Stop letting the mechanism limit you

There are many lessons I’ve learned on my journey of creating & scaling different productized services.

Today I’m going to share one that I think you’ll find valuable.

And it’s this…

“Don’t let your own skills hold you back from growing”

We’ve all heard the saying, "just get out of your own way if you want to grow."

One of the key elements of a productized service is having a clear and specific “mechanism” that you plan on selling. This is important and valuable.

This is otherwise known as your Intellectual Property, and your specialized skill.

You may be familiar with my CMR framework. Customer + Mechanism = Result

Your goal should be to exit the doing of the mechanism as quickly as possible to focus your energy on your customers & their results.

Your mechanism may be running ads, writing copy, designing graphics, etc.

But don’t let the "thing" of what you do hold you back from progressing.

Your capacity will eventually hit a ceiling and if you don’t free up your capacity by hiring and building leverage it will create drag in your ability to grow, sell, and operate. This is a normal evolution and will affect everyone at different times.

Do you ever notice how some people have the ability to go from 0 to 1 crazy fast? It seems as if like they have literally skipped ahead with cheat codes. Well, they did.

Take me for an example.

I created a Productized business called Content Pros where we created long-form blog articles.

I never wrote one blog post the entire time I ran that business.

Instead, I found skilled writers and editors who could deliver the services for me. From our first order, I outsourced the mechanism. This allowed me to build the business much faster.

Although i’m competent at creating and writing I knew that doing it myself would slow my ability to grow the business. So I instead leaned on industry specialist writers to create the content while I focused on operations, sales, systems.

This is not easy and takes a leap of faith and trust that others can do the work as good or better than you.

By not letting the “mechanism” of writing hold me back I was able to grow the business much faster and get out of my own way. I believe most founders eventually arrive at this conclusion but the timeline at which they do fluctuates drastically.

Look at Elon Musk.

From what I can tell he wasn’t a mechanic or involved in the automobile industry before starting Tesla. Today it is the fastest-growing car manufacturing company in the world. How can one person be the CEO of multiple companies like this at the same time. His ability to find a-players and delegate is world-class. Jack Dorsey of Twitter and the Cashapp is another example. Heck even Richard Branson.

If you can see a niche market that isn’t being served and you know how to fill it don’t be afraid to go for it. Not being the “expert” in the field can actually be a strength because it forces you to bring in experts.This will also help you avoid getting stuck in the “doing”.

Here is a great quote from Richard Branson that sums this up pretty well:

Some people struggle with relinquishing control due to their ego getting in the way.

However, at the end of the day, that’s all part of a successful business.

If you want to grow your business you need to learn to delegate, build leverage, and manage other A-players.

How might you implement more leverage faster?

There are plenty of other moving parts that will determine whether your service is either a complete time-suck or a smooth leveraged operation that is exciting to work on each day.

As we wrap, here are two questions to ask yourself:

“What am I actively doing in my business right now that is possibly holding me back from actually growing?”

“If I no longer could “do” the mechanism or core offer of my business and I was forced to bring in experts how might I approach this?”

Tyler