everything: No follow-through equals no trust. Period. This applies in the boardroom and the playroom.
You Can’t Lead Like a Follower: If you’re trying to manage people without managing yourself first, you will fail. Not might. Will.
Culture = Standards + Trust: Most leaders build backwards, starting with shortcuts instead of standards. They throw money at ads, rebuild websites, hire fast – anything to avoid the real work.
Belief Before Ability: You don’t have a delegation problem. You have a belief problem. If you believe “I do it best,” you’ll never let go.
Everything Flows From You: This isn’t about making you feel terrible. It’s about recognizing that as a founder, you’re the source. Fix yourself, fix your business.
Legacy Through Standards: Your legacy isn’t the company or the money. It’s the culture that survives without you.
Key Takeaways
Misalignment: Most companies don’t fail from bad marketing or team issues – they fail from misalignment between founders and their business.
Trust as the Foundation: Trust isn’t taught – it’s transferred.
Personal Mastery Before Leadership: Leadership flows from personal mastery. Conquer before you coach.
Building Backwards: Real growth starts inside and works its way out.
Key Problems Addressed
Does your team reflect your standards or your shortcuts?
Why do most founders and companies fail?
What’s the biggest problem across businesses and founders?
Why does my team have performance problems?
What are leading indicators versus lagging indicators?
How do I get a high-performance team?
Why can’t I manage my team effectively?
Can you lead followers if you’re leading like a follower?
Why doesn’t my team trust me?
What’s the connection between follow-through and trust?
Why is my company culture weak?
What happens when leaders are confused, absent, or inconsistent?
What stage of founder development am I in?
Why am I stuck at my current revenue level?
What mistakes keep founders from scaling past $1M?
Should I be a problem solver or a standard setter?
Why isn’t my team performing at a high level?
How do personal standards affect team performance?
What’s the formula for building culture?
Why do founders start with shortcuts instead of standards?
How do I identify my shortcuts?
How do I raise my standards effectively?
Why should I conquer before I coach?
What is a founder’s true legacy?
How can I test if my standards affect my team’s culture?
Summary
Team Culture and Standards
Simon hosted a live video discussion about team culture, standards, and shortcuts for founders, sharing his personal experiences and insights about leadership and business growth. He emphasized the importance of building trust, setting high standards, and focusing on internal development before external expansion, using examples from his own journey as a founder. The session concluded with plans for future weekly discussions on key topics like vision, identity, and leadership, while highlighting the central theme that culture is the true legacy of a leader.
Next Steps
Identify one standard you’ve been tolerating and raise it for yourself this week
Examine what shortcuts you’re taking instead of setting proper standards
Evaluate if your team culture would stand or collapse without you
Identify blind spots where you need to raise your own standards first
Key Discussion Points
The Misalignment Problem Most companies don’t fail from bad marketing or team issues – they fail from misalignment between founders and their business. As Simon’s mentor said: “The only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership.”
Trust as the Foundation Trust isn’t taught – it’s transferred. Simon shared how his parenting experience taught him that his son didn’t trust him because he didn’t consistently follow through on what he said. The same dynamic was playing out in his business.
Personal Mastery Before Leadership Back in 2021-2022, Simon was 50 pounds overweight, a functional alcoholic drinking bottles of whiskey weekly, Netflix binging, hungover daily – and wondering why his team wasn’t performing. Leadership flows from personal mastery. Conquer before you coach.
Building Backwards Most leaders start with shortcuts: throwing money at ads, rebuilding websites, making tons of content. These are at-scale tactics that avoid the real work. Real growth starts inside and works its way out.
The Challenge Take one standard you’ve been tolerating. Raise it for yourself this week – without announcing it. Don’t tell anybody what you want. Just be it. Do it. Watch your culture follow.
Full Transcript
Wow! Here we are, welcome to today’s focus hour for founders. It is awesome to be here. This is Thursday, September 11th. We’ve got a great topic today on team culture, standards and shortcuts, and I am stoked to unpack this. This is, I think, number 5 of the live videos that I’ve been doing.
Yeah, it’s been great. It’s been really fun to share some of these ideas. And I hope that we get some people who join today. So if you’re here, if you join at all, or if you’re watching later, just say hi! Put your name in the comments. Just so I know that you’re here, and I can say hi. If you have questions as I go through this live presentation, just holler in the comments and ask. I’m gonna follow and jump in with answers and commentary as we go, so I will try to keep watching for comments.
Let’s go from here. I’m gonna share my screen and I have a little deck to walk through.
Does Your Team Reflect Your Standards or Your Shortcuts?
All right. Here we are. Does your team reflect your standards or your shortcuts? This is today’s topic. And this is a tough one. This is a really good one. Every time I write a LinkedIn post, put up a TikTok or Instagram video, or talk in any way about team, about leadership, about culture, it’s always a hot topic. Because it’s a hard topic. And so I’m really excited to hit this today and see what comes out of it.
Before I jump in, one more note of setup here is I do this every week, every Thursday for founders, and these are 6, 7, 8 figure founders that I’ve worked with, and I’ve formed this content for, because that’s who I am.
I’ve been through that process of building a business, starting a business, scaling a business, cresting over revenue ceilings, breaking through them, struggling, failing, hiring, firing – the whole gamut – building my marketing agency Structure, which still exists, which still operates.
And what I learned in that process was one big thing over 10 years, and that big lesson was this: Most founders, most companies don’t fail from bad marketing. They don’t fail from external growth. They don’t fail from a bad market. They don’t fail from just team culture issues. They fail because of misalignment.
Misalignment between the founder and the business, between the founders and the business, and the biggest problem across the board is misalignment.
There’s a phrase that a mentor of mine used to say: “The only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership.” And I’ve heard that a few times. So true.
It’s so hard to make a business run and work with multiple partners. So if you have multiple partners and you’re on here, just holler and say something, because I want to know. Because that is a hard place to begin. That’s a hard business to start. It’s so helpful because you have someone to bounce ideas off of. You have someone who’s there with you. You have someone to complement your weaknesses. However, it does not help the alignment problem. We have enough trouble staying aligned with our own personal vision and values and execution. When you add another person or 3 people into the mix, it is almost impossible.
That’s my mission. That is my message – to help with misalignment across businesses and founders. I’m here just to help. I know you don’t want to settle. I know you don’t want to fail. I know you don’t want to drift. And so I want to help you have clarity, have focus and have alignment so you can grow. Because that’s what I needed, and I know that’s what we all need.
The Mirror Principle
Here’s a question: Does your team reflect your standards or your shortcuts? Most founders think they have a team problem. I did. I thought I had a team problem. Deadlines were missed. Quality was slipping. I was constantly firefighting. But the hard truth here that I’m gonna unpack throughout this talk is: Your team isn’t broken.
Your team isn’t broken doesn’t mean you have the highest performers in the world, doesn’t mean they’re the most experienced, doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. But what it does mean is they’re a mirror, and they’re reflecting you. Let’s dive in.
Here’s the big idea. I want to help turn that mirror that your team already is so that you can see that feedback that they’re giving you through their performance, through their energy, through their communication.
Three quick things right off the bat:
Ability follows belief Culture follows trust
There’s this massive concept, a data concept that I really want to share. It’s this concept of indicators in any relationship – leading indicators and lagging indicators.
Leading indicators are the inputs to the actions, the activities to get what you want. The lagging indicators are the outcomes of those inputs and time and process.
Do you want a high ability performance team? Yes, here’s what you gotta do. You got to input belief. And if you’re not getting performance and ability, you’re missing belief.
Same thing – culture follows trust. Build trust, build culture.
Peter Drucker’s Truth
Peter Drucker, the management consultant, author, speaker, said this quote: “Executives who do not manage themselves cannot expect to manage associates.”
This is a massive mirror. When I read this in his book, The Effective Executive, it was right at the beginning. It was mind-blowing. I realized I had spent years with my team trying to manage other people.
If you’re a founder, a parent, a friend, family member – which you are in some way – you are in charge of managing people. And if you are trying to manage people without managing yourself first, you will not be able to do it. You will fail.
Here’s a translation with both of these two keys that I want to share. This is the foundation of this whole talk: You can’t lead followers (team, children, spouse, friends, community) if you’re leading like a follower.
A Story About Trust
I want to tell a story, because this is something that isn’t just theory. I’ve lived this very practically on a day-to-day basis with my home and with my family, and I’ve learned it in my business too. Sometimes some of the biggest business lessons that we can learn don’t come from the boardroom. They come from the playroom.
I had this moment with my son Peter that I really want to share, because this was a playroom lesson that I brought into the boardroom and has transformed my leadership as an executive and founder.
We were begging, bribing, threatening our son. But nothing worked. If you’re a parent, you’ve been in this. You want your kids to listen. You want your kids to obey. You want your kids to respect. I see this at restaurants all the time: “If you don’t eat that now, or if you don’t stop jumping on this booth, we’re going to go home.” Or at the store: “If you don’t stop, then we’re gonna leave right now.” For us, we were trying to get our son to eat: “If you don’t eat that broccoli, you can’t have dessert.”
And then what happens? You don’t leave. You still give him dessert. You always find a way to slip, to justify, to tolerate, because you don’t want them to fail. You don’t want them to lose. You don’t want to be mean.
We were doing this with our son, but he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t obeying, and we were constantly nagging and coercing, bribing, begging to get our son to do what we wanted him to do. This was our first son. We were very early parents and we made a lot of mistakes.
But we had this friend couple. They had more kids than us. They were older than us. And I remember one moment they looked at us and said, “Hey, can we tell you something?” I said, “Yeah, go for it” because I was frustrated. And they said, “Your son doesn’t trust you because you don’t do what you say.”
It hit me like a truck. A gut punch. It was so true. The same thing that was happening in our life was also happening in our business and was happening across all of our relationships.
I’d never really thought about it from his perspective. I’d only thought about it from mine. For him, I was setting a standard, I was setting a culture, I was setting an expectation that changed his behavior, changed how he showed up in our relationship.
So my question for you is: Do you trust yourself enough for others to trust you? Or do others not trust you because you don’t trust yourself or you don’t follow through? No follow through equals no trust.
The Reflection Principle
If your culture is weak in your company, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. You hired them, you started it, you’re calling yourself a founder or a CEO. It’s yours. They’re reflecting you.
Your confusion becomes their chaos Your absence becomes their avoidance Your inconsistency becomes their infrastructure
Your leading indicators here are confusion, absence, and inconsistency. You’re saying one thing, doing another. You’re showing up sometimes, not showing up other times. You’re showing up at different times. You’re inconsistent.
