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If you feel like you have plateaued in your business, or maybe you're getting bored, or maybe you're getting burned out physically or even mentally, I want to share a thing that has really changed my life as an entrepreneur. And before we kind of get going here, I just want to say, first of all, thank you for listening to this audio only episode that I'm going to do. Uh this is Josh, by the way, with e commerce Ally. And Dylan is not here with me because I I kind of want to just share some thoughts here after so many countless client conversations and internal conversations and that has been very impactful on the people that I've shared this with this framework with. And this framework is something that I've kind of learned over the years that be I've learned over the years of being an entrepreneur, and I've been an entrepreneur for for over 13 years now. And one of the challenges that we run into as entrepreneurs is the fact that, you know, we leave our jobs because we want to have greater impact. And I look at everything as like in inputs and outputs. And so in a job, you put in your, let's say, 40 hours for simplicity, and you get certain types of outputs. And output would be financial, right? So you have a certain, you put in 40 hours, you make$75,000 a year. That is the financial output. It also gives you a certain output of fulfillment and satisfaction, a certain output of time freedom, a certain output of fitting your lifestyle, et cetera. There are a lot of outputs of a job. And then we're like, we don't want to work nine to five. We don't want to work for somebody else. We want to control our outputs. We want our inputs to create greater outputs, which is really smart, right? That's what leverage truly is least input, maximum output. And so we go and we start a business and we start to own it, right? Well, our input generally doesn't stay the same. So the input of time usually goes up a little bit. So you're from 40 hours, maybe go to 50 or 60 or so. And you desire this deep, this higher level of output in other areas of your life. But then you start to realize it doesn't always work out like that. And then you start to get frustrated and you feel like you plateau, you get burned out, you maybe you get bored in the process of it, like I was just saying. And so I did this little exercise with a group of clients recently where I talked about inputs and outputs, and then I said, I drew this like I drew on my iPad, and I said, I want here it, what are the outputs that you desire? What is the objective output, what are different objective outputs of entrepreneurship? And people said, time, uh, freedom, so we could do what, when, with who we want. We have impact on our customers, team, family, et cetera, so we could leave a legacy and be generous. So we could, we could have a growth outlet, right? To grow as individuals. We want to, we want to have unlimited income potential. We want to feel a sense of purpose and happiness, right? These are all differently said outputs that entrepreneurship can create. But the challenge comes in when you are putting in so much input and you're not getting those outputs. You're putting in so much freaking work. You go from these regular jobs to now you're doing two times what a regular job would be doing on the input side, but you're seeing your family less, you're making less money, you have less time on your hands, and maybe you don't have the impact that you want to have. You're and you don't feel like you could be generous because the financials aren't there. And then you feel like you don't actually have this. What once started as purpose and brought you joy to do the thing has now become more burdensome than anything, and you kind of feel stuck. And I say this because that's literally that that's my story. That's how I kind of felt. Like you go in, there's all this honeymoon phase of entrepreneurship, and then you get in and you realize holy crap, this is really, really hard. No wonder eight out of 10 businesses fail in the first five years and nine out of 10 fail within 10 years. No wonder because it's so it's hard to do. And so I want to give you a framework that will help you start to move toward that. And I like to do this in the form of red light, yellow light, green light when I think of the things that I get to do, because the things that I do create the the things that are green, I call the these would be like zone of genius and joy. Green things that I do task-wise, create the highest outputs. They move me as close as possible to the desired outputs that I want for the inputs that I do. And on top of that, they bring me joy. So I want you to think and I want to start talking through what you do because the inputs that you do, the tasks, the things that you do every single day as an entrepreneur, they're either moving you toward the desired outputs or they're moving you away from them, or you're just maintaining and you're starting to burn out. And so either they're compounding or they're maintaining. And so I want you to start thinking of your tasks in red light, yellow. We're gonna traffic light system this. We're gonna go back to the the grade school, red light, green light, or yellow light, green light. Green light are tasks that you're