In this engaging episode, John Whitt, Owner of BusinessWhitt, shares how to break free from the founder's trap and turn ideas into money. If you struggle with overwhelm and scaling, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to prioritize clarity to guide your business strategy

- What team-building steps boost your growth potential

- How to use testing to validate ideas before scaling

This episode is ideal for 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

John Whitt is an experienced coach and the author of Checkmate!: Translating Ideas Into Money, a book that uses chess as a metaphor for business strategy. John brings over 30 years of experience helping both corporations and small businesses shift their culture, boost results, and improve profitability. As a leadership coach and business growth strategist, he specializes in assisting founders to move from high-stress hustle to structured, values-aligned scale.

Want to learn more about John Whitt's work at BusinessWhitt? Check out his website at https://businesswhitt.com/

Grab a copy of his book Checkmate!: Winning Tactics for Translating Ideas into Money at https://www.amazon.com/Checkmate-Winning-Tactics-Translating-Ideas/dp/1947341979

You can follow John through his Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BusinessWhitt/ and connect in LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachjohnwhitt/

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

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the Start scale and succeed podcast. It's the only podcast

that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As

a founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and there's a

pattern that I see constantly, one where founders who've

finally gone full time, who are in their business, they're

generating revenue, they're doing their thing, they've got

clients, and they're drowning the salesperson, the delivery

person, the accountant, the marketer, the janitor, and

everything in between. You wake up every morning, and the first

thing you have to do is get through all the admin that you

missed yesterday and the day before and the day before that

before the clients start, and everything goes crazy. And so

what do we how do we deal with it? How do we focus to grow?

Especially because you have these ideas, you know that

they're going to change the very nature of the game, but you just

can't seem to get to them. And what's really challenging about

this stage, what makes it so brutal, is that you're pretty

good at the stuff that you do, too. That's why folks have hired

you. But you can't keep this up. You can't keep this cycle going.

And so how do we shift this? How do we turn it around? I'd tell

you if I knew, but I have something better for you. I've

got the one and only John Witt, who's been doing this for 30

years. He's been helping founders to break this cycle,

and he's also the author of the book, checkmate, translating

ideas into money. It's a book that uses chess as a metaphor

for business strategy. John brings over 30 years of

experience helping both corporations and small business

owners shift their culture, boost their results and improve

profitability. As a leadership coach and Business Growth

strategist, he specializes in assisting founders to move from

high stress hustle to structured, values aligned

scale, and he's here with us today. John, welcome to the

show. So excited to have you here. Love the name of the book,

Turning ideas to money, that is the game, isn't it. Why is that

so hard to do?

Well, Scott, first off, let me say thanks for

having me today. I really appreciate it. It's it's hard to

do because most people haven't done it before. If you've done

it and again, when you, when you think about transiting ideas

into money or it's a goal, starting a business is a goal. I

want to start a business. I want to generate revenue. You've

never done it before. I actually teach a program called Achieving

uncommon events, because getting going from zero to a successful

business is not all that common. There are a lot of people that

go from zero to an unsuccessful business as opposed to

successful, and it's really it's a system and a process, and it's

all brand new. And you're learning a lot, really fast. And

when you're learning a lot, a lot of times, you make some

mistakes, and man, you have to have some perseverance it's a

discipline, and you got to keep getting back up and getting in

the fight, because if you give up, it's over.

Yeah, one of the things that you talk I've

heard you talk about, is this idea of judgment mode, and it's

something that keeps us stuck, even when we have good ideas.

What is judgment mode and why is it so dangerous?

Well, it's a preset condition. Instead of, you know,

an open mind, it's a fixed mind. And so judgment mode shows up

when I'm working with a client, and I've worked with many of

them in this space, and sometimes this is what we have

to get through first. And I'll say, so you want to save some

time, you need to get some more time. So why don't we? Why don't

we hire a virtual assistant? Right? That's a real common

process. And they'll say, oh, no, I can't do that. I've

already tried that. It doesn't work. Well, see, they tried it,

that's true, and it didn't work. That's true, but that doesn't

mean they did it, right? So so really, they're kind of stuck.

And so when somebody says no or that doesn't work, that's like

turning the light switch off. So then we have to say, okay, but

well, maybe, you know, there are other people that have done this

and had made it work. You think maybe you could try it a

different way, and it could be any number of different things,

but the, you know, they're preset because they've, they've

made a decision that that won't work, and it's, it's false

information, you know, they basically, it's only in their

head where it doesn't work.

Right, right. Now, you've got a framework in

the book the five key attributes for success that help to

translate ideas into money. I'm wondering if you could just kind

of briefly walk us through those and how someone could take that

structure and start to put it to use today.