And you know what you get? You get chaos, you get avoidance and poor infrastructure. If you’re experiencing any of these things, it’s because of the inputs.
The Brutal Reality
Everything flows from you as a founder. And I don’t want you to sit here and watch this and think you’re terrible. That’s not my goal. I’m not here to tell you that you’re bad. You are a leader. You are a CEO. You are driving your business no matter what stage you are in.
People measure where they’re at as a founder based on revenue. That’s one way to do it. Another way – and I’m working on this right now, about to come out with it – is more of a storyline of developmental stages of a founder that don’t necessarily follow revenue but follow experience, development, growth stages.
I want you to know that if you are struggling with this, you are not alone. You are very normal. You are just in the stage of struggling with this. You are basically in the bottleneck stage, likely around a million, likely somewhere around there. That’s probably where you’re at, and you might be between 300,000 and 3 million. But the point is, that’s very normal.
My Turning Point
My turning point happened around this same point. I was starting to feel it at 300,000. It kept me from getting to a million. I finally broke through because of the leadership lessons I learned.
At this point in my company, we had 10 team members, a million dollars in revenue, a dozen clients, and I was carrying my family and team, not building a culture. Mind you, I have 4 children and a wife. My mistakes were lowering my standards and rushing hires to offload pain, not build the future. I was acquiring team members, having more kids, building without really building, if that makes any sense.
I had a few shifts that I want to share with you:
Mindset Shift
I had to stop being the savior of every problem. Stop fixing, and start being the standard bearer. Big difference: If you want to fix a problem, be the savior. If you want to build a legacy, set standards. Your legacy is based on the standards you set that others hold when you die. Because if you’re the savior, as soon as you’re gone, it’s over.
Performance Shift
You can’t expect high performance results from low performance standards. I was expecting high performance from my team without really setting a bar or setting my own bar. I was living a low bar on my own.
Back in 2021-2022, I was 50-ish pounds overweight, a functional alcoholic, drinking a couple bottles of whiskey a week, Netflix binging at night, hungover every day, trying to make it through the day, wondering why I wasn’t growing and building my team. I had clients following me. I had kids following me. I had team members following me. And I was expecting prolific performance from all of these people. But I was – not to put too fine a point on it – not living up to my own standards.
Legacy
Trust isn’t taught. It’s transferred. When I trusted myself enough to raise my standards for myself, my team then learned to trust me. Only when I could get to this point was I able to build the team, and the team would build the business.
Culture = Standards + Trust
Culture is a combination of standards and trust. When you have standards and when you have trust, it equals culture. But here’s the problem: Most leaders build backwards.
If you’re like most founders, you start with shortcuts, not standards. Every time we want to grow, every time we want to build, every time we want to create, we start with the easy route, and we try to go at scale with the shortcut. Isn’t that funny?
For example, clients come to our marketing company wanting to grow their business. They want to market and sell. They want to increase revenue. They come in with massive goals – 10x revenue. But what they want to do is throw money at ads, rebuild their website, and make a ton of content.
Nothing wrong with ads, website, and content. But those are at-scale ways to grow a following, to grow a business, to build a brand. They are not aligned with you doing anything. You’re just outsourcing a bunch of work. That’s a shortcut to growth. Growth starts inside.
Most leaders build backwards. They start with the outside, all the external things. Real growth starts inside and works its way out.
Practical Shifts
Here’s how you can take this topic and work it out in your real life:
1. Sniff Out Your Shortcuts
What shortcuts are you trying to take in order to accomplish something? List the behaviors, shortcuts, or compromises you’ve been accepting. That’s really hard to think about, so if you have to ask someone, ask someone. Your spouse knows. Your kids know. Your team knows.
For me, instead of dealing with my feelings and my fears back in 2021-2022, I drank. That’s a shortcut because it cuts short my feelings, and I couldn’t even see clearly.
2. Raise Your Standards
Raise your standards before expecting things from other people that you are not doing yourself. Model it. Your family, your team, your friends – they watch what you do, not what you say.
If you want sales to be done a certain way from your sales team, model it. Sit in the chair and do it.
3. Conquer Before You Coach
Don’t just model it and send it. Show them the proof of the results, the outcomes. Master your disciplines, habits, and standards before trying to instill them in others. Leadership flows from personal mastery.
I didn’t start talking about leadership the moment I realized I needed to grow as a leader. I made a big shift a few years ago and spent a few years working this out. I wanted to make sure I could exercise consistently before talking about health. I didn’t talk about that when I was 50 pounds overweight, when I hadn’t run a half marathon, when I wasn’t going to the gym, when I was eating donuts. That was something that I mastered – my health – and I can talk about that now.
A Unified Team Is The Only Way
Relationships determine results. If you’re a founder, if you’re a leader, you started this thing because you wanted to build something beyond yourself. You wanted to build something that was bigger than you. You wanted freedom of some sort.
Your legacy isn’t the company you build or the money you make. Those are material tools, resources on the way to building a legacy. Legacy is the culture that survives without you. Your standards are your legacy, not your standard of living. When you’re gone, all that remains is the standards you set for others because of the standards you set for yourself.
This Week’s Challenge
Take one standard you’ve been tolerating. Raise it for yourself this week and watch culture follow. Watch culture in your home follow. Watch culture at work follow.
Don’t say anything. Here’s the challenge: Don’t tell anybody what you want. Do this as a test. Don’t say “I want you to do this.” Just be it. Do it yourself.
It’s not gonna happen instantly. But what you embody will permeate.
That’s the talk. That’s what I got. Thank you for joining. Every Thursday, 1 PM Mountain Time. Hope to have you join and watch in the future. Have a great rest of your day.
Most founders think they have a business systemization problem. They’re wrong. They have a business belief problem.
In this live session, I break down the brutal truth about why your business isn’t scaling – and it’s why it’s not what you think.
What You’ll Learn
Why “competence is a cage” and being good at everything keeps you stuck
The exact moment I told my project manager to take over 90% of operations (and revenue exploded)
My 5-area alignment framework that took me from $300K to 7 figures
Why belief comes before ability in delegation
The “management by absence” strategy that transformed my business
My Story
In 2022, I was 50 pounds overweight, working 80-hour weeks, and stuck at $300K revenue. Three years later: 7-figure business, working 30% less, with 95% of delivery handled by my team.
The 5 Areas Every Founder Must Align Before Scaling
Vision (Do you know where you’re going?)
Health (Do you have energy to lead?)
Leadership (Are you a leader or an overpaid firefighter?)
Systems (Is your business a machine or are you chasing trends?)
Standards (Is your team a community or a headache?)
Key Timestamps
00:00 – Why businesses plateau
15:30 – The moment I stepped out of operations
29:30 – Competence is a cage
42:00 – Why the business needs to breathe
48:00 – Companies don’t plateau, people do
Key Problems Addressed
Is your business running like a machine or are you chasing trends to survive?
How do you break through when you feel like your business has hit a ceiling?
What do you do when you need alignment and execution but can’t find it through Google searches?
How do you get focused when you’re stuck in a reactive loop at 3 AM?
What are the 5 areas founders need to align before they can accelerate?
How do you know if you have systems or if you are the system?
What should you do when stepping out of day-to-day operations feels too risky?
Where would your business collapse if you stepped away for 2 weeks?
Why does being good at everything keep you stuck?
How do you overcome the belief that you do everything best?
What goals should you set to force yourself to rebuild and delegate?
How do you stop making small decisions that drain energy from big ones?
What should you focus on based on your revenue target?
How do you delegate without just handing off what you’ve been doing?
When should you intentionally drop the ball to let others step up?
How do you implement “management by absence” effectively?
Why do companies plateau and how do you break through?
What’s the real bottleneck when you think it’s your systems?
What should you fire yourself from to free your business to scale?
What’s keeping you stuck right now and how do you move forward?
Summary
Quick recap
Simon hosted a live session on LinkedIn and TikTok discussing systemization for founders, sharing his personal journey from business struggles in 2022 to significant success by 2025 through implementing structured frameworks and seeking coaching support. He emphasized the importance of alignment across five key areas – vision, health, leadership, systems, and standards – while highlighting how delegation and letting go of micromanagement can actually improve business performance. Simon encouraged founders to overcome self-imposed limitations and personal bottlenecks, offering various support options to help achieve business growth and transformation.
Summary
Systemizing Business for Sustainable Growth
Simon hosted a live session on LinkedIn and TikTok, focusing on the topic of systemization for founders. He emphasized the importance of distinguishing between running a business like a machine and simply chasing trends to survive. Simon encouraged participants to reflect on whether their businesses are well-structured or if they are being driven by external influences. He also mentioned introducing a friend, Chris, who is a coach, and planned to continue the discussion further.
Simon’s Business and Personal Transformation
Simon shared his personal journey from being a frustrated founder in 2022, struggling with business challenges and personal health issues, to achieving significant success by 2025. He transformed his business from $300,000 in revenue with flat growth to 7 figures in annual revenue, while also improving his personal well-being. Simon emphasized the importance of elevating one’s vision and creating systems rather than just reacting to trends, and he introduced his “13-1 framework” of 10-year vision, 3-year mission, and one-year goals.
Business Growth Through Mentorship
Simon shared his personal journey of overcoming challenges in business growth by seeking guidance from various coaches over the past three years, emphasizing the importance of alignment and execution in achieving significant business milestones. He highlighted the value of mentorship and coaching in transforming both personal and business success, noting that successful entrepreneurs often work with multiple coaches to address different aspects of their ventures. Simon encouraged attendees to engage with him on platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn for further support and to address their questions live.
Founders’ Path to Clarity and Control
Simon shared his personal journey from a chaotic, exhausting lifestyle as an entrepreneur to one of clarity and control, highlighting the importance of systems and focus. He emphasized the dangers of constant distraction and the need for founders to align on five key areas to accelerate growth. Simon introduced the concept of “being the system” rather than being driven by trends, and he promised to share more about these areas in future calls.
Key Areas for Business Alignment
Simon discussed the importance of alignment in business growth and scaling. He outlined five key areas: vision, health, leadership, systems, and standards. Simon emphasized that these areas are essential for achieving clarity, energy, confidence, resilience, and results. He explained that systems are often overlooked by founders, who may have processes but lack true systems that can run the business effectively when they are not present.