doing that are really, they bring you joy and they're in your zone of genius. They're really good at them and they have high leverage and you really love doing them. They're moving you toward the desired outcome that you have. Yellow are kind of like, they're kind of okay. Maybe you're good at them, you like them. They kind of keep you there and it's they're okay to do, but they're not your favorite thing, and they don't have that much leverage. And red things are things that uh are just maintaining you, they're not growing you, and eventually uh you'll get really you're really bored by them or you get burned out by them. And so I want you to think of all of the things that you're doing. Because the stuff that we do often attributes to the fulfillment that we have. If I hate the stuff that I do every day, the level of fulfillment, pretty low. So when I'm talking through this, I want to talk through a a simple way of looking at the things that you do. Because if you're sitting and you're listening right now, or maybe you're not sitting, maybe you're maybe you're running or doing something else. Um, if you're listening right now and you're like, hey, I feel like I'm plateaued right now, or I feel bored by the stuff that I do, or I feel burned out. Those are three things I want you to look through a lens of. I feel burned out either mentally or physically, or I feel like I'm stuck, right? If that is you, then this is really, really important because I I assume you don't want to feel that. And there's an inverse effect feeling that you want to have. You don't want to feel burned out, you want to feel energized, you want to feel fulfilled by what you're doing. So much excitement from it. You don't want to feel bored, you want to feel energetic about it, you want to be wake up every day and say, Thank God it's Monday, thank God it's Tuesday, thank God it's Wednesday, every day of the week. And so I want you to, and you don't want to plateau, nobody wants to plateau, they want to grow. And so if that's you, then there are two ways I want you to, here's the framework. I want you to think of maintenance and compounding tasks. So main maintenance tasks and compounding tasks, because this is what's gonna push you toward the desired outcomes that you have for your life and your business. And I'm gonna assume, just because you're listening to this, that you have big dreams, you have big outcomes you want to achieve on all of those examples that I just gave you. And if that is true, then it's very critical that you can control you control the inputs because if you have bad inputs, you're gonna get bad outputs. So let's talk about your inputs. Your inputs are one of two categories they are maintaining or they are compounding. Now I look at maintaining as more of just like a means to an end, and I look at compounding as something that multiplies over time. So here are some tasks that are a means to an end. Finances, like running payroll, doing your bookkeeping, that's a means to an end. That's not compounding anything. Production means to an end, customer support means to an end. Legal stuff means to an end. It's not actually compounding anything. Doing administrative stuff means to an end. So there are things that you do that don't actually multiply the business. It doesn't multiply you toward the output. And quite frankly, if you were to ask, if you were to really rank it, you probably wouldn't put it as really, really high green. It's probably gonna be a yellow or a red for you. And so maintenance tasks are a mean means to an end. And it's not gonna actually keep you growing. And so your job as the entrepreneur is to consistently move all of your time toward compounding tasks. Compounding tasks are the thing that multiply your outputs over time and they bring you the most joy, and you're really freaking good at it. So I want you to picture something for me. What I want you to imagine what would your perfect week look like Monday through Friday or Sunday, I don't know, Monday through Sunday. What is your perfect week look like? What are the things that you do? How do you feel when you do those things? And what are the outcomes those things will accomplish if you got to do those? I was on a I was on a a call with a client about a week ago, and I asked her, I said, she's she's like, I feel like I'm just like treading water, like I'm just doing this stuff. And mind you, this this is a multi-seven figure operator, like very, very successful, and she's grown this pretty quickly. And she just feels like she's just like treading water. I said, How much time do you spend thinking? She's like, Well, I mean, obviously when I do a task, I have to think about the telecommanding. No, no, no, just a time where you sit thinking, building strategy, creating vision, exploring new frontiers of things like AI and following all of the rabbit trails with no limits. And she's like, I don't do that at all. I said, Well, that's a compounding task. I said, What would have how would you feel if there was one day a week that you had no meetings, you had no obligations, you did nothing except that? She's like, That would be the greatest thing ever. That sounds like so much fun. I was like, Yeah, that's a compounding task. We have to get that on your plate, and you need to start figuring