Yeah, absolutely. So step number one is clarity. And

clarity is king. In the in the chess world, the queen is the

most powerful piece on the board. In the business world,

clarity is the most powerful piece on the board, and it's not

clarity at the 60 or 70% level. You want to get it as high as

you possibly can get it. You want to know what you're trying

to accomplish, who you're going to do, what there's, there's a

whole litany of things that you want to work with. And the

second step is Team people. And sometimes you need some people

to help you figure out the clarity, because you don't know

all that, all the answers, right? So most, most

solopreneurs, they start up, they're not a marketing expert,

so they probably should bring somebody from marketing onto

their team to help them. And. Are the marketing type

questions, right? So we have clarity, and again, super

detailed. Bring the marketing team, bring the person on board,

and then we get into testing and validation. And that's typically

the step that gets skipped first, right? Let's, so let's,

let's spend a little money. And I know it's tough when you're

getting started your solopreneur, you're not looking

at a lot of money left over. But let's spend a little money and

make sure money and make sure that we're going to get the

results that we want. And based on those responses, we can go

back and we can make some changes, or we can go forward

and build a plan to launch our product, or idea, our business,

our service. So the fourth step is plan, and it's a strategic

plan. It's not just, you know, let's do X, Y and Z things.

You're really what are the things are most important to do?

When to do it, who needs to do it? So your team is going to

change often, very frequently, through the process. And then

the last step is, is absolutely critical, and that's a change

management system, because you don't get to decide what comes

in the door tomorrow, right? Adversity shows up. You don't

get to decide when it shows up. You get to decide how you want

to respond, but if you're not paying attention, then you don't

notice the change in the first place. That means you can't

respond and you end off, off course and so frequently,

especially with a business, especially when you get started,

you need to have a weekly change management cadence in the

manufacturing world that I grew up in way back when, you know,

we're making big products a big manufacturing facility. And so

there'd be lots of people that say, Well, I wish it would do

this, or I wish it'd do that. Sales guys came in and said,

yeah, they wanted to change the product because the consumer

wants something a little bit different. But they couldn't

just willy nilly change everything. So they'd have a

change control board where, you know, whoever was looking for

the idea had to fill out all the information and go to the board,

and then they would, you know, decide whether they wanted to

accept that or not. I'm not saying that you need to change

control board as a solopreneur, but a system and a process that

reviews what you're doing, where you're going, on a frequency

basis, so that you don't end up off course. Yeah, those are the

five steps.

As folks hear that, there's kind of this

visceral reaction to that's five steps that I don't have time

for. So how do you start spinning that, that snowball, if

you will, in the right direction? Where can you use

these five steps to actually create time to do the five steps

right?

Well, okay, so create time. That's the first

objective. And for many of these solopreneurs, that is, without a

doubt, the first objective, and that's what I try to help them

do, because that's where they get a little breath, that's

where they can reduce a little stress. But we'll say, Okay,

well, let's bring on an assistant. Let's bring on a

virtual assistant, or let's find somebody that we can delegate

these things to. Well, a, they may not know how to do that, so

there's some training and coaching in that space. Or B,

they're like, I can't afford that. So okay, well, then, then

we got to figure out, how do we get more money into the system?

And you do a couple things, you can increase your sales

conversion rate, right? Get better at sales, but that just

means you have to sell more and that. So it takes more time to

sell more. That's not going to be as effective. The most

effective solution that I've found over 15 years is raise

your prices. Raise your prices so that you can afford to hire

an assistant. Now, most people say, Well, I can't do that. You

know, my competitors. And they'll give you some story. And

it's like, you know, here's the thing, there are seven

attributes. No, what is it? It's money is the seventh attribute

in the buying decision. So there are six other attributes that

are more important than money when it comes to making a buying

decision. We want to sell on value, we want to sell on

convenience. We want to sell on a lot of other things besides

price. Because we all make decisions to buy a better

quality product or better system. We don't naturally run

to the cheapest thing. We know better in many ways. Yeah, so

let's figure out how to raise your prices. Now. There's a

process for doing that. I don't think you could just, like, flip

a switch and double your rates, but there is, you know, you're

letting your customers know. You're letting the marketplace

know. It's a it's a message. But you know, if you could raise

your prices by 10 or 15% or 20% that probably pays for an

assistant. Now you got 20 hours that you can spend some more

time doing something else, and all of a sudden, now we're we

got the snowball going in a different direction.

Yeah, I love that. I love that the time value

of money is such a big deal. Was such a clever thing, because

most folks, especially in like professional services, are

charging too little, especially for the amount of time that

they're spending doing the work that they're doing this. Yeah,

what a great strategy there. There's another thing that comes

up, so let's say we've done it. Let's say we've got a little bit

of time, we've got an idea that we're ready to execute on, but

just saying we want to do it, and actually going out and doing

it are a couple different things, right? And and so

there's these stages to learning, and you've cited the

four different stages to learning. But how do you get

through that stage when you realize you have no. Idea what

you're doing.

Yeah. Okay, so stage one is what I think it about.

