In this transformative episode, Jason Moss shares how you can scale your startup to seven figures while working less with his CEO Freedom Formula. If you’re struggling with burnout from doing it all, or if you feel overwhelmed by inconsistent revenue, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why shifting to a CEO identity helps you escape the daily grind

- How to eliminate low-value tasks to free up your time

- What value ladder strategy lets you focus on high-impact work

This episode is ideal for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Jason Moss is a multi-six-figure business coach and leader of a thriving global community of online business owners. His journey began in 2016 with his first online business, which generated just $4,728 in its first year. Determined to crack the code on consistent leads and clients, Jason spent years refining his strategies. Once he discovered what truly worked, everything changed. He scaled his business to over $500,000 annually and built a vibrant community filled with incredible clients. Today, Jason wakes up every day passionate about transforming lives by sharing the proven marketing strategies that fueled his success.

Want to learn more about Jason Moss's work at jasonmoss.com? Check out his website at https://jasonmoss.com/ and get a copy of his free 7-Figure Scaling Guide.

To learn more about Scott, visit https://www.scattritzheimer.com.

To get help scaling your own business or nonprofit, visit https://www.scalearchitects.com

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

All right, and one thing before we do, and this is blindingly obvious, but Jason Moss, no

surprises with your name, right?

2

Okay, I've had a couple that's like, this is totally obvious, and it totally wasn't

obvious apparently, and I got it dead wrong.

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So no matter how obvious it seems, I realize I just have to check and make sure.

4

So anyway, thanks for pairing with me on that one.

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But all right, we'll give it a couple seconds of silence and we'll kick off.

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Here we go.

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Hello and welcome.

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Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows

with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder.

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Today, Jason Moss is joining us to help all you founders in the startup entrepreneur stage

to make a million while working less.

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Jason is a multi-six figure business coach and leader of a thriving global community of

online business owners.

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His journey began in 2016 with his first online business, which generated a whopping

$4,728 in its first year, determined to crack the code on consistent leads and clients.

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Jason then spent years refining his strategies, and once he discovered what truly worked,

everything changed.

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He scaled his business to over $500,000 annually and built a vibrant community filled with

incredible clients.

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Today, Jason wakes up every day passionate about transforming lives by sharing the

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proven marketing strategies that fueled his success.

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And he's here with us today, Jason.

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Thanks for being on the show.

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So excited to have you here.

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You've got this really cool guide and I hope we can show folks how to get a copy of it

themselves.

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But in it, you open with a pretty hard truth and that is that most founders who've hit six

figures are overwhelmed, they're working long hours, they're questioning if all of this is

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worth it.

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So for a startup founder who's

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just getting off the ground.

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They've got big dreams, but they're already feeling buried and burned out.

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What's the first step to using your CEO Freedom Formula to take back control?

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Yeah, it's a great question.

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And I, you anyone who's out there, I just want to say you're so not alone if you're

feeling like that you're wearing the entire business on your back.

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And I mean, so many entrepreneurs that got to six figures, the thing that got us to six

figures is we're scrappy.

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We figured out how to solve problems.

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We figured out how to run everything ourselves, manage all these tools and wear all the

hats and, and that's a beautiful thing.

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But there's something super interesting that happens around six figures, which is that the

way

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of operating that got you to Six Figures really starts to break down.

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And so when I was at Six Figures back in 2018, I hit Six Figures for the first time.

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I was working six days a week.

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I was designing thumbnails on the weekend.

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I was writing landing page copies, sending emails.

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I was doing everything myself.

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I had a mindset of this proud DIYer.

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And I see this a lot with entrepreneurs who are at that level.

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It's that scrappiness that got us to six figures that really starts to create the

bottleneck at that level.

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So when it comes to shifting out of that and being able to scale, I have a three step

formula called the CEO freedom formula that I walk through with clients.

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The first step of that is I think the most important piece, which is CEO identity.

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And what I've seen from helping and mentoring so many different entrepreneurs is that the

thing that really gets in the way is actually the internal piece in order to scale a

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business.

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You literally have to become a different person.

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cannot build a seven figure business with a six figure identity.

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And so I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are trying to change the outside.

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Certainly where I was in 2018, I was so focused on marketing strategies and funnels and

lead gen and I was spending all my time focused on the outside.

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I hadn't yet become the kind of person I needed to be.

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So there's a radical shift in identity that needs to happen.

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There's a move from being an operator to being an owner.

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And it's a completely different mindset, completely different way of thinking.

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about running a business, that really is that foundational shift that when entrepreneurs

are able to make that, then everything else can filter out into the way that they run and

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lead the business.