Delegating for Business Growth
Simon shared his personal experience of realizing that his hands-on involvement in operations was actually harming his business, leading to a decision to delegate 90% of day-to-day operations to his project manager. He explained how this shift not only relieved him of the burden of micromanagement but also improved business performance, as his team was able to operate more effectively without his constant oversight. Simon concluded by challenging the audience to identify areas where their business might collapse if they stepped back, suggesting that their fears about client service quality were often unfounded, as his own clients actually received better attention and service after his delegation.
Breaking the Cage of Competence
Simon discussed the concept that competence can be a cage, explaining how being good at everything can limit growth and prevent progress. He emphasized that belief comes before ability, suggesting founders often struggle with delegation not due to skill but due to lack of belief in themselves. Simon encouraged founders to set ambitious goals that force them to rebuild, reinvent, and realign their businesses, highlighting the importance of shifting beliefs and casting a bigger vision to enable delegation and system building.
Delegating for Business Growth
Simon shared insights on the importance of letting go and delegating tasks to allow for growth and development within a business. He emphasized that founders often hold onto tasks out of fear of failure or a belief that only they can do it perfectly, but this can hinder progress. Simon highlighted the concept of “management by absence” and the benefits of stepping back to allow the business to breathe and innovate. He encouraged founders to identify tasks they are hesitant to delegate and consider the potential benefits of letting go, even if it feels counterintuitive.
Quality Over Quantity in Opportunities
Simon discussed a baseball analogy about focusing on quality over quantity, emphasizing the importance of selecting the right opportunities to succeed. He mentioned finding a typo and having to leave for a while due to a visit from an AC technician. Simon returned to continue the discussion but acknowledged some technical difficulties during the live session, including dropping his camera.
Business Growth and Founder Development
Simon discussed the concept that businesses don’t plateau but rather reflect the growth or stagnation of their founders. He emphasized that personal growth and reinvention are crucial for companies to evolve, citing Yvon Chouinard’s belief that change and stress are necessary for growth. Simon highlighted that internal issues, rather than external factors, often hinder a company’s progress, and he encouraged business owners to reflect on whether their personal development is limiting their company’s potential. He concluded by asserting that the real bottleneck in business growth is often the founder’s beliefs, not the systems in place.
Overcoming Self-Limitations for Business Success
Simon shared his personal journey of overcoming self-imposed limitations and encouraged founders to identify and remove bottlenecks in their businesses. He emphasized the importance of personal growth and transformation for business success, offering three ways to help: a free alignment check, a 12-week intensive, and a 12-month program. Simon stressed that alignment builds legacy, contrasting with drift which destroys dreams, and invited viewers to engage with him for further support.
Full Transcript
Alright getting ready to go live on LinkedIn. It’s about time. Let’s see. Here we go, hey! Somebody joined. Say hi in the comments if you are here.
Okay, we are going. It is a great day. We are live on TikTok. We’re live on LinkedIn. This is my first time doing both. So this is going to be fun, but I hope to make this valuable for you and to share as much as I know.
Hey, Kimberly, thanks for joining. We’re live on LinkedIn and TikTok here today. We’re gonna be talking about a really good topic for founders called systemization. The name of this is: Are you the system or do you have one? It’s a really good question to ask, because often as business owners, we can just be the system and think that’s working until it’s really, really not. So I’m going to share my presentation on LinkedIn.
This is focus hour. This is for the top 1% of 7 and 8 figure founders who refuse to drift and want to scale their business.
Like I said, today’s topic is: are you the system or do you have one? So basically, the question I want to ask to start is, if you’re a founder, hey, just put in the comments here. Say I’m here. Let me know your name. Let me know what your business is, would love to hear, and if we can, if anybody can support one another, or if I can just know I’d love to hear what’s going on so I can support you.
So is your business running like a machine or are you just chasing trends just to survive?
That’s a really interesting question, because on one hand, you have machine business running like a machine, on the other side, you have chasing trends to survive. What business owners can often do, founders can often do is because they’re desperate, because they’re trying to grow, because they don’t have clarity and direction or focus, they’re chasing just trends. Whatever comes across their desk or their email inbox or their Instagram feed basically can take over. Now this is my focus. Now this is what I’m doing, and it’s just a really dangerous trap to get in, because you can end up just chasing trends trying to figure out, solve problems with other people’s prescriptions, and not really figuring out your own enough to solve them.
My friend Chris, he’s a coach, he says the real solutions to problems happen when you sit in it long enough for it to get clear.
If you feel like your business is in a spot where you’re chasing trends to survive, it’s okay, because I’ve been there. I’ve lived every moment of that pain. I’ve done that over and over in many, many different ways, and I am here because I want to help you grow through it instead of run from it.
I have basically a story to share. My family’s been sick. I don’t know about you guys out there. We’ve been sick. We got just totally slapped over the weekend. So if I cough, I really apologize. But I’m still recovering on my end.
In 2022, I was the epitome of what I would call a frustrated founder. I had started a couple businesses, I had exited one. I had played a lot of different roles, and was in a spot in the business. This was about 2022 where I was 50 pounds overweight, doing anything for anyone. I was a functional alcoholic, just wandering, and I was struggling with constant sinus infections every day, and trying to figure out what’s going on, and my business was about $300,000 in revenue at the time. It had flatlined. It hit this point where it was just not really growing. I couldn’t figure out what to do.
This whole topic today is so relevant to this story, because if you’re anything like that, the question “are you a system, or do you have one?” is I’m going to teach you how to not be the system and to create a system in your business.
It was a tough time in my life. It was a tough, challenging season. I thought my business was stuck and constrained—that it had hit a ceiling. What I learned in this process is it was really that I had hit a ceiling, that I was constrained, and that I was stuck, and that I could grow through it. When you’re in that spot it’s hard to know that, but it’s true.
Fast forward to 2025, 3 years later. Here we are today. Thank you, I see CMT Promos, Alt 79, Ryan, Millie, thank you so much for joining. It’s good to see you guys, Sam Ray, thank you for joining on this. Just say hi in the comments, and share the name of your business, or what you do would love to just hear to support, to connect, so share more about yourself, and if you have questions I’ll field them too throughout this live so keep it going. It’s great to have you here.
Fast forward to 2025. Here I am, right here. My, the 50 pounds is gone. Lost that weight. That was hard work, by the way. I’m in a spot in my business where I am a visionary CEO, I am leading. I am doing what I’m best at, and I’m operating on a clear 10 year vision and one year goals. I call this the 13-1 framework. It’s your 10 year vision, 3 year mission, one year goals.
Instead of chasing trends and pain relief, I’m operating on a bigger vision, and I think this is a really big point that we’re gonna unpack over time: when you’re stuck, the best thing you can do is actually elevate. Elevate the floor that you’re on, and is to think bigger and to dream bigger and start actually at the end and reverse engineer. Your life is such a great way to do that.
But I’ve got visible results in my mind and my body. I look like a different person than I had 3 years ago. Now my business is at 7 figures in annual revenue, and I’m working 30% less than I worked back then. 90, 95% of delivery, fulfillment on the business is done not by me. It’s a completely different place to be in the business. So I’m going to share how you can do that today, and how I did that.
But I tried this on my own for years. Before I get into the details I just have to make a disclaimer, so that you know this isn’t a self-made story. This isn’t a get rich quick, anything. This is my real lived-in story, my real lived-in life, and the challenges I went through, and the lessons that I learned that were school of hard knocks that were hard earned.
What I learned, though, is that I could Google growth hacks. But what I really needed when I was at this point, 50 pounds overweight, struggling, frustrated revenue was capped, I wasn’t growing at the level I wanted to, I said I wanted to scale, I said I wanted to grow, but I couldn’t quite breakthrough was I needed alignment and execution, and that wasn’t something that Google could give me. That was something that only a relationship, a coach, mentors could give me.
So I invested over the last 3 years heavily. I don’t know how much, easily 6 figures in coaches to help me grow, and they gave me roadmaps. I really needed to get clear and focused enough to transform myself to transform my business. There’s not another way around that. Everybody who I meet who’s actually successful 7, 8, figure, 9 figure founders, they have had probably a couple dozen coaches over the last handful of years, 10 years of their business, and to be honest, most of them have multiple coaches they’re working with that are supporting them at any given time on different aspects of their business or their life.
Don’t skip over that thinking that’s just a thing that you do when you get to a certain level. It’s not. It’s actually how you get to a certain level, whatever that level is you’re wanting to hit, whether that’s starting your first business, whether that’s hitting, getting past 300,000 a year, whether that’s getting past a million a year, 10 million a year, climbing to 100 million, no matter what. You can’t do that alone. You can’t do that alone.
So Chris Ronzio at Trainual, a coach of mine, he’s really taught me focus clarity. He’s taught me really high-level thinking, and I’m really appreciative of him.
Matt Verlaque, he runs a company called Precision. He’s really helped me with operations, with data, with tracking and metrics in my business. It’s been vital, and without that clarity, without the help, I wouldn’t be in the place I am today.
Scott Chisholm, he’s, I’m gonna see him in a couple weeks, he built and sold Classy to GoFundMe, and he’s a coach of mine. He’s really taught me about operational leadership, management, a lot of the stuff that I talk about on here. Just want to say he’s taught me a ton about those things.
Dale Partridge at Startup Camp, he actually built and sold Startup Camp. He taught me how to leap and dream. He taught me that nothing was too crazy to go after, and I’m just really thankful for that guy.
James Warwick, he was my first ever coach that I bartered to get his help. He really helped me start to become self-aware of my own leadership identity, who I was and how I was holding back my business, my family, myself with my fears and my beliefs, and which is why one reason why I am so passionate about founder psychology, belief, vision identity today is because of a lot of what James invested in me early on. So James, if you’re watching this, thank you.
I also want to say Linda, Pete, Sonia, Sonja, thank you so much for joining here on TikTok. It’s great to see you. Please comment. Say hi! Introduce your business, or what you’re up to, or how I can help you. If you have any questions, I will answer them right here live so thank you so much for being a part of this call.
LinkedIn, same thing. If you guys, if you’re on here and you have any questions, please feel free to introduce yourself, and I will answer any questions that come through.
Okay, let’s keep going. If you’re at this point, and you’re frustrated, and you know we all have this moment, you’re staring at the ceiling, it’s 3 AM, you’re stuck in a loop, stressed and distant, and you feel like if I quit everything’s gonna fall apart, and you also feel like if I keep going, I’ll fall apart, right?