This is unconscious incompetence. Unconscious. I'm

not aware I'm incompetent. I don't even know what I'm unaware

about. And so what owners have to do founders is they have to

put themselves in positions to where they can get exposed to

net new information, net new ideas, net new concepts, on a

frequency basis. So that's not 40 hours a week. Maybe that's a

couple hours a week. Maybe you're at a conference, maybe

you're here. Maybe there's a lot of places where you can get

exposed to different information, different

information, and depending on what your idea is and what your

service is, maybe there's an association, maybe there's a

trade show. Maybe there's a couple different ways you could

do it, but you have to invest that time, or else you'll never

get the direction, the guidance that you're looking for. And

you're going to get exposed to hundreds of things. That doesn't

mean you need to do 100 things, right? Once you're exposed, now

you can make a decision, oh, out of those 100 things, I think

this one's interesting, and now it's in your control. So you

could decide whether you want to go do it, but you have to put

yourself in stuff. You know? The great example is AI, right? So

AI is just killing everybody right now, and it's been a

couple years, right? There were a lot of businesses that didn't,

weren't aware of the AI. Call it revolution, until the last six

months, and they're behind the curve. However, if you had put

yourself in a situation where you could be with people, learn

from technologists, you would have found out about a lot

sooner, and you would have started to figure out, hey, how

does this fit into my business sooner.

Right? Right? That's really important. I've

actually found that something that folks one of the reasons

why it's so underdeveloped and underutilized at this stage is

because we missed the need for it in the previous stage.

Everyone's in such a rush to get out there, start their business,

do the thing, hang the shingle, you know, bring in the revenue

that they don't take the time to set up that learning

environment, and they pay for it in the long run. Love the way

that you brought that, brought that back into the equation

here, because it's so easy to miss. But I've got a question

that I'm going to get to in just a moment. But one thing I want

to do before we get there is you talk about this idea of a

founder's trap, and our our listeners who, especially those

who tune into the show regular are overwhelmingly founders, and

this is something that I mean we all faced at some point in time.

So tell us, what is the founder's trap? How do we know

if we're in it, and what do we do to get out?

So the founders trap is a wonderful place to be, but

it also keeps you stuck. Means that you've found a niche, that

you've got a way to make money. It's consistent, it's

sustainable. Maybe you have a small team, and you're able to

manage all of that yourself, and you've got a consistent revenue

stream coming in. And some people, some founders, just say,

hey, look, this is fine. This is all I want. But some people want

something more than that. Well, now the question is, how do I

scale? Right? So how do I and there's two ways to scale. You

can scale with technology and you can scale with people, and

generally you're scaling with both. But now let's say you have

a team of five, and you can kind of watch over them on a frequent

basis. You know what they're doing. You can correct them,

etc, etc. But what happens if you want to go to a team of 20

you? I mean, you're not gonna be able to look over their shoulder

and watch, right? So now you have to, you have to bring in

some leaders, right? And so now you have to learn to lead, to

lead leaders. So when you want to scale, and when you bring

that extra people in, you're going to have to bring in

additional processes. You're going to have to be able to

teach them and train them and help them grow to the next

level. And so it's really systems and processes that are

associated with people and technology that allow us to

scale beyond that small founders space and like, say it's only a

trap because you're stuck there until you do something else.

Yeah, John, there's a question that I ask

all my guests, and I'm interested to see what you have

to say. And the question is this, what would you say is the

biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's

that one thing you wish everybody watching and listening

today knew?

Well, you know, it's a secret because most people

don't know it, but that doesn't mean nobody knows it. And I

think it's a two part secret. The first one is generosity.

Generosity goes a long way in many, many ways. I mean, it

covers a lot of errors. It covers a lot of mistakes. Covers

a lot of whoops, the idea is to be generous with your time and

your talent, and I would say your treasure, and that will

come back to you and your business in the long run.

Generosity always, always, always delivers better long term

results. And the second one that kind of goes along with that,

and this is where people get tangled up. You know, if they

have an employee that comes in and has an issue or a problem or

a grudge, or, you know, wants to change something, the owner

feels like they have to respond right away. And I wish everybody

would learn the art of the pause, which is to pause and

say, Hey, listen, I hear you. I understand. We need to have a

conversation about. About this, but now's not the right time. I

want to give it the time it deserves. Let's set some time

for this afternoon, or let me get back to you with a better

time, and so that stops you from spontaneously saying something

inaccurate or wrong or inflammatory. You know, it all

happens, right? If you have that pause, that little pause, then,

then you have the time to think through what's the right

response. There's a little bit of time between stimulus and

response. The better you use that time, the better results

you're going to have.

So true. It's so true. John, there's some

folks listening, and they want to know more. How can they find

out more about the work that you do? And where can I connect you

with you or get a copy of your book?

Well, the books on Amazon. It's called checkmate,

translating ideas into money. And if you search amazon.com,

forward slash author, forward slash, John Witt, you'll go

right to the page. My website is business wit it's a play on my

last name, businesswit.com so www.businesswit.com there are

places where you can see all the different tools and strategies

and things that we have. There's a lot of, I would say, free

stuff there too, and then there's certainly a Contact Us

space. So if you want to spend spend some time and have a

conversation, you can certainly do that. I'd be happy to do

that.

Fantastic, fantastic. Well, John, thanks

for being on the show today. Really was a privilege and honor

having you here. I really enjoyed this conversation, and

for those of you watching and listening, you know your time

and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out

of this episode as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you

next time. Take care.