Ryan Deiss

I have a friend who runs a $2M business.

Smart guy. Great margins. Low stress....

And he takes more cash home in a month than some founders I know running five times his revenue.

Sounds ridiculous... until you look at what the growth actually did to those $10M companies.

Their revenue got bloated, but all the cash was disappearing.

Here is what my $2M friend did that they didn't:

>He got smaller before he got bigger. He cut the bloat and killed the distractions before he tried to scale anything.

>He refused to confuse revenue with what reaches his bank account. Revenue doesn't matter if the cash keeps disappearing.

>He hired DOERS instead of helpers. (You can’t be productive if you’re spending all your time telling other people how to do their jobs.)

>He understood the part most founders never accept: the more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is.

That's the whole game.

Most founders are optimizing the number on the top line…

He’s optimizing the number that hit his account, and that’s why he’s winning (and his business is still growing).

I recently turned 45....

Which means I've had exactly half my life to collect scar tissue from building businesses, and the other half to be young enough to not listen to anyone who already had it.

What I know now that I wish someone had forced me to hear in my 20s.

1) Pay yourself first, and pay yourself a lot.

I didn't take a real salary until a mentor called me an idiot for it. The feast or famine cycle I was living kept the business in the same cycle. If the company can't afford to pay the CEO well, the model is broken.

2) Don't hire an operator (COO/integrator) before you have an operating system

I tried it twice. Failed both times. If you need someone to "integrate" your business, you don't have a people problem... you have a systems problem. Build the operating system first, then hire someone to operate the operating system.

3) The people who got you here won't get you there.

I had to fire my college roommate because the business outgrew him. The relationship never fully recovered. The team you love at $2M probably isn't the team that gets you to $10M, and pretending otherwise hurts everyone.

4) Diversification is for investors, not entrepreneurs.

One business. One market. One offer. Until it works. Every time I split focus, the original business suffered. Every single time. I still struggle with this one.

5) Give your family first dibs on your calendar.

I worked 80-hour weeks without a vacation for almost a decade while telling myself I was doing it "for my family." Stupidest thing I ever believed. My wife and I now block our family calendar between Christmas and New Year's before a single business event goes in.

6) The excuse IS the reason.

Take any excuse for inaction and invert it. "I can't fire that person, they're too critical" becomes "I must fire that person, they're a single point of failure." My biggest excuses have always been my biggest diagnoses.

7) Don't quit on a bad day.

I fired myself from my own company in my early 30s out of burnout and impostor syndrome. Brought in an outside CEO. Company was in a death spiral within a year.

You're allowed to quit.

Just not on a bad day.

Comment "45" and I'll send you the CEO Dashboard we use to make sure the bad days don't become bad decisions.