But what I want to do is I want to help you get focused. I want to help us focus in here. Because right now, this freedom vehicle that you started to create the life you want, to help you make the money you want, to give you the freedom you want, it starts to feel like a prison. I know this, it’s felt that way to me, and every decision, crisis and dollar is on you to produce, to create, to drive. That’s exhausting. What it does is it just puts you in this reactive position where you’re constantly pushing harder, constantly driving yourself into the ground essentially. You’re just hoping things will start to finally click.
They really kind of tend to do that. Which is why a lot of people say just don’t quit, right? The fastest way to failure is by giving up by quitting, and so if you can stay in it longer than anyone else, your likelihood of winning is very high. But the point is if you can stay in it, because if you’re constantly pushing yourself harder, if you’re constantly driving yourself into the ground, you’re constantly trying to get more output with the same amount of input, you’re just gonna burn yourself out.
What I want to say here is when focus is scattered, every distraction looks like an opportunity, and I get that, and that’s my life, because I lived that. This is really back to the topic of the day: is your business running like a machine, or are you chasing trends just to survive? Every distraction looks like an opportunity. Those trends all look like opportunities. But the truth is, they’re distractions. They’re taking focus away from your business and your life and holding you back from growth.
So how do we get that focus? How do we know what we should work on? How do we know what that looks like? Let’s dig in even further. I wanted to share that today, I’m gonna share a lot about my story, and how I got here.
Ali, Alexandra, Georgie, thank you so much for joining this call. It’s great to see you on here. If you have questions, comment them, and I will answer them.
Tony, I see you just joined. Thank you so much.
Today I am not the same man as I was in 2022. I’m leading with clarity. My marriage runs on midday syncs with my wife and my team, not midnight late night arguments. My kids are getting one-on-one daddy dates each week, not just my evening leftovers. I get to take them to school every day, pick them up. It’s amazing. I’m in a position to where I am regularly advising 7 and 8 figure founders without spending 80 hours a week trying to just get the business up and continuing running because of systems, because of the systems we built.
It’s amazing, because we were watching this show the other day. The family, what was it called? It’s a Gordon Ramsay show. I don’t know if any of you like Gordon Ramsay or cooking shows. If you do, just give a thumbs up because they’re super fun. We’ve watched a lot of them, MasterChef Kids, MasterChef. But the one we watched was, I think it was called Secret Agent, or something like that where Gordon Ramsay goes into a restaurant that’s struggling, and somebody there is asking for help.
He goes in and he remakes it, transforms the restaurant. One of these restaurants he transformed, the owner kind of came in sleepy eyed the next morning, and he’s like, what? Why aren’t you like, what’s your problem? She’s like I was up till 4 AM. I had to go buy food at the grocery store, and then I had to do all the paperwork, and then, after cleaning the kitchen, I mean, it was like, oh my goodness! You’re exhausted.
So the goal here is, how do we become leaders? How do you become a founder who leads from clarity, from focus, from control? I just want to share it’s been a hard, long journey, but I’m in a place now where I want to share what I have learned, because I have come a long ways to a place where I have become a leader who can grow with vision, focus and control. I was just reflecting earlier today, it’s really hard to go back from that when you’ve experienced that, when you’ve had that, when you’ve created that. Going back to reactivity, distraction and chaos doesn’t sound good at all. It’s kind of like I don’t want to go back to 200 pound Simon anymore. 140 pound, 150 pound Simon is a much better Simon than the other guy.
Once you can see that it’s hard to unsee it, let’s keep going.
We’ve got, I’m gonna, over these calls we’re about to dive into, by the way, we’re just about to dive into the meat of today’s topic. A lot of this is setup and sharing info, and I’m continually improving this every week. So if you have any recommendations for how this can be better, let me know.
But I want to share the 5 areas of alignment for founders. Today we are on Number 4 of 5. I’m going through them week by week. We’re revisiting them with different angles and different specific questions on each. So we’re not rehashing the content every time. But about every 5 weeks we’re going to be recovering one of these areas or these arenas.
So there’s 5 domains every founder needs to align on, align with before they can fully accelerate and scale.
Let’s talk about alignment, because alignment can just sound like a woo woo like yoga thing, and I’m not necessarily saying I don’t like yoga, or I don’t agree with fasting. I’m not talking about those things here. What I am talking about is alignment, and alignment is not therapy. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about aligning your vision with your values. What you care about and where you’re going in life should match.
Before you can accelerate, before you can scale, before you can grow a business, those things have to be aligned, or it’s gonna burn you out. It’s gonna burn others out, and it’s gonna be a painful process. So that’s what we’re talking about here.
The 5 areas:
One is vision. It always starts with vision. It’s the most important thing to kick off. The question is, do you know where you’re going or are you just hoping next month won’t be worse? If you have vision, you have clarity.
Two is health. Do you have the rhythms and the habits that help you grow? Does that, do you have that in your life, or are you running on fumes and burning out? When you have health, you have energy. As a leader, as a founder, you can’t replace that. Until you are healthy, and have energy, you’re spending all of your time trying to get that if that makes any sense.
The third thing is leadership, leadership identity. Are you the leader your business needs, or are you actually an overpaid firefighter? This is really getting into today’s topic. But the point is when you have leadership clarity on your role, where you’re going, you have confidence, and you can show up every day and lead and guide your people and your team and your company.
Four is systems. That’s what we’re really talking about today. Is your business running like a machine or not at all? Or are you just chasing new trends to survive? When you have systems, you have resilience, you have freedom. That’s what we’re gonna be talking about the rest of this call.
Number 5 is standards. Is your team a community you want to be a part of? Or are they just a headache that you want to get rid of? When you have standards, you have results. You have performance. You have teamwork.
Really, if you want to be a leader, if you want to be a founder, if you want to be aligned and growing and scaling, you’re gonna need clarity, energy, confidence, resilience and results. The way to get those things, those are output metrics. Those are lagging indicators of something else. How do you get those? Through vision. Through personal health, business health, through leadership systems and standards. Those are the inputs to the machine.
If you want scale, hear me on this. We all want to grow, scale, make more money. We all want more clients. Everybody says that. Everybody says, sure, yeah, yeah, I want that. Well, you have to be clear and be energetic, and you have to have confidence and resilient against hard things. And driving results, not just activity. Oh, yeah, I want that too. Okay, cool. Well, in order to do that, you gotta know your vision. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t wanna just dream. Dreaming’s just a dream. Well, it’s not.
So that’s gonna be tough. If you can’t get there to health, are you prioritizing your health?
Actually, so I’m gonna stop now because I already said them. But the point is, these are the keys. These are the building blocks to growing and scaling.
Okay, I’m going to continue on. Let’s talk about systems a little bit here. Most founders I meet have SOPs. They have documents. They have processes. But they don’t have systems. They don’t have systems. They are the system. Without them, when they’re gone, when they’re away, when they’re disconnected, everything breaks.
It’s not really good for a business. It’s really not good for a leader for a human, and I want to share my story a little bit here with systems and delegation. I’m sharing on LinkedIn. The TikTok people won’t really know this, but I’ve got a presentation and a picture.
This is the exact call where I told my project manager something that changed my life forever, and it changed our business forever. This is one of those moments that after you can’t unsee this, undo this. Because I will now forever walk into every business, saying the same thing.
We were having this, crossing 1 million dollars revenue was up. Team was bigger. But progress was slowing. We were starting to see some writing on the wall for some things that weren’t working very well.
I thought that initially the problem was execution. So I got more involved in ops. I buckled down on management. I buckled down like more one on ones, more conversations, more processes. Things actually just got worse, which is the wild thing. That was just truly my experience.
Things got worse, because, well, for a number of reasons. I thought I was fixing the business… bringing something to the business—but the truth was, I wasn’t fixing it. I was choking it. That was a really hard truth to swallow. I had both of my hands around the business’s neck, and I was squeezing. I was sucking the life and the air and the energy out of everyone and everything.
In this call I had a realization earlier that week, and I got on this call with my project manager, and I told him something that I had been telling people for years, but never actually did. I told multiple project managers this, I told multiple team members this.
What I told them was: This is the moment. Right now I am stepping out of the day today. I am 90% focused on business growth, customer acquisition, customer retention. I am focused on bringing fuel up this truck, keeping it running. Everything else is on you. That’s what I told him. I said, hey, man, all the delivery is now your shoes to fill. I know there’s a big gap. We might drop some balls, but literally this is on you.
The cool thing was he was like, alright, I’m ready. I’ve been waiting for you. I’m waiting for you to let it go and give it to me, and he took it, and he ran with it. The crazy part is for me it felt safer to stay in it then let it go, and I realized that my choking, my over-functioning in the business was actually fear. It was actually scarcity. It was actually control, but not in a good way. So when I actually let things go, and I let others step in, my business actually changed in a really good way.
So my question for you today, if you’re watching is: Where do you feel like if you stepped out for 2 weeks, or you told your project manager or your COO, and you said I am 90% out of this day to day. I am 90% out of it. I am working on the business. What would collapse?
Where would the business collapse? Where? It doesn’t necessarily have to be where it would. It’s where you feel like it would. Where do you fear that collapse would happen? That’s what you need to start with.
My fear was that clients wouldn’t get what they wanted. Clients wouldn’t get me, clients wouldn’t get that personal touch that I wanted client. The truth is, they get more attention now than they got when I was running it because I was too busy. They get more attention. They get better quality work now, because I’m not spread thin. I’ve got team members dedicated to working on it, and I’m not standing in the way or slowing it down.
Alright! Second thing. Or actually, this is the first thing that was enough about my story. First thing is that the first truth I want to share is competence is a cage. So what I’m going to do now let me just zoom out really quick, because I see that I’m kind of following this journey, and I’ve got a presentation. If you’re on TikTok and you’re following, you may not know what I’m talking about. Let me just recenter. So you see I’m now sharing 5 keys to systemizing your business. Or 5 truths, I would say.
This truth that I’m gonna share now is that competence is a cage. Being good at everything is why you’re stuck. I just published a post on LinkedIn about this and have talked about it for some time. Being good at everything is why you’re stuck, and what got you here won’t get you there. Competence feels safe. But it keeps you small.
I got distracted here, trying technical stuff. Thanks for hanging on. This is a problem with these lives is there are technical issues that I have to deal with. It’s really distracting to try to talk and have to deal with the tech. So maybe I need to get someone to help me with the tech. That’s what’s really needing to happen here. Because if I’m gonna be present here, the tech keeps distracting me. I realized it wasn’t recording, anyway.
I shared this example on LinkedIn, but I’ve told these stories before, but it always happens in every workshop I’ve ever been to. This can be workshops that people pay me to help them with. We do growth workshops, transformation workshops, strategic planning workshops. We’ve done those in the past, or even coaching workshops that I go to with other business owners where I am being coached.