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And that's when scale becomes possible while reclaiming your freedom and your time.

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So you don't have to work 60 hours a week, but you can make a lot more money.

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Yeah, I love that.

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What makes that tricky is a couple things.

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One, you mentioned this earlier, you get to this stage by doing those scrappy things,

right?

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So it's not that those things were wrong, it's just that they're not right anymore, and at

least not in the way that you're approaching them.

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And so that begs the question, when does that change?

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Like, is it like some little fairy comes and tells you overnight?

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Like, what's the demarcation point where you have to start shifting those

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mindsets to create the success that you're really looking for.

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I think what it really comes down to is you hit a stage of burnout where a lot of

entrepreneurs will try to do more of what got them to six figures.

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So it's more content, it's more sales calls, it's more of the same.

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And it gets to a certain point where you just feel like you're, I mean, I know for me, it

was like I was wearing the entire business on my back.

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I was overwhelmed, I was stressed out, I was burned out.

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I felt like I was constantly on, like at the end of the day,

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I couldn't turn off, like I was constantly thinking about my business, because the level

of intellectual weight of managing and running and being so in the weeds and building a

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successful business just starts to, you start to collapse under the weight of it.

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So I think that's the symptom that.

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most people will come to me and they'll say, Jason, I can't keep doing this.

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I know I'm on the path to burnout.

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I just feel like I'm overwhelmed.

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I'm wearing too many hats.

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And that's the moment I think for most entrepreneurs where we go, okay, we either stay

small or we slip back into the comfort of what we did before.

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And some entrepreneurs will do that.

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It's like, okay, well, I don't want to scale because I feel like scaling is going to mean

more of this.

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And I have a story that says that I need to just do more of this and that

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doesn't work for me.

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So we stay small or we break through and we shift into a new way of being and operating in

the business.

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You mentioned with this identity piece that there's an element where you have to change

who you are.

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That can be really scary for most folks, really.

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What does that mean and should it be a scary thing?

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Yeah, I mean, it is in a certain sense, it's it is scary to that old part of you that's

literally dying.

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Because I mean, a lot of what's underneath the surface is it's a addiction to getting our

dopamine from doing, which I see with a lot of entrepreneurs.

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I've also struggled with this.

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It's a sense that we feel like we get validation for being the one who's constantly in

control.

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and managing.

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So there's a lot of deeper stuff that has to change in that journey.

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And it is scary because it means letting go of a way of operating and a way of seeing

yourself.

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And so there's a lot of resistance.

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There's a lot of fear around that.

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A lot of entrepreneurs feel

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I know for me, we have to reimagine the model, the way that we're showing up in our

business, because it's just, it's not possible to scale the current model to the next

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level.

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So that is a tough place to be.

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And it's also incredibly exciting and expansive.

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And there's so much possibility on the other side of that.

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It's just being able to work with the resistance and the fear and the stories and redefine

our relationship to business and how we lead, which is not easy to do, but more than

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possible.

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and there's so much freedom on the other side of that.

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So that's really the message I wanna share with people is this does not have to be your

life.

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If this is where you are, there's so much possibility on the other side of that.

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It's so true.

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So I can kind of hear the pushback.

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I know I've received it.

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I'm sure you have as well.

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It's like, nah, but really I just need more leads.

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Like, that's fine.

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I just need more leads, right?

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Or I just need someone that I can trust that can execute on this.

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like we want to shift back to those external things.

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Share a thing or two with us that you tried that didn't work just so that we can kind of

lay that to rest.

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Yeah, well, what I've noticed in my own business, and I've experienced this personally as

well with so many people I mentor, is there's this thing that starts to happen where it's

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like we take one step towards a certain direction,

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For example, when I hit my first $100,000 month, that was a big milestone for me.

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And I see a lot of entrepreneurs who hit record months.

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It's like they'll have their first big month, but they can't hold it.

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And so you'll see a lot of this, like we hit the milestone and then there's this collapse

on the other side of it.

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And I see this so often with entrepreneurs.

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And what it is is you have not become the kind of entrepreneur who can hold the

sustainability behind the model or behind the level

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of revenue, or you're just hustling, you're just grinding to try to hit that thing.

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So that's what often happens.

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And what I experienced in my own business was this kind of stop and start thing for many

years.

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It was like I would hit a milestone, and then I'd be right back where I started.

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And I would break through and then it felt like I was back at square one again.

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And that is a symptom of this deeper misalignment.

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I always tell people it's like the business you have right now is a perfect reflection.

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for who you are and it will rise or fall to your own level of identity and your own

internal blocks and sets of beliefs.