out how to get some maintaining tasks off your plate so that you could do that kind of stuff. And so I want you to imagine what it would be like if you got to do only the stuff that compounded the outputs in your business and your life. And I'm gonna give you the three things that I actually believe are the only compounding tasks, all bucketed. There are three compounding tasks you could do in your business that will change your whole life. Number one is thinking, highly underrated. Not just thinking about like, oh, I need to do this task or I need to do this project, so I'm only gonna think about this project. It's like, no, no, no. Like this is where you have a half day or a full day where all you're doing is exploring. You're thinking about, hmm, what's the constraint in the business? Hmm, how do I solve that constraint? What are things that I could explore next? What are the AI things that we are not doing? Who do we need to hire next? How do I empower our team? Like really taking time to think through the strategy in your business and how to reverse engineer the outputs that you want to get and how to identify constraints, and then how to just honestly have fun building stuff. I recently built an entire app using a tool called Replit. I used it to code an entire app for like great scanning ad performance and scanning email flows with clavio for our clients and also taking their profit and loss statements and it'll grade them and it will give them all of their holes and say, here's what we need to lift, here this percentage is good, here's the fixes. I built this and it took me less than three days to build. And that was part of my thinking time. It was a little bit of exploration. And so if you don't spend time thinking, thinking is one of the most compounding things you could do because everything begins in your mind, right? Your mind is what creates all of the other things that are happening in your life and your business. If you don't think about the thing, the thing won't happen, right? If you don't think about the areas of your life that you're struggling, the areas of your life that you need to improve upon, and then think about how you can improve upon those and you can succeed in those areas, then how would you ever succeed in those areas? There's a quote, I forget who the heck said it, but it's like, if you aim for nothing, you'll hit it every time, right? It's kind of like, how often do you you sit down and say, How could I improve my relationship with my spouse? How can I be a better, better parent? How can I be a better leader? What are what are the things that I need to work on? If I struggle with my weight like I actually do, um, if I've struggled with this my whole life, what needs to change? What are the things? Who do I need to hire to coach me through this season of life in this particular area? If you don't sit down to think about it, you know what's going to happen? You're just going to exist in those areas of your life. You're going to probably end up plateaued, maybe a little bored, maybe a little bit burned out. So maintenance tasks lead to plateau, boredom, and burnout. Compounding tasks lead to growth in all areas of your life that you're working to compound. So the three compounding tasks. Number one is thinking. I know I hash out a lot. Number two is creating. Creating looks very different. Now, I create a lot of content. As a founder, content is going to probably be the hot one of the highest leverage things that you will create ever. I mean, founder-led content is the best content. Creating stuff for organic, writing down stuff, building things that your team will use on the marketing front for product dev, et cetera. Like creating is something you have to allocate time for. I have two full days of creation every week. I write all day. I write and work on stuff. I work on product dev. I work on marketing content. I create all I write all day on Wednesdays. And then I write and film content and stuff that we need internally all day on Thursdays. In Fridays, I think all day on Fridays. Fridays are literally just the what do we need to think about? What do I need to explore? AI has been a really big forefront for me recently. And in the last month or so, I've spent every single Friday all day long exploring AI. And it's been able to automate just now over a thousand hours a week of our team's time. It's or a thousand hours a year of our team's time. I even built a dashboard to monitor the time savings that's starting to happen. So that's the second thing. Second thing is creating. You need time to think, number one, uh, create, number two, and number three is lead. As you do these things, you will grow. Your business will grow and you will grow as an individual. The third is really freaking hard. I was talking to uh someone who worked for me actually years ago, five, six years ago, and he did sales for me, but then he he ended up uh he's a good friend of mine, and he went and he started his own business. He's five years in and he he built this like insurance agency. And well, it started as an agency, and then it just went down to him. And I was talking to him last night and and uh he said, Yeah, I grew up to like four full-time agents, but nobody wanted to go in the field, nobody wanted to do the hard stuff that