There’s always people in the room that are checking their phone, taking calls. One time this guy was approving a $100 invoice that a vendor had sent them. We were literally in a session planning a 100 million dollar vision. It’s the most wild thing, because literally we’re dreaming of what do you have to do in order to get to a hundred million dollars? I can guarantee you approving a hundred dollar invoice is the distraction from getting there, right? That just shows you how far this gap is, and how challenging it is for a lot of founders, and this is so real, and that guy wasn’t stupid. Nobody who’s doing this is stupid. Foolish, yeah. But you gotta learn. You gotta see this.
So the key here, the truth is that competence is a cage. So my question is, where are you still choosing to be the hero, like I’m paying the invoices, when in reality it’s actually just keeping your company stuck?
Something to consider. The next truth is, belief comes before ability. Belief comes before ability. Belief comes before ability. I’m going to keep saying that because it’s so important.
You don’t have a delegation problem. If you’re struggling with systems, I’m just going to say it. And the systems people out there, the operations people out there, the process people out there can get mad at me. That’s fine. You don’t suck at delegation, you suck at believing in yourself.
I know that’s confrontational. One of my traits is challenge, and that’s what I bring to the table is challenge. So it’s great if you don’t like it. You don’t have to stay.
But if you believe I do it best, then you’ll never let go. You’ll never let go if you believe this is what I’m supposed to do as a founder. Then you’ll never do anything differently.
So the truth is, if belief comes before ability, gotta require yourself to set goals that are so impossible that it forces you to rebuild, reinvent and realign and honestly re-believe. As a founder, if you’re struggling with systems and delegation, I would say you need to think a little bigger. Need to grow in your belief of what’s possible. In order to do that we got to cast a bigger vision, so that you have to change how you think. That would be where I’d want to work on that.
Before you can actually delegate, before you can actually build those systems, before you can actually not be the only system in your business anymore, a belief shift has to come first, and behavior change follows. The question for you to reflect is, right or wrong, what do you believe about yourself that keeps you everywhere, doing everything?
What do you believe about yourself that keeps you everywhere doing everything?
Good time to be honest, to actually think about that. Is it because you’re the hustler, the provider? I’ve heard all kinds of things. A founder told me one time he said, it’s because I’m just responsible. Leaving that gap, dropping that ball, feels irresponsible.
I get that. I remember telling one of my coaches one time. He’s like, why will you not do this? I said because it feels foolish. It feels foolish. I think he was asking me to invest in something in the business, and I said, it feels foolish like I’m spending too much money. It probably wasn’t very much money. I don’t remember. This was 10 years ago. I remember him distinctly, saying, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go buy something. He told me to go buy a piece of memorabilia, and he said, find the most expensive one you can buy like, make it a thousand dollars. I need you to waste your money on that.
You need to put it on your shelf. Why don’t you buy a shelf, too? By the way, have someone put it up. Spend another $500 on that. Put this thing on the shelf to remind you that foolishness, your fear of being foolish was holding you back from taking action, and that really stuck with me because some of those beliefs can be right in the sense that they’re noble. But they keep you stuck.
Lots to think about.
The other truth here is that every task is a trade. I already told this story. I guess I’m repeating it. It’s just the $100 invoice distraction versus a hundred million dollars direction. That’s a trade. You’re making a trade every time you do that, and that is one story of founders doing that. But the question is, what are you? People say it other ways. I think it’s I’ve heard it said another way, which is are you creating? I don’t know. Don’t just do activity, but create assets. Something like that.
The question is like, are you doing something that just solves a moment or reacts? Or is it making a dent, leverage into the future? Every task is a trade. Small decisions drain energy for the big ones only you can make.
Let’s keep going. The question is, what’s your number? What’s your number that you’re going for? Is it $1M? $100,000? $100M? $1B?
I know people at every spectrum in there—some people that right now are saying, if I could make a hundred thousand a year in my business, I’d be super happy. I also know people that are saying I’m making my 1 billion dollar plan. I’m serious. The question is, what’s the last decision you made that distracted you from that plan?
Because you gotta be making decisions that are close to that plan.
All right. Next. This is one of my favorites. The business needs to breathe. The business needs to breathe.
Delegation isn’t only handing off what you’ve been doing. That’s how we think. We think delegation is just handing off the things that we’re doing. We drive by delegate, we death grip delegate, right? Which are both not great. But we think of it as just handing off what you’ve been doing.
I want to present kind of a unique perspective on that. Delegation sometimes can be dropping the ball or intentional incompetence that lets someone else step up, step in and build in your place.
I’m a parent. If I don’t let my children experience the consequences of not doing their chores, if I constantly clean up after them, if I constantly do the last bit of dishes, if I constantly switch over the laundry for my daughter, if I constantly pick up underwear after showers, you know what I mean? It’s never going to be done. So part of delegating is letting the failure happen, letting the feelings sink in so that it’s clear what is needed, and sometimes taking something away, feeling the pain of that missing, experiencing a subscription relapse or a bank account balance go below 0 are the things that are needed to realize what’s important.
For real. This is a massive point, because a lot of times it’s so easy to just keep up. I heard somebody talking about the other day, and it was really inspiring to me is they were saying, imagine that you needed a substitute founder for a week, because you got sick. So what you did is you wrote a list for that substitute founder of all the things they need to do that you do that they need to keep up with.
Imagine that founder came in. That substitute founder came in for you, and they didn’t do anything on the list. But when you got back, revenue had increased. Team morale had increased. Client satisfaction had increased. Invoices were getting paid faster. You’re like what the heck it’s been a week. He’s like, yeah, I didn’t do any of the things that you said to do, because they’re dumb. They’re a waste of time. But I did the things that I knew needed to be done. Wow! The results were incredible.
Imagine on the flip side, if that founder came in and did everything exactly as you asked them to do. Nothing changed, or it got worse. You’d be like, what did you do? He was like, I just did what you said. You’re like, what’s wrong with you? The question is, what’s wrong with you? Right. I mean, that’s the hard truth that we don’t want to admit. The “what’s wrong with you,” because a lot of the things that we do that we hold on to that we keep up with that we try to maintain don’t even need to be done in the first place. They’re not taking us where we wanted.
I think Elon Musk said it best. He said. You probably many of you have probably heard this, he said. One of the worst traits of an amazing engineer is they optimize parts of a system that don’t even need to exist in the first place. We do that.
What happened which was crazy with me is when I told my project manager. Hey, I’m stepping out. I’m focusing on the business. Well, the business started growing. We started actually having a revenue engine that we didn’t have before. Within 60 days of stepping out, maybe 45. The ops ran stronger without me. That was just incredible to watch.
The last point on this slide is that management by absence – MBA. This is Yvonne Chouinard. He’s the founder of Patagonia. This is his term in his book. Let my people go surfing, great book. By the way, recommend it. I love a lot of the philosophies in there and have used and drawn a lot of that for my life and my business.
But he said that businesses need to go for prolonged periods without their founder. So the founder can go get inspired. Come back and bring a new life into the business. He would go rock climbing. Which is why I have this picture on my slide deck here, for LinkedIn. Go rock climbing, have new ideas, come back, bring them in, shake things up, and the business would grow, and it kept growing over decades to where it is today, which is a massive company.
But the business needs to breathe. So, as a founder, one of the best things you can do for yourself, one of the best things you can do for your business is to give it space to let it breathe, to take days off, to take time away. Because dropping the ball intentionally, not answering questions because you’re not available or not there is really helpful for people. It’s really helpful for the company. It’s very counterintuitive. Not gonna lie. It hurts. It’s painful. It seems foolish, it seems unfamiliar. But to be honest, it’s helpful and you can’t. I mean, you don’t want to throw a grenade, but it’s something to think about.
Honestly, as I’m talking here, I’m thinking about myself, and I’m like I need to take some of this medicine for me again, too. This isn’t just for you.
Next question is, what’s 1 ball you’re afraid to drop just because you don’t trust someone else to pick it up?
Donald Miller. Inspiration to me. Author. He told this story one time that your job as a founder isn’t to hit all the balls. It’s like you’re in baseball, and there’s a pitcher throwing balls at you, and maybe you have a pitching machine. It’s just throwing balls, and you’re hitting there. If you try to hit every ball, you’re never gonna hit a great quality ball. You’re never gonna hit a home run, but if you let 3 balls go and you know I’m going to hit this next one out of the park, crush it. You might have the home run record. The point is hit the right balls. Not just all the balls.
Okay, what do we got. I think this is the last point. I think I have to go. My A/C guy is here. I’m gonna have to pick this up a later time. Thank you.
Let me check. Okay, I’m back. I’m back. Just had to let him in. But I want to keep going on this, because this is a really great one. So thanks for waiting. If you left, I just had to walk out. This has got to be the most crazy live I’ve ever done.
Okay, here we are. We’re back. I’m sure that’s happened before. But I’ve never done that literally dropped my camera. So if you’re live watching this, thank you, and boy, we’re going to have to get better at this live thing.
If you were on the TikTok I want a video of that because you just got tossed. I just punched you across the room on that camera. That’s wild. Okay, let’s dive back into this. Here we are.
Oh, my goodness, companies don’t plateau people do. This is a massive topic. I really need to lean into this because we think everything is so disassociated with us, right? We think of this business as this object, that that works or doesn’t. I just think it’s untrue. I just think it’s untrue because businesses are machines. They’re systems. Do they fail? Do they struggle? Yes, but it’s really because the people who are running them are failing and struggling, or doing things wrong.
Businesses don’t get stuck on their own. They get stuck because their founders are stuck or built them to get stuck. This is the crazy thing.
So another quote from Yvon Chouinard, he said, evolution or change does not happen without stress, and it can happen quickly. You should not see change as a threat, rather as an opportunity to grow and evolve to a higher level. A company needs to constantly stress itself in order to grow. Evolution change requires stress.
We typically don’t do that because we don’t want to. We don’t want to change because it’s stressful, it hurts. It’s painful. So we don’t. Then our companies don’t change either, and they plateau. This is how it works, but what I learned over the last 10 years of doing business for myself and clients is that business is personal. There’s this quote. Can’t remember who said it, but they said business problems are just personal problems in disguise. Oh, man, that one is powerful. It’s painful. Because it’s so true.