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And so the real work is really it's not an outside game.

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It's not a popular message.

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I most people come here, they want marketing strategies, right?

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But what I found is you become the thing first and then the strategy actually emerges from

that.

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It's like when I'm thinking like a seven figure entrepreneur, my mind will figure out the

right strategy that

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it needs in order to actually generate seven figures.

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But if I'm thinking like a six-figure entrepreneur, literally, the strategy, the

seven-figure strategy is not available to me.

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The seven-figure lead generation plan is not available to me.

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So it really is an inside-out game.

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And it's a hard shift, I think, for most entrepreneurs who are wired to think externally

first.

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But it's a dramatic shift when we can make it that has such incredible impact on the

business.

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And it's been more effective than anything else I've ever seen in terms of strategy.

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It's so true.

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And it's one of the reasons why, and I think you'll relate to this as well, but I love

working with founders because once they do make the shift, man, they can figure stuff out.

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Like it's profound how quickly you'll adapt and how quickly you'll solve these things that

you didn't even know you needed to solve so long as that energy is directed in the right

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way.

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One of the, if we kind of move on to step two of this process, you talk about eliminating

and leveraging.

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which is an interesting combination because most folks will kind of split those out.

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What does that mean to you?

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Why is it so important that it's the next step in the process?

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Yeah, so when I look at what most entrepreneurs are doing, at least 50 % of what they're

doing on a day-to-day in their business doesn't need to be done.

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And this is, mean, hundreds of entrepreneurs I've met and this is like 99 % of them myself

too.

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mean, I, I, every few months of my business, I do a time audit where I'll track my time

every, every 15 minutes I'll do for a week.

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And I look at the things that I'm doing and there's every single time I do it, there's

just things that when I actually scrutinize it and I sit down, I say, what's actually

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generating revenue and what's not.

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For example, we had a, for

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For a couple of years, we had a video editor in my business, and I do a lot of YouTube

content.

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It's a big lead gen source for us.

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And I had this...

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Unvalidated assumption when I first hired that video editor that if we invested a lot of

money into having better edited videos, we would get more views, and YouTube would want to

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push them to more people.

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I never checked that assumption.

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I just assumed it.

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went on and hired a video.

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We were paying $500 a video, so like four grand a month to be able to edit these videos.

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And I had someone on my team who was reviewing these videos and working on revisions.

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I never actually stepped back and looked at the data.

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And when I actually looked at the data and I compared highly edited videos on our channel

to raw uncut videos, what I found,

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was there was zero difference in retention.

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People were just as likely to watch the unedited videos.

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Actually, they were watching them for longer, and they were doing better on our channel.

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So this is a small example of what happens all the time with entrepreneurs.

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There's so much inefficiency and bloat in most businesses.

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And in times when things are good, that stuff can float by.

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But if we look at what's happening in the economy right now, what's up ahead, I think many

people, myself included, are looking at where we are economically

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We're kind of headed for what I imagine to be a little bit of a bumpier ride over the next

year.

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And in times like these, efficiency, lean, effective models that are not overwhelmed by

bloat, that's the stuff that's really going to survive.

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So the first step of this is really getting super aggressive about auditing your time and

cutting all the things that actually aren't moving the needle.

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And then from there,

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Because most people skip that, like I did.

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They're like, oh, let me just find a team member to do this.

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Let me delegate this to someone else.

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And it's very easy to hand something off to somebody else that we think needs to be done

when most people just don't ask that question of like, do I even need to do this in the

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first place?

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Is this an important part of my business?

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So that's the first piece.

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And then we move on to how can we create more leverage around your time so we can move you

up the value ladder so you're not spending all your time doing $20 an hour admin tasks in

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the business.

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Mm-hmm.

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the piece that I think a lot of entrepreneurs at that six figure level could really

benefit from.

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That leveraged approach, moving away from this I'm doing everything myself mindset and

more to how do I leverage team?

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How do I leverage AI?

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How do I leverage automation to be able to free me up to focus on higher revenue ROI

generating activities in the business?

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Yeah.

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With all those different opportunities, how do you help people figure out where to start?

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Well, I think the easiest thing that most entrepreneurs could do right now, if you're

listening to this is just make a list of all the things that you're doing in your business

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on a weekly basis and go through every single one of those and ask yourself, is this

making money?

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Number one, and how much revenue is it actually generating in the business?

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And if it's generating less than 10 % or 20 % revenue in the business, just cut it.

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You probably cut your to-do list in half just by doing that.

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So that would be where I would start.

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And then from there,

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I have this, I mean this is not a new concept, the value ladder.

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Many people talk about this.

