Some people are a Tony fan and some are not.
Either way that’s ok for the lesson I want to share with you today.
Back in 2017 when I decided to be a Platinum Partner, I was searching for something I thought was missing from my life. I thought that it was partly the answer to how I was going to grow my business to $10mil, $20mil and beyond. I also thought it was where I would find my soulmate, little did I know he was sitting next to me the whole time - that story is for another day as it’s a very long one!
If you follow me on social media you would have seen that in 2018 I was pretty much overseas nearly every month for 10-14 days at a time. I traveled to Europe twice in 6 weeks, USA 3 times for instance and I’m so familiar with the Abu Dhabi airport that I could probably give you directions around it. I was also running my own events in this time frame plus attending events with my own mentors including them taking us to Egypt!
2018 was HECTIC to say the least, I was flying around the world and Australia going from event to event and spending a tonne of money on all the travel, as when you want to be in and out of places on certain dates you don’t have the luxury of looking for what flight was a better deal or what hotel - it was a matter of convenience with travel date and times, and what hotel was the closest to the event!
It looked super glamourous from a highlight reel perspective online, but the reality behind this level of travel and events was this.
I spent 5 months total time away from my daughter in a year. I have her 12 days out of 14, so I already spend 2 months away from her in a year because of custody arrangement.
The reality is that I spent so much time travelling that my body got to a point where it was so damn exhausted that 12 months later I am STILL fighting the effects of pushing myself to the limit last year. I was recovering from burnout which takes YEARS for how far into I was when I was diagnosed. Knowing what it was going to take out of me in 2018 (HA - KNOWING, if only I ACTUALLY knew, I was really just guessing) I set the goal to just maintain my health. I wasn’t expecting to recover more from burnout, no more weight removal, no significant changes, just maintain my point of recover.
Well I kind of managed to do that last year, but as I said it’s 12 months later and I’m still barely maintaining it, it’s been hard.
That’s the family and health side of it, let’s get to my lessons from that year.
The BIGGEST lesson of them all is that I worked out exactly what I DIDN’T want.
It’s taken me being away from the environment of being a Plat for awhile and processing everything that I learned and experienced.
I don’t want to travel around the world every month. Regardless of if I was holidaying instead of working - I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to have to live out of a suitcase. I don’t want to spend that much time away from my family. I don’t want to spend that much time on planes.
I actually really like being at home.
Travel will always be a part of my life, I do enjoy seeing places and experiencing them. But I really like being at home.
I realised I didn’t want the $10mil, $20mil, $50mil plus business. I have seen what it takes to get there and I don’t want it. Not because I’m scared I can’t do it or anything like that. It’s just that I simply don’t want it.
I went back and forth with myself about this, WHO does it make me if I don’t grow my business like that, because that’s the trajectory that I “should” be on with what my last decade in business has looked like. Will it mean that I’m not successful because I haven’t continued to grow a lightning speeds?
No matter how many questions I asked myself, I just kept coming back to the simple answer of, I simply do NOT want to have a $20million business, or even $10million.
I don’t want to have to deal with the team that it would take to run that. I don’t want to have to run it. I don’t want to do the work that’s involved. That level of business, I wouldn’t get to do what I really want to do.
I don’t want to deal with the expenses there would be to not only run it but maintain it year upon year.
I don’t want to be on stage in front of thousands of people.
I don’t want to run events with thousands and thousands of people over multiple days.
I don’t want to be travelling overseas every month, even every 2nd month.
There is all this onslaught of conversation about you needing to 10X your business, and that you can do $10mil, $30mil, $50mil in the next 1-2 years. I’ve sat in rooms at Business Mastery 1 & 2 last year where they show you the calculations of the numbers that you could be doing and some basics of how to make it happen, I think my calculations were in the $15-$20mil range of what I could possibly do within 1-2 years time. Which at the time I thought YES I WANT THIS!
Afterwards when I got back to my hotel room, I realised something What no one was asking about was the profitability or what it would take to make that happen. To take a business from $2million to $20million, so 10 times, the same infrastructure that got me to $2million is NOT going to take it to $20mil.
My profit margin is NOT going to be the same.
My time and energy output is NOT going to be the same.
I’m just not prepared to do the work to make that happen in 1-2 years.
I want to give you a distinction around this and it has taken me A LOT to get to this point.
I am a high achiever. I always want to win. I always want to be the best. I am highly competitive. I will push myself beyond my limits that I have to achieve, which is also a HUGE part of the problem I had with how I ended up so damn burned out barely functioning huddled in the corner crying.
I am NOT lazy when I say that I’m not prepared to do the work though. I want to be very clear about that.
I don’t want to do the work around managing a team of that size. I don’t want to spend 20 hours a day working my ass off to 10X a business in a year. Even 2 years.