The truth is that personal growth forces reinvention and and forces you to push your company to the next level. You see, what can happen, though, is that companies will put more pressure on their founders to scale them then the founders are putting pressure on their companies to scale. That’s when you know, companies don’t plateau like people do so big thing just to realize. So the question is, if your company is stuck right now, are you willing to consider and admit it’s likely not the business that’s plateaued. It’s you.
Big question. I know that’s a hard one. But it’s worth asking.
Are you like, oh, I know it’s me! I know the company is stuck, ceilinged, capped because of me. If so, you’re in a great spot. I just gotta say. You’re in an excellent spot, where you’re ready to grow. So if you say, yeah, I know it’s me. I’m embarrassed, and I’m frustrated. I know it’s me, you are ready. That means let’s talk because I think you have a massive opportunity in front of you.
If, on the other hand, you’re sitting here, and you’re like this guy’s dumb. No, the business is broken. The model’s bad. Haven’t found the right platform yet. My strategy is off. You’ve got a ways to go.
I say that because I’ve worked with a lot of companies over the last 10 years in marketing. We’ve had a lot of people who have thrown a lot of money at a lot of problems and a lot of growth problems. I gotta say that the ones who grow are the ones who look internally.
They rebuild from the inside out, grow from the inside out, do the hard work to align who they are, with, how they grow. Then, they build from there.
The ones who just want to throw money at problems and not internalize them, not address them, not face them, not change like Yvon Chouinard said. I mean he knows this. This is from him. This is a billion dollar founder who said this.
Something to ask yourself. Let’s keep going.
Your bottleneck isn’t your systems. I mean it can be, it is. But really. Like, really. Your bottleneck is your belief.
Your bottleneck is your belief.
So here’s my challenge to you. I said earlier, I thrive when coaches and other people challenge me. They give me challenges almost like I have to prove them. One of the things that one of my mentors said. I made a hand. I’m full of videos about this. Wrote a lot of posts about this. High impact on my life. I remember one time asking him like, what do you see in me? He said. You’re Simon, you’re a leader, but you’re not leading. This was years ago, but he said, Simon, you’re a leader, but you’re not leading.
Talk about challenge. That was a moment where I said thank you. I will work on that, and internally, though what I really said was f*** you. I’m gonna prove that.
So if you’re like me, I’ve got a challenge for you. I want you to prove me wrong. I want that fire to well up inside of you to where you want to show the world what’s possible.
Additionally, I want you to decide. What are you going to fire yourself from? You don’t have to blow up the business or close up shop. If you need to, that’s great. I mean, if you need to do that to become, who you were meant to be. I would love to hear that story. Please tell me. But I would also love to hear the story of I fired myself from this project, from this task, from this area of the business.
It’s a powerful move for a founder to make. What I want to say is that one decision could be what frees your business to finally scale, to finally grow that thing you’ve been wanting. I want to grow. I want to scale. If someone would have told me when I was back in 2022 overweight, struggling, hitting a $300,000 a year ceiling, I shared that whole story earlier on. But if they would have said you have to fire yourself from one thing. I want you to do that. Tell me what it is. That’s the thing that’s going to free you up, to grow. But first you have to let go. Changed my perspective. So that would have been wild. I mean, consider that.
All right. What I want to share is, the future is literally yours. The downside of the fact that companies don’t plateau people do. Which means it’s your fault, which means, if you’re not growing, it’s because of you that’s disappointing. It’s frustrating. It’s discouraging. But, on the other hand, the future is yours. That means you can build. The possibilities are unlimited for you. If you can grow, if you can develop, if you can become someone, and you can bring your company with you. The truth is, it’s unlimited.
So imagine being one of those few founders who doesn’t just win, but is recognized. It’s recognized for who you are. You’ve got a life. You’ve got a legacy that lasts for decades.
The truth is, if this is something you want, kudos to you. It’ll also be the hardest, most rewarding work you’ll ever step into. It’ll change. It’s gonna change a lot in your life and your business. It’s gonna make people question who you are, and what you’re about, and they might be like. You’re not who I thought you were.
But what? My really big question, my really big challenge here is for founders who say they want to grow, but they’re not doing what it takes to grow.
Because you can’t win. You can’t be recognized. You can’t build a life and a legacy that lasts decades. If you’re not willing to grow and change. Doesn’t work.
So here’s the chance. If you haven’t asked questions. Let’s open it up for just a minute. I mean, I could stay on for a little while. But what’s keeping you stuck right now? What questions do you have any feelings or opinions about the topic?
Let me just go through and check my comments here and see if I’ve got anything. Haven’t got anything here on LinkedIn. That’s okay. Anything on TikTok. I don’t believe so. So we’re just gonna kind of finish up then. If you want to make a comment in the comments post video, I’ll go back and comment on it, and we can have a conversation. We’d be great.
I’m here. I’m a clarity coach for founders. I am a CEO and founder myself of a 7 figure business. I’m also a coach. I also coach founders to help them align and connect who they are with, how they grow. To connect their current life to their big visions and figure out what they need to do to get there. So I’ve got really 3 ways I can help.
The first one’s an alignment check. This is actually free. Just hit me up in the comments, or DM me, and let me know if you want an alignment check. It’s a document, but it’s quick clarity on your biggest business bottleneck. You can do it yourself. Take you 10 minutes. Help you see the biggest area, the biggest constraint in your company.
Two is my alignment intensive. This is a 12 week sprint to help you reset your vision, rebuild belief and resharpen your focus.
Number 3 is alignment program. This is 12 months, 12 month commitment inside what I’m calling the hardest, most rewarding room you’ll ever step into. It includes the check, the intensive, and relationship with community and me. It’s a true transformation experience. So that’s how I can help you. If you want help.
But if not, thanks for joining. You know I make this content for free. I put this out because I am hoping to help. I’m hoping there’s a founder out there that’s just like me, like I was 3 years ago. That was looking for clarity. Looking for advice, looking for focus and that found someone like me who is just putting out the raw truth, sharing what he knew and could help. You know I’m building this for you because and I know it’s valuable. But in a way, I’m building this for me, and who I was knowing. There’s a lot of people out there who are going through what I’ve been through and knowing that I can help is exciting. So it’s selfish in some ways, but hey? If you joined today. Thank you so much.
Last thing I want to leave you with is, if you don’t align, you drift. Drift destroys dreams. But alignment builds legacy.
We’ll see you next time I’m live here. Every Thursday one PM Mountain time, LinkedIn TikTok hit me up with any questions in the comments or DMs. I’m here to help. Thank you so much.
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.
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?
Are you a founder who is grinding harder but getting nowhere? Your health habits might be why. Let’s dive into the founder health habits you need to have to scale past $1M in revenue.
In this founder-focused session, I share the brutal truth about why 75% of businesses fail within 15 years – and it’s not what you think.
After being stuck at $300K revenue while 50 pounds overweight and numbing with alcohol, I discovered that every business problem is actually a personal problem in disguise.
Here’s the transformation framework that took me from struggling founder to $1M+ advisory business.
Welcome to Focus Hour. Today’s topic is founder health habits. My promise to you is that I’m going to help you trade scattered effort for a focused plan this week.
If we haven’t met, my name is Simon. I am the founder and CEO of Structure and the Aligned Program, which is a program out of our company that’s focused on helping founders get unstuck and stop spinning so they can start growing again and get that clarity and traction that we’re all looking for to know that we are headed in the right direction, aligned and connected with our vision so that our goals can happen.
For the Frustrated Founders
I made this for the frustrated founders. If this is you, you know what I’m talking about. You’re staring at the ceiling at 3 am, stuck in a loop, straining your family to carry your team, wanting growth, but it feels random and distant.
You probably feel like if I quit, everything falls apart. If I keep going, I’ll fall apart.
Let’s get real
Your freedom vehicle that you created feels like a prison. Every decision, crisis, and dollar is on you to make, to move, to create. If you’re not creating the dollar, nobody else is.
You might think if I push harder it’ll finally click. This is a trap, but this is so real.
Grinding – if I just try a little harder, if I just keep going, it’ll finally click. I was answering support emails and processing payroll at midnight. You might have been there too, or you might be there right now.
I want you to know I’m here because I’ve been there too. I’m not just sharing this from a podium with book smarts. This is lived experience, real deal. I was 50 pounds overweight, numbing with alcohol, building a successful company while failing myself and my family, feeling alone, stuck and spun out.
Most of my evenings after work, which went late – 6, 6:30 – and started early, ended with Netflix, whiskey, and guilt.
Why am I doing this?
Why am I showing up on LinkedIn, putting myself out there, sharing my story, being vulnerable? It’s because I lived every moment of this pain. This was my story. I was there, and I want to help you as a founder grow through these pains instead of running from them.
What I learned is that the power was in growing through them. That’s really hard. It’s hard to figure out what that should look like, what things you should be doing or not doing, and who you need to become.
The Transformation
Here are two side-by-side pictures. On the left, we’ve got me in 2022 with my wife Rebecca. She looks very happy, and I look very unhappy, which is kind of how it was. This was in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho during a video shoot for a client.
If I look at that guy, he was 50 pounds overweight. He was doing anything for anyone who would pay him a dollar. I was a functional alcoholic. I remember that night – I was probably still a little bit hungover from dinner and drinks the night before. That night I had I don’t know, 3 or 4 old fashions, and that was the norm.
I was…
Dealing with constant sinus infections.
At a $300,000 flatline.
Struggling, stuck, spinning, not able to break through.
Fast forward to 2024
This picture with my son Peter. This is a different guy. He’s living in a place that he dreamed of living. He’s doing things with his family that he dreamt of doing. I lost those 50 pounds over those few years.
I’m doing what I’m best at.
I have a clear 10-year vision and one-year goals – not wandering anymore.
I’m investing in myself instead of drinking all the time. I work out 3 or 4 times a week with a macro diet, and I have a million-dollar business and a family who’s following my lead.
Today I’m locked in
My marriage runs on midday syncs, not midnight arguments anymore, because I have time. I have space. I’ve created my life around prioritizing my marriage, prioritizing those conversations. My kids get a daddy day every week – one on one, not all of them every week, but one of them, and we rotate through. They don’t just get my evening leftovers.
I’m running a million-dollar advisory company, consulting and coaching with ambitious, high-performing, successful founders and their teams without working 80-hour weeks myself. I’m able to give them my best so they can give their team their best.
I don’t say this because I want you to think Simon’s amazing. Between Tuesday’s first session and today’s second session, my feedback from my team was, “Hey Simon, you’re really empathetic and relatable with a great story, but tell me more about what your life looks like now. Help us see what’s possible. Tell us – you have transformed, and we’ve all watched you transform, but not everyone on the call knows that. So tell us, show us.”
