This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes from Stephanie:
I have a striving set point. What happens is things go really well, I’m doing everything myself, it’s time to hire, so I hire an assistant—and then it’s like turning off the faucet. Clients dry up, someone wants a refund, and then I let the assistant go because I can’t pay them and myself. Then I build it back up doing everything myself, and it keeps happening over and over. It’s exhausting.
Let me ask you a question: What if you hired somebody and they were better than you?
I’d bet that you’re conscientious, responsible, you think highly of yourself—all qualities needed to be very successful. But you’ve probably had to do everything on your own your whole life. You’ve been the only one you can actually count on. So the growth path here is that you have to start to be able to trust people in order to expand what you really want.
I had this very same problem. It took me 7 years to hire my first salesperson, because I couldn’t let go of being the person who had to bring the money in. I didn’t trust anybody else. So this is a set point, but it’s more of a set point based on how you think about yourself.
When you hire somebody, what emotion do you feel? Why do you shut down your ability to attract new clients when you hire somebody? If you’re not having this problem before you hire, and every time you hire you have this problem, your energy is completely shifting when you hire someone. And the perfect excuse is “we don’t have the money to pay for the person.”
So the idea is to push past that specific area. It’s like, I refuse to let somebody go based on the idea that I can’t pay for them. I will earn the money no matter what. You have to push past that barrier, and you have to want to do it instead of using it as an excuse. That’s part of the problem with set points—it’s always the perfect excuse, the exact excuse you need to align with, that causes you to back off.
How much more of a sale would you need to make to replace someone’s salary? Probably one more client? There you go. That’s it. Just one. Start there—just one client to pay that person—and then you’ll start to break through.
