8 Ways to Escape The Middle Class

is a place for business and let's dive in! Are the hard truths for business owners about escaping the middle class trap and actually becoming wealthy. I know this because as a millionaire entrepreneur, I work with real business owners every day and they're stuck still grinding like employees. These are the hard truths that separate the millionaires from the burnouts. The first truth is that if you own a business, it actually owns you. Have you ever thought about what

happens if you get hit by a bus? I know this is a little bit morbid, and you might be in the hospital and quite a bit of pain, but if you think about your business and what happens there, if you got hit by a bus, do you still make revenue? Do your team members still know what to do? Would your customers freak out because they weren't getting serviced? What would happen if you no longer were able to be there? That principle is how you should choose to

run your business every single day. The creation of systems and processes have to be your priority because you could get hit by a bus. Now, I don't wish this on anybody, but it's a reality. Something bad could happen, but even better than something bad happening. Is something good happening, like taking a vacation? Wouldn't it be nice if you could step away from your business and have it run, and have it continue to grow and not have it slip backwards, all because you actually knew how to set

up your business correctly. My simple trick for making processes effectively is recording what you do every day. So if you are on a call with clients and you know how to close the deal, record the call. If you are putting together some spreadsheet and making updates to what

expenses you paid, record that entire process. When you record the most important things that you do when you bring new people on, it's very easy to get them up to speed because they can watch how you do it on two times speed and have a full process in place without it taking you any more time. The next truth is that your business may be making you money, but it's not making you wealthy if it's dependent upon you. So many business owners get stuck on this hamster wheel

of increasing revenue, increasing profit. They're focused on growth, growth, growth, growth. But if the growth is dependent upon you, it doesn't matter. True wealth is not created from you being in the operations. Wealth is created through you owning something that's valuable. But if your time, your resources, your energy are focused and part of a valuable thing, you're stuck in it. Which means that you can't sell it, you can't exit it.

And that's not creating wealth. It's just generating money. That brings us to truth number three. You're not actually focused on the real game. The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make chasing short term cash instead of structuring their business for long term value. Adding another million dollars in revenue this year is great, but you want to know what's better? Building

something that is worth ten times in an exit. Have you really sat down and thought about, hmm, if I was to sell my business, what would be valuable about my business and how it's run in an exit? If you're not planning for the exit today, this is what happens. You eventually decide that you want to exit, but by the time you decide you want to exit, you haven't put the systems and processes in place and you haven't created the story, the valuable story that a future potential

investor would be interested in would be captivated by. In order to pay more for your business. If your revenue goes up and down based off of how you choose to run your business, let's say one year you decide to take a six week long vacation and you know that your revenue plummets that year. Well, when an investor is looking at that over the course of a three year span, you're thinking, man, I got my revenue back up the next year. But they are going to see

instantly when it took a dive. And then they're going to ask a really smart question, which is why did I take a dive? And you're going to know, shoot, it's because I took a vacation. It's because I stopped working as hard, which to the investor instantly tells them, oh, this business is dependent upon this person. Therefore, I'm either going to have to structure a nice long burnout so that you keep working in the business. Or I'm going to discount the value of this business because it's not

worth that much if you leave. Neither one of these are great solutions. So what do you do instead? You switch your perspective to knowing that everything that you do in your business is creating a story for your exit. It doesn't matter if you're not exiting for ten years or 15 years from now. The story is being created through the financial impact. So the way that you make decisions and the products and services that you create cannot be dependent upon you. They have to be bigger than you.

They have to be outside of you so that you can create true value. Next up is truth number four. You're focused on the wrong things. You have to shift your focus from making more money to keeping more value. The biggest winners in business aren't the ones who make the most. They're the ones who keep and reinvest the most. Your top line revenue means nothing if you are bleeding cash on bloated overhead, bad tax strategies, and inefficient systems. And this is why I am obsessed with systems and

team efficiencies. The most successful business owners I know don't just make money, they know how to protect their money. One of the most painful mistakes that I see business

owners make is they start making money. And when they start making money, they start to think, oh, I have a lot of money, which is cool in that moment for them, because they buy the fancy car, they start spending more money on their lifestyle, but all of a sudden they're defocused and now they're not doing what they used to do in order to generate money, and they're not doing what they used to do. They don't have

excess capital to reinvest in the business. So then the business eventually stays steady and stops growing, and it might even decline because of the lack of focus on the business now. And so they find themselves in this problem where they had capital and they could have used the capital in order for them to fuel operations in order to fuel their growth, but instead they get distracted. Do not make this mistake. Do not get distracted. When you

finally start making money, tell yourself that you're broke. Just say I'm broke. I can't touch this money. I'm broke. This money needs to stay in the business so I can reinvest in the right hires, in the right systems, in the right education for me to know what to do next so that I can fuel the next round of growth. Do not bleed out your business by spending a bunch of money when you're finally making money. Next up is number five, which is a personal favorite of mine.