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So if you imagine a ladder, like a visual of a ladder, and you have, at the bottom of the

ladder you have low level, low value tasks in your business.

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Things like admin, things like scheduling content, things like scheduling, generally

scheduling administrative type stuff.

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Things that you could hire somebody for $20 an hour to do.

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And then at the top of the ladder you've got things like high level strategy.

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sales calls, being on camera, doing interviews like this.

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This is high leverage time for me.

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And then you've got all sorts of things in between.

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can just draw on a value ladder like this in your business.

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And my goal when I mentor entrepreneurs is how do we move you up the value ladder?

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So you start looking at the bottom of the value ladder and you look at the things that

you're doing, lowest rungs on the value ladder.

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And we look at how can we automate?

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How can we delegate?

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What can we eliminate here?

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And then over time, you start to just inch up the value ladder week by week, month by

month.

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We move you off more and more of those low leverage things.

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And you do that bit by bit by bit.

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And that opens up more time to be able to enjoy your life, but also to be able to focus on

things that are actually going to generate a lot more revenue in the business.

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Yeah, that's fantastic.

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Such a simple approach, but it really, really works.

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I love that approach.

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Jason, I'm gonna let you go here in a minute, but I've got another question before we do,

and then I wanna make sure folks know how they can get in touch with you.

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What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?

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What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

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I think it's that business is an act of service.

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You know, when I think about what's been most...

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influential for me in terms of my own success, as well as the clients that I serve, it

really comes down to that.

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It's the entrepreneurs who are obsessed about how can I solve problems?

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How can I understand deeply who my people are, what they need, what their dreams are, what

keeps them up at night?

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And that sounds cliche, because a lot of marketers talk about this, but it's easy to get

distracted.

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I find as I grow and scale, it's everything I've always launched in my business that have

flopped, that has flopped.

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and I've launched a lot of successful after I've also failed a lot of times, launched a

lot of things that have just bombed.

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And 90 % of the things that have bombed when I look back and I asked myself why, it's

because I got away from the market.

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I wasn't rooted and I wasn't grounded in what people really want.

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And so I think that the real what to me what business is, is it's an act of service.

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It's how can I add value?

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How can I help other people?

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And particularly as you scale and grow a business, it's

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it's actually harder to stay grounded in that because we start playing more of this high

level owner role and we get away from those ground floor connections and relationships and

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more being like tapped into what people really want.

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So for me, I think the secret is stay grounded in who your people are, really seek to

understand them, get on calls with them, like hang out with them, even when you're growing

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and scaling, you know.

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This might sound like contrary to everything I'm just saying, but it isn't.

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It's sometimes actually being in the ground floor is a good thing.

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Like going and just having conversations with your five best clients and getting on the

phone with them.

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I think that's a high leverage time.

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And really that is the biggest secret to success is the entrepreneurs who are staying

grounded in service that are gonna win.

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Yeah, I love that.

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And I found a point of distinction between those two things is that you're having those

conversations because you can, not because you have to.

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It's not necessary for the thing to move forward, but it's for you to really approach and

make that connection.

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Get the, we wouldn't really call it this, but get the data out of that experience that's

gonna help you make great decisions and implement the right strategies moving forward.

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So that shift from I have to do this to I can do this is a really big one.

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Yeah.

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there's some folks listening that like it's just exactly what they need right now and

they'd like to have more.

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Tell us a little bit about the free resource you've got available and then where they can

find more out about you and the work that you do.

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Yeah, for sure.

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So you can go to jsonmoss.com.

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There's that seven figure scaling guide there, which we talked about steps one and two of

the CEO Freedom formula today.

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Basically how to, how to.

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to break free from becoming a prisoner in your business and build a business that you run

instead of a business that runs you.

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This formula, this three step approach really walks you through how to do that.

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And so that guide goes into more depth into the how into what's working best for the

entrepreneurs that I mentor to help them scale today.

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It's completely free and super valuable.

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It's not like a hidden sales pitch.

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There's actually like a lot of value in there.

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So you can check that out on my website if you just go to jcmoss.com and there's a link to

download the

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We got a ton more information on that site there, YouTube channel with hundreds of free

videos, valuable content for entrepreneurs who are scaling.

272

So lots of great places to check out, but jasonmoss.com is where I'd go and that's our hub

for all things helping you scale.

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Fantastic.

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Jason, thanks for being on the show.

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Just a privilege and honor having you here with us today.

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Loved this conversation and there's a lot of gold in there for folks that are in this

stage.

277

For those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world

to us.

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I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did and I cannot wait to see

you next time.

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Take care.

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Super.