At this point today, I’m not perfect, but I have become the kind of visionary leader who can grow a business – any business – and grow any area of my life with clarity and control. That’s where I want to help you get today because it’s possible.
I don’t want you to think that I did this alone. Nobody does it alone. Nobody goes to millions of dollars a year, nobody creates a legacy by themselves. My mentors helped me turn my mess into a transformation. I haven’t sold a hundred-million-dollar company yet, but I did rebuild my health, reconnect with my family, and grow my business past a million without burning out.
The Five Domains
If I can break through, why not you? Founders almost always think that their growth problem is strategy or sales. Sales fixes all, and sometimes it does. Or operations – there’s systems or plans that aren’t working out. That fixes things too. But what I’ve learned is that underneath it all, every business problem is really a personal problem in disguise.
Business is personal. One of the meanings of that is that you as a founder are such a key component to your business growth. If you are dying, your business isn’t going to be growing. If you’re growing, it’s going to be growing.
There are 5 domains that every founder needs to align before they can fully accelerate:
1. Vision
Do you know where you’re going, or are you just hoping next month won’t be worse? Where there is no vision, people perish. If you want to be growing but you don’t have a vision that you have dreamed up, written down, articulated in any form, you’re working against growth.
2. Health
Do you have the rhythms that help you grow, or are you just running on fumes and burning out? Your body is the first business you lead. If you want to grow, you need to invest in yourself and your physical ability to grow. It’s the most obvious thing in the whole world, but most of us overlook it.
3. Leadership
Are you the leader your business needs, or are you actually just an overpaid firefighter? A lot of us are firefighters in our business – we’re just reacting to every flame that comes our way, trying to spray it out as fast as we can to keep the whole thing from burning down.
4. Execution
Are your actions on a daily basis, your team’s actions and your goals aligned with the vision that you set out? When vision and execution are going in different directions, that’s misalignment. The goal is, how can we execute the vision?
5. Culture
Is your team an extension of you, or are they an extension of someone else? If you’re showing up chaotic, stressed, grinding, unclear, your team is going to be chaotic, stressed, grinding and unclear. What you really want them to mirror is clear, thoughtful, intentional, exponential.
Health Focus
Let’s dive into founder health habits. Your body is the first business you lead. Here’s my question: Would you invest in a business run by a founder who’s constantly exhausted, overweight, anxious, numbing just to get through the day? Would you hire a coach or go to a doctor who’s constantly exhausted, anxious, numbing just to get through the day?
Why would you ask your team, your investors, or your customers to invest in you while you run yourself into the ground? This hits hard for me. Those years where I was 50 pounds overweight and drinking – we were funneling $300,000 through the business with a dozen clients and a couple team members, and they were following that guy.
Burnout isn’t a badge of honor. Grinding isn’t a rite of passage. If this is you, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re actually a business risk wrapped in ego, fear, and scarcity.
The Paul Bunyan Story
I want to tell you about Paul Bunyan. In the story, Paul is a big, tall performer, hacking down trees with his axe, crushing everybody. He’s successful, he embodies this incredible doer. But this scrawny guy comes in with a saw – this newfangled technology. Paul’s like, “I’m going to beat this guy with the saw using my axe.”
They do this competition cutting down trees in a forest. Paul’s thinking he’s got this wrapped – there’s no way this thing can keep up. But the saw outcompetes Paul and crushes him. He has an identity crisis – who am I? Why couldn’t I do this?
Paul, in that moment when he’s trying to outwork a system, didn’t matter how hard, fast, or long he swung his axe. The blade was dulling, he was tiring out. He lost not because of a lack of effort – he gave it his all – but a lack of edge. He was working too hard and not smart enough.
I’ve heard this from founders: “I’m doing the best I can. I’m working the hardest I can. You’re getting everything from me you can, and it’s still not good enough.” The truth is, it’s not that you’re not trying hard enough. You just don’t have what it takes to do what you want to do yet. This lack of edge ties into health.
The Stakes
The stats are real: 20% of businesses fail in 2 years, 50% in 5 years, 75% before 15 years. But it gets worse – 30% of founders get divorced (double the US average), and 72% struggle with mental health, clarity, depression, and suicide.
I share these not to crush you, but because it’s important to know what’s at risk. It’s not just your business that can fail – your life can fail too. There’s more at stake. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When you sharpen your blade, you don’t just survive, you feel alive.
Dan Martell Example
Dan Martell – his wife said, “Dan’s the wealthiest man in the room, not because of his watch or his cars, but because of his health.” He has fancy things, but when she looks across the room and sees a lot of high-income earners, founders, entrepreneurs, achievers, there are very few that are healthy. Those are the people that have the true wealth.
Peter Drucker said, “Leadership begins with self-management. You can’t lead others before you lead yourself.”
Alignment Anchors
I want to share something called alignment anchors. These are what I use in my life and teach. Just the other day, I took my family to San Diego for SeaWorld. We stayed in a hotel, and throughout the week I was really starting to burn out and struggle, spin, feel disconnected and stressed and anxious. When we came home, I lit up – totally back to normal. I realized it was because I wasn’t anchored in my daily routine. I didn’t have those anchors to hold me, keep me stable, keep me feeling full and energized.
The Seven Anchors:
Sleep – 7 to 8 hours of sleep = rested founder
Lifting weights – 3 to 4 times a week. You’ll become more resilient because lifting is hard and painful, and it helps teach you to embrace pain and see pressure as a privilege = resilient founder
Walk – 10 to 15,000 steps a day. This improves your mental health, makes you clear-minded, focused = clear-minded founder
Quitting/reducing vices – things like alcohol, weed, porn. These will bring you down, drain your energy. They feel good in the moment but hurt you later = disciplined founder
Surround yourself with positive people = connected founder
Work and rest – both for purpose and energy = inspired founder
These anchors help you become a rested, resilient, clear-minded, fueled, disciplined, connected, and inspired founder. Who doesn’t want to follow someone who has these traits?
90-Day Roadmap
If you’re looking at this thinking it’s a lot, I understand. It took me years – 3 years where I lost 50 pounds and doubled my business. If you’re just starting, here are the 3 lead dominoes:
1. Sleep
Try to get 7 to 8 hours between 10 PM and 6 AM. This turns your body into a recovery machine, giving you the focus and stamina your business actually needs. Sleep is literally one of the most important things – it unlocks everything else. The trick is going to bed at the right time. Going to bed early enough will unlock your ability to get up early.
2. Walk
Getting 10 to 15,000 steps a day is the simplest performance hack before supplements or gadgets. You don’t have to get a gym membership. Movement clears your mind and builds capacity to lead. This can be as simple as your watch reminding you every hour to stand up and take a walk.
3. Eating
Target 80 to 90% whole foods. This is probably the hardest of the 3, but if you’re sleeping and energized, if you’re walking and moving, you’re going to start feeling better and wanting to eat better foods. Simple swaps like eggs instead of cereal in the morning, chicken salad instead of burgers at lunch, salmon with rice instead of frozen dinners. Fuel your body with clean energy.
Founder Health Habits Audit
Rate yourself on each area from 1-4 and add them up out of 20:
Sleep Quality & Consistency: How well are you sleeping 7-8 hours nightly?
Physical Fitness: How consistent are you with exercise/movement?
Nutrition: How clean and intentional is your eating?
Stress Management: How well do you handle pressure and recovery?
Energy Levels: How consistent is your daily energy throughout the day?
What’s one habit that if you committed to for the next 60 days might change your life and your business?
The Future is Yours
This isn’t about guilt or pressure. This is about desire. The goal isn’t to make you feel bad about where you are – it’s to help you see what’s possible for you. Every visionary leader started exactly where you’re at right now.
Are you swinging harder with a dull axe, or taking time to sharpen the blade? This isn’t about grinding harder or adding more to your plate. It’s about doing the right things and unlocking the focus to where you’re present, alive, and in control.
Growth and progress often has more to do with subtraction than addition. In music, “the rest is as important as the note.” If you imagine a song with nothing but notes and zero pauses, all it would sound like is noise. You use silence as power.
Being fully present, alive, and in control is being more of you, and this is what your family, your business, your team really needs.
Closing Story
My very first coach, James Warwick – I reached out to him blindly on LinkedIn when I was struggling as a founder. We met at coffee for a great hour. I remember getting up to refill my coffee, going to the bathroom, coming back and sitting down. He said, “You know, Simon, you know what your real problem is? You know why you’re struggling to get clients or get your business off the ground?”
He said, “You’ve got this sticker on your head right here. You’re walking around this coffee shop going a million miles per hour. You’re lasered in, and the focus is admirable. But the truth is, you just look busy. ‘Don’t talk to me. I’m busy. I’ve got too much going on. I don’t have time for you.’”
The truth is, I lost not because of a lack of effort, but because I didn’t have what it takes to do what I wanted to do yet. I said I wanted to grow the business, but what was really standing in the way was me and my inability to see what I wasn’t seeing, or my inability to be the person that I needed to be to have that impact on the business.
Next Steps
If you want to go deeper on this stuff with me:
Free Alignment Audit – A PDF that walks through a scoring system on all 5 domains. Just DM me on LinkedIn or comment “audit”
Aligned Intensive – A 60-day sprint to help you get unstuck and turn around. Direct work with me in cohort style. $3,000
Aligned Program – The intensive plus additional deep dives and accountability. 12-month program for $15,000
I’ll keep showing up every Tuesday and Thursday, 1 PM Mountain time. Thank you for watching, for joining, for letting me share this. It’s truly an honor to show up and share my story, to teach what I know, what I’ve learned, what I’ve lived in a way that hopefully helps you break through in your business and your life.
Imagine…
Leading your business with focus and clarity.
Being fully alive, fully in control, moving closer to your vision every day.
Your team – because of who you are – is getting better, the strategy getting sharper, and the results getting bigger.
When you’re rested, when you’re resilient, when you’re clear-minded, growth compounds. Growth happens. Growth is inevitable. This is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but the goal is becoming someone who, no matter what room you enter, you will have an impact.