Why would you chase growth when you can buy it instead? Because the fastest way to ten-x your business growth is to buy the growth through mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. When you think about Jeff Bezos and what he did at Amazon, do you remember how he grew it? Was it through campaigns and all of this internal effort, or did he

buy entire industries? Think about Whole Foods. What about Zappos? See, Amazon grew through acquisitions, not just traditional marketing, traditional organic strategies, and one brick by brick building this business, you can grow quickly through acquiring other businesses and the biggest businesses do not scale just by working harder. Yes, they do

work hard, but they also work smart. And the smart move is to start looking at acquiring your competitors or creating a joint venture where you can connect with somebody who has something that you don't have. Because remember that organic growth can be very slow and it traditionally is very expensive. When you have this mindset where you're going to switch into a different game, you're going to think

about how is my competition? Not somebody that I need to, like, beat up, but somebody that I could align with or a potential partner that has a complementary business that has existing clients, existing leads that you could leverage, or maybe even a deal that comes from someplace that you might not be currently looking that could multiply your revenue. You're starting to think smart, and you also are working hard.

These are my two favorite things to be. I'm going to be a hard worker, but I'm also going to work very smart. And I'm going to add revenue and strategic ways. One of our favorite sayings at Cardinal Ventures is collaboration. Is the new currency. There is no reason in this day and age to not be collaborating with people. If you're not collaborating with people, that might be a little bit of an ego situation that you got going on, because there's no shortage of opportunities. And the fastest way

to do something is to collaborate. But if you want to do it all by yourself, that is the slow way. That is the hard way. And it takes the longest, which actually might increase your chances of failing. Why wouldn't you just collaborate and increase your chances of actually being successful? That brings us to number six. Your industry will not look the same in five years from now. So if you're not reinventing, acquiring, or diversifying, you're going to get

left behind. The number one piece of advice I give to business owners is do it scared. The market doesn't care how hard you've worked. It only cares about who adapts the fastest. How are you leveraging AI? How are you adapting your customer service models? Your ability to generate leads based off of the market today? Do you spend a lot of time doing this if you don't as

a business owner in 2025. I promise you, you are going to get left behind because all of a sudden we are going to wake up in a world in 2035 where things look very different. And if you get ahead of this, you can be a part of the growth. If you decide to hang back and to say, I'm already doing too much, I'm already overwhelmed. I can't take anything new on. You're going to find yourself in a very difficult position in a matter of ten years from now.

So depending on where your lifespan is and what your career is and what you're looking to do with your business, I would hop on these things now. It would be like the person who decided only to advertise in yellow pages back in the day and not learn anything about the internet. The internet was coming. They could have been buying Google AdWords, but instead they put all of their money into Yellow Pages because it was working. It was trusted,

it was what everybody was doing. But fast forward today, that would be a waste of money. There would be no real reason to invest your hard earned marketing dollars into Yellow Pages. Why the internet exists. Social media exists. Google exists. So don't think of this time right now, especially if you're having some success, as I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing because the world is changing and is changing rapidly. How are you getting in front of AI? If you haven't done this already, I

would recommend you type this prompt into ChatGPT. Based on my business that does x, how should I start today to leverage AI across my operations and build me a three month roadmap for how I would integrate AI to make my business more effective and ahead of the curve.

And you are going to watch this magical list of things unfold about how specific roles can use AI, about how your processes can be optimized, and it is going to be the launchpad for you to start thinking about how you re-engineer the way that your business does work. And don't be scared of it. Ask it follow up questions so that you can use it. You can partner with it to help you get ahead of this because it's coming regardless, so you might as well make it

your best friend. That brings us to the final truth, which is to really know who you're building this business for. Is it for yourself or is it for others? You might have originally started your business because you were escaping something. You were running away from a job that you didn't like, and you just decided to create a business as an alternative?

That is awesome. Congratulations on being an entrepreneur. But it can't stop there because as a business owner, there are a lot of people who are depending upon you and there is a significant amount of responsibility that you have. And if you're not taking into consideration all of the people who depend on you to have a plan, then you are being very irresponsible. Your plan for how you

exit your business. Your plan for how you set your business up for success directly impacts the people who trust you. So when you think about who you're building this business for, I hope you choose yourself and others. You choose the life that you want to live, the income that you want to create, the impact that you want to have, while also choosing to build a great business for the purpose of impacting other people, both your customers and your

team members. If your business can't survive without you, you are not protecting any of these people and you're actually putting them at risk. You have to remember to make sure every single day that the decisions that you make, the products that you create, the services that you have, can run without you. This is the only way that you actually build wealth and escape the trap of the

middle class. I get why this is challenging. It's challenging because today you have to prioritize what you need to do in the future. All while today it feels like things are on fire. As a business owner, I get it. There are problems, there are challenges. There are things that go wrong every single day that feel like you have to put your energy and attention on them. Without that, it feels like maybe your business won't even exist in six months from now, much less in five years from now.

I get the difficulty, but here's the reality you can build your business for the future while still solving problems for today. And it is just a simple mindset shift. You have to have a plan. You have to have a strategy. You have to know what is valuable in a business and start taking those actions, such as putting processes in place, creating clarity on your products and services and how somebody sells them without you even involved. These simple things help set your business up for success and

allow it to grow. And you are going to be amazed at your ability to step out of your business once you start building everything with this frame of mind. If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely not want to miss out on my new newsletter. It just dropped. I just started creating this content and I am obsessed. Every single week in your inbox I'm going to send you business. And which is exactly what it

sounds like. How do you fit business and all of the other things in your life so that you are up to speed on fashion, beauty, wellness, all things that really matter. If you want to subscribe and get this special gift and weekly treat in your inbox, go to Cartoon Ventures.