actually gets you paid and blah, blah, blah. And he's going through all this. He's like, so I decided I'm better off doing it myself. But my problem is like I just have no time for anything, and and I'm just working all the time, and I have two kids and I want to see my kids more and all this. And I said, Yeah, well, it makes sense because he did a lot of the stuff, but he got stuck at leading. Leadership compounds. You basically got yourself a really good paying gig, but that's it. Because if it's just you and you don't build the team, it will always just be you. You can't just leave and stuff happens. You have to build the team. And that's a really hard thing. Leadership is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, in my opinion. Like being able to lead people is really freaking hard. So you have to make time for it. You have to say, hey, leadership compounds because when I can delegate and I can lead the team and empower and equip them to do the things that multiply so I don't have to, that will compound your growth tremendously. And so spending time intentionally leading is going to compound. If you have a team and you're not doing a team meeting once a week, you should be doing a weekly team meeting. If you have directors and you're not doing a director's meeting once a week, you should probably do that so that your directors have vision or direction on what they need to do and everybody's problem solving together. If you have key leaders, you should be doing, or even team members, small team, you should be doing one-on-ones with your team. I'm not saying do those every week. Some people, based on how involved they are and their role and how much they work, will be we bi-weekly. Some might be monthly. But you should at least we meet with your team one one-on-one for 20 to 30 minutes one time per month, because that it might feel like, oh, I'm just spending 30 minutes every other week and I'm spending this time. But you know what happens? That 30-minute investment compounds. Imagine what happens when you have someone you meet with for 30 minutes one on one every other week. So you spend an hour of them on with them per month, and then they have 159 other hours or more that they are multiplying. Like that is how you compound. So, three compounding things you need to think, you need to create, and you need to lead. Those are what I've I've categorized, I've come to the conclusion that those are the only three things that I can I could come up with that are the most compounding activities. So, how do you get to that? And I'm gonna close on this. How do you get to that? Once a quarter, you should do a quarterly energy audit. This is where, like, we have a whole spreadsheet. So if you're a client listening, please go use the spreadsheet. We have a quarterly energy audit. And what we do is we go through every quarter, and it's a spreadsheet where basically you list out every single teeny tiny granular task that you do. And uh the good thing is once you do this once, you just dupe, uh, dupe the sheet over and it's like 90% the same every time or 80% the same. But the goal is every time you dupe it, you look at every task and you red light, yellow light, green light it. And then you choose what you're gonna do with every task every quarter. You say, This quarter, I'm gonna stop doing this, I'm going to automate this with AI or automation in some way, or I'm going to delegate this. One of those three things. Or I'm going to stop doing it. Oh, yeah, yes, I already said that. Or I'm going to keep doing it. That's the thing. I what do I stop doing? What do I keep doing? What do I automate? And what do I delegate? Those four decisions are made about every task every quarter. And so what you do is you go in and say, what are the main maintenance tasks that are a means to an end and they're not multiplying me toward the output that I desire in my life in business? Those are the first to go. I'm either stopping them or I'm automating them or I'm delegating them if I have to. In that order, by the way, it's way easier to just stop something than to think you have to keep doing it because you've always done it. I promise you can just stop doing things and your business will not burn down. In fact, you're probably doing a lot of things that you should just not even automate or delegate. You should just stop doing them and investing resources in them right now and reconsider them at a later date. And if you do that and you keep moving toward compounding green zone of genius and joy tasks, you will feel fulfilled and your outputs will go up tremendously. I hope this was helpful. A little bit of a uh something I've been thinking about. It's been heavy on my mind recently on how you can multiply your output with compounding tasks versus uh maintaining tasks. And this is an audio only episode. This is my thank you just for listening because I really appreciate anybody listening to our podcast on audio. So this is audio only, this little thing you won't get anywhere else. But if this was valuable, please drop a rating on the podcast. It would mean the world to me. We're trying to become the number one podcast for e commerce businesses on the planet. So please leave a review, it helps get into other people's ears. And I will see you in the next episode.