Founder health habits key points
What you’ll learn:
The 5 domains every founder must align before they can accelerate
Why your body is the first business you lead
The 3 “alignment anchors” that changed everything (90-day roadmap included)
How to stop being a “business risk wrapped in ego, fear and scarcity”
The Paul Bunyan principle: Why working harder isn’t the answer
Key timestamps:
0:00 – The frustrated founder’s dilemma
8:00 – My transformation story (before/after)
14:00 – The 5 domains of alignment
23:00 – Founder health habits deep dive
33:00 – The 3 alignment anchors
41:00 – 90-day roadmap for beginners
44:00 – Founder health habits audit tool
49:00 – Q&A and next steps
Key problems addressed:
6:48 – How do you break out of the founder trap of feeling like quitting means everything falls apart but continuing means you’ll fall apart?
8:07 – What does transformation from a struggling founder to successful leader actually look like?
14:01 – What are the five domains every founder needs to align before they can accelerate their business?
16:57 – Why do every business problem stem from personal problems in disguise?
19:43 – What is the most important domain to focus on first as a founder?
23:01 – Why should founders prioritize their health when trying to grow their business?
24:36 – How do you avoid being a business risk to your team and investors?
26:02 – What can founders learn from the Paul Bunyan story about working harder versus working smarter?
29:00 – What are the real statistics about founder failure and mental health struggles?
33:25 – What are the specific daily habits that create a successful founder mindset?
37:52 – What is the 90-day roadmap for founders who feel overwhelmed by health changes?
38:00 – How do you optimize sleep as a founder for maximum business performance?
39:10 – Why is walking 10,000-15,000 steps daily critical for founder success?
40:02 – How do you transition to eating 80-90% whole foods without overwhelming yourself?
44:29-How do you assess your current founder health habits and identify areas for improvement?
45:45 – What is the one habit that could transform your life and business in 60 days?
49:17 – How do you recognize when your personal behavior is limiting your business growth?
The hard stats
75% of businesses fail before 15 years
30% of founders get divorced (double the national average)
I thought saving money, avoiding risk, and staying lean were how you showed up responsibly as a founder. That you had to have gobs of money before you could invest in growth. That bootstrapping meant you were a good steward.
And it can be. But the truth is, it wasn’t for me.
I wasn’t being wise. I was scared.
Scared of failure. Scared of losing it all. Scared of not performing with a standing ovation. Scared that whatever I did to “try” wouldn’t work, and I’d have nothing to show for it but an empty bank account and a bruised ego.
Here’s the cold, hard truth.
“Fear—disguised as wisdom—is a pattern that keeps founders stuck.”
That’s the core message I want to share today.
Because fear doesn’t always show up as panic. It shows up as logic. As discipline. As strategy. As “being responsible.” But it’s not always.
It’s hesitation. Scarcity. Control.
I’ve lived that truth. I used to wake up every day feeling behind, stretched thin, and overwhelmed. I was pouring out into my business, my family, my friends, my team—while running on empty myself.
I was creating from scarcity, limits, and depletion.
And when you try to create from that space, you’re not building from what you have—you’re building from don’t.
But no one wants what you don’t have. No one’s excited to follow a leader who’s running on fumes.
That was me. Until I drew a new line in the sand.
The Line I Drew
I was stuck in a pattern. Wake, work, drink, sleep.
Everything felt like it was slipping—my health, my energy, my performance, my marriage, my parenting. I didn’t recognize myself.
I didn’t want this life. But I didn’t know how to fix it.
But I started small. I chose to start intermettent fasting.
Why? I heard it helped you lose weight. At 190, I was getting heavy.
Not for religious reasons. Just because I was tired of being tired. Tired of being bloated, heavy, and frustrated.
I said: I’m not going to eat until 9am.
It felt impossible.
I thought I might die. Literally. I was so used to waking up and eating to calm my anxiety that waiting a few hours felt dangerous. But I did it. And something clicked.
That one act of self-leadership created a ripple.
Because if I didn’t eat in the morning, I didn’t want to feel hungover. So I drank less the night before. And if I was drinking less, I was more present the next morning. That led to better sleep. More clarity. More confidence.
That one domino? It fell into everything else.
And that’s when I realized: standards create momentum.
But only after you break the pattern.
It’s not about food. It’s about pattern-breaking.
What Came Next: A New Standard
Today, I fast frequently—and I do it till 1p.
What came out of this process is that I set a new rule for myself:
“I will not negotiate with honesty.”
Not in my body. Not in my bank account. Not in my business.
I don’t justify. I don’t excuse. I don’t convince.
And from that rule, I created new standards:
I will no longer grind for my worth—by from my worth
I will no longer build systems I to trap be—but that free me
I will no longer lead from depletion—but overflow
I set a standard.
And that’s when things changed. That’s when my family finally made a move we’d been wanting to make. That’s when I lost 40 lbs. That’s when my business doubled. That’s when I began becoming the kind of founder—in my business and my legacy—that was someone worth following.
That’s also why I will have four coaches supporting me, my team, and my family this year. Not because I had the money lying around. But because I became the kind of person who knew growing a family and a business means that investing is a standard, not a luxury.
I used to think that phrase—”you have to spend money to make money”—meant buying ads to get sales.
Now I know: it means becoming someone who can multiply money, momentum, and meaning.
And that starts with you.
“You don’t invest when it’s easy. You invest when it’s hard.”
The 4 Lenses That Help You Break the Pattern
Before I could raise my standards, I had to break the pattern. And the tool that helped me do that was this simple framework I now use with others:
🧠 4 Lenses for Leading Through the Lies
Compassion: You’re not alone. “Of course I’m stuck—this pattern kept me safe for a long time.” This makes your situation safe, not shameful.
Curiosity: What’s under the lie? “What am I afraid would happen if I told the truth?” Often the lie is protecting something fragile—fear, shame, identity.
Clarity: Let’s name what’s real. “I say I want X, but my choices tell a different story. What story do my actions tell?” This is the mirror. The clean line in the sand. No drama. No shame. Just truth.
Challenge: Am I willing to face it? “I’m scared. But I can’t lead and hide at the same time.” This is the moment you stop tolerating, stop spinning, and step forward.
This is how I led myself through my own lies. And it’s how I now lead others. Now, you can lead yourself.
Why This Matters for Founders
If you’re grinding harder than ever, but feel like your growth has slowed… If you’re doing all the things, but it’s not translating to momentum… If you feel pressure to perform, but confusion about how to break through…
That’s the sign.
You’re not broken. But your actions might be.
You’ve outgrown the strategies that got you here. But you’re still making decisions based on the version of you who:
Had to do it all alone
Couldn’t afford help
Thought grinding was noble
That’s no longer who you are. And it can’t be how you lead.
“Raise your standards. Break the pattern. Lead from overflow.”
You don’t need another tactic. You need a new identity.
It starts with honesty. With drawing a new line in the sand. With becoming someone who leads from alignment, not anxiety.
That’s what we help founders do inside our Aligned Program. Connect who they are with how they grow. If you’re tired of grinding through uncertainty and ready to lead from clarity—we can help.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
That quote hit me this week. Hard.
I’ve been leading my company through a major push in content—writing, filming, publishing, showing up. We’re walking our talk, putting our own system into action. And yet… I felt it.
That creeping founder feeling:
I don’t know exactly what’s going on.
The work doesn’t look just how I imagined.
The results aren’t quite matching my expectations.
The content doesn’t feel like how I would do it.
And here’s what I realized: I was tempted to micromanage—not because the team wasn’t doing their job, but because I wasn’t aligned.
That’s the trap. The classic founder micromanagement mistake.
Micromanaing Happens When…
You know the feeling. You delegate the project. You set the vision. You even built the system. But when execution starts, you feel disconnected. You see the edges, not the whole. You don’t understand the why behind the outcomes, and your instinct is to jump in, tweak the details, or “fix” things.
This isn’t just a Simon thing. This is a founder thing.
I’ve seen it with clients. I’ve seen it with peers. And I just caught myself mid-pattern this week. Instead of leading through alignment, I started leaning toward control.
But here’s the deeper truth: control isn’t leadership. Clarity is.
Most Founders Aren’t Failing. They’re Just Misaligned.
Founders like us don’t usually lack vision, energy, or drive. What we lack—often without realizing it—is alignment between our vision and the execution that brings it to life.
When marketing looks scattered, when team members feel disjointed, when results stall… it’s not because we need to work harder. It’s because the team doesn’t see what we see.
And most of the time, that’s not their fault. It’s ours—for not giving them our mind on the matter.
10% — Set the Vision. I start the process. I generate the ideas, the strategy, the voice. I am the source.
80% — Let the Team Work. They build. They produce. They edit, publish, refine, distribute. Their way. Their rhythm.
10% — Close the Loop. I come back in with data, feedback, gut checks, and clarity. Not to override. But to reflect and align.
That 10-80-10 model keeps me from becoming the bottleneck. It also forces me to ask: Am I doing my first 10% well? Am I showing them what I see—not just what I want?
Because if I don’t share how I think, how can they create what I see?
Your Team Doesn’t Need Tasks. They Need Your Mind.
The best leadership I’ve received in my life hasn’t been instruction. It’s been insight.
It’s someone saying, “Here’s how I see it. Here’s how I think about it. Here’s how I decide.”
That’s what I’m trying to give my team now. Less checklist, more worldview. Less “here’s what to do,” more “here’s what to align to.”
When you share your mind on the matter, you do more than lead a team. You empower one.
What Founders Get Wrong (And What to Do Instead)
We micromanage when we feel misaligned.
Micromanagement is usually a symptom, not a solution. What you’re actually feeling is a lack of clarity or connection to the process.
We confuse vision-setting with control.
Vision isn’t about dictating every step. It’s about defining the win and giving people the freedom to pursue it with you.
We forget that teams can’t read our minds.
If the marketing feels off, or the sales process feels weird, or the culture starts drifting… ask yourself, “Have I really shared how I see the world?”
Want to Grow? Start by Getting Aligned.
If you’re feeling stuck, frustrated, confused by your team’s output—or your own—it’s probably not a people problem.
It’s probably a vision alignment problem.
This is exactly why I built the Align Program—to help founder-led companies go from reactive, bottlenecked chaos to clarity, alignment, and compounding growth.
It’s a 12-month container where we zoom out, redesign how your business operates, and make sure everyone knows what winning looks like.
No more drive-by delegation. No more random acts of marketing. No more silent suffering behind the scenes.
If you’re done making excuses, and you’re ready to step into your next level as a transformational leader—schedule a clarity call.
I’ll sit with you, unpack what’s working, what’s not, and what it will take to stop being the bottleneck and start being the leader your vision demands.
Final Thought: What Kind of Founder Are You Becoming?
“You can’t scale what you won’t let go of. And you can’t lead what you won’t align.”
If you’re feeling the drift, you’re not broken. You’re just being invited to evolve.