I don’t want to do all of that work to end up with probably the same type of profit per hour for the output I do, as I have right now.
I want to fill my days with work I love doing. The things that I enjoy.
I want to spend time with my family. I want to watch TV. I want to read. I want to sleep 8 hours minimum a night. I want to enjoy my life. Not kill myself in the mean time from travelling all over the world fucking up my internal system and barely sleeping.
My mentor has been telling me for a while now that me playing to WIN RIGHT NOW is so toxic and it’s not been until recently that I’ve really understood what she meant by that, I’ve been processing it for years now.
The people that want the $20million dollar business can hustle and grind to make that happen in that 1-2 years, they can sacrifice their health, their family, their life for it. One thing I know is that they can’t maintain it in the long term. Something will crash out because it’s not been built on strong and HEALTHY foundations and when one thing goes, it’s like dominoes falling fast. Nothing survives. I know, because I’ve experienced a version of this myself.
I would prefer to spend 10 years sitting at $2million a year and making huge profits and get to enjoy my life and NOT sacrifice what’s actually important to me to get to that goal of $20million, which I literally made up as being the success point.
I will admit, it’s a daily battle internally to not push ridiculously to WIN and sometimes I do relapse into that mentality, I go through phases of it and I am trying very very hard to unlearn the behaviours and discipline that has gotten me to this point in my life.
I look at Tony Robbins now and how he has tried to use every health hack he can get his hands on to have him sleep 4 hours a night, travel the world constantly, perform at such a high level of physical intensity constantly that he does and now the man's body is crumbling on him.
I saw him at an event where everyone was meant to have their eyes closed through a process and I opened my eyes to see two men basically carrying Tony off stage because he was all hunched over like a cripple, could hardly move, and looked like a weak old man, he looked in his 90’s. Not the strong, giant of a 60 year old man that we normally see.
You can only do so much in a physical and mental capacity that’s healthy and his lifetime of pushing so damn hard has had him sacrifice the ultimate thing - his health. Everything he does is just layering bandaids upon bandaids to keep him moving and it’s not the way I want to live my life.
He talks about how on average he is on a plane every 3 days because of his crazy schedule. He talks about the 6 homes he has across the world that he hardly gets to stay in because he is in hotels travelling most of the time. He talks about not seeing his family as much as he would like to.
And for what purpose? To have 30 companies that turn over $6 billion dollars and for you to be worth $500 million personally?
What is the point of that?
I’m not saying that it’s wrong - what I’m saying is that I don’t want it as it doesn’t fit in with what I want my life to look like and what I want to create.
I don’t want to deal with the masses. I want to deal with higher level people in smaller rooms and I want to run retreat style events as I LOVE THAT style of presenting.
I would prefer to deal with fewer people, both from a team and client perspective.
I want to keep my expenses low to create more profit.
I don’t need to say that I have a huge team and I have this and that. I’ve had it and I’ve gotten rid of it because it doesn’t make me happy and it also affects my profitability!
The game is LESS, not MORE.
I’ve been in business for so many years and I speak to so many business owners daily and what I see is that people get so caught up in turnover but when you ask them about their profitability their tone of voice changes, they say lots of “ahh, ummm, well... “ and pause before they tell me the number. Some of them don’t even know the number because they don’t look at their profit because they are burying their head in the sand of the reality.
There is a saying, Turnover is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is King.
Because there is a difference between Profit and CASH!
I would much prefer to have a $1million dollar business profiting $500K than a $5million dollar business profiting $300K. Hell, even if the $5million business was profiting the same $500K, I’d STILL take the $1million business.
LESS IS MORE. I just wanted to repeat that to you again.
Huge teams = Huge expenses
Teams are just one of many areas where LESS is MORE - Huge teams also need management and that takes time, effort and money to do that. I will write a whole different post diving into this in more depth at another time.
My lesson and acknowledgement of the fact that I don’t want to grow that type of business was huge and changed my mindset so much that it let me take huge actions towards a very different type of business than the one I was currently creating.
This was the biggest lesson I got out of the $200,000 I spent last year to be a Plat and I believe it was worth every cent and more for me to learn that lesson now, not when I was physically and mentally shutting down and realised I had lost 2 years with my family and lost my health in the meantime.
I can’t put a price tag on the stress and time that going down the whole “10X your business” path would have created for me.
I wanted to share this with you so that if you are also seeing these ridiculous messages in the marketplace and you think you HAVE to do that to be successful, just know you don’t. There are other ways PLUS you are already successful right now.
I had to change my definition of success from being “when I reach the $20million mark THAT’S when I’m successful” to “I’m a success that I woke up breathing today”! This is another one that is a daily battle to remind myself that is the case!
Let me leave you with a question - What is it that you REALLY actually want?
