Growing a Business Doesn’t Have to Suck

Why hustle culture actually costs your company

00:00Announcer: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:26Bill Gallagher: Growing your business is hard work, but it doesn't have to suck. It doesn't have to feel like a grind. That whole hustle and grind culture and stuff, that lean in business, yeah, it's kind of BS. And it actually ends up costing your company and your team a great deal. I'll share some stories. I'll tell you what I'm talking about, what I mean.

00:47Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up podcast. So here's the story. Actually, I'll tell you a couple stories. But the first one is really this one. I, in the period of growing my company years ago when my kids were 11 and 13, realized with my wife that it was the time that we said that we were going to take long trips. And I spent a month in Italy with the family, and I wasn't on the phone and in meetings every day remotely trying to manage my business. So in a time of high growth, I took the family and we went to Italy, and we had a fabulous, fabulous time for a whole month, which, you know, for North Americans, for people in the United States, is a remarkable accomplishment to get away for a whole month without dialing in remotely. And I did that, and it made my company stronger.

Taking a month in Italy made the business stronger

01:40Bill Gallagher: So at a critical time in our family life, in the life of our kids and raising them and that kind of thing, and a critical time in the business and growing, I got both. I got yes and. And, you know, that's like a precious, precious thing that you never get back. When your kids are that age, right, before they hate you and they're old enough to remember it, like doing a massive trip. So we drove all around Italy and we got a sailboat and we went sailing with the kids around some of the islands out of Naples, and we had a fabulous time. Went all over the place and they talk about it to this day now, you know, more than ten years later. And, you know, it's such a precious time to get. And here's the interesting thing. It wasn't done at a cost of business. It actually made my business stronger. How is that?

02:34Bill Gallagher: Well, we had a plan and a vision, and we were tracking on big goals, and we did annual strategy sessions, and we did quarterly and mid-year plans, and we had daily huddles, and we had dashboards, and we had KPIs and we did all kinds of most of the things from Scaling Up. Right? That's where I learned it. We applied it in prior companies. So we had all of those things except there was still me in the way I led the business and the way that I related to the business. But I am by nature, I want to make things fun. I want to find a way to play with it, not to suffer things. And so I saw this thing about our kids and our family that was important to us, and I went to work on it. It took me about nine, ten months.

Ask questions instead of solving their problems

03:19Bill Gallagher: So when we saw it, the thing that I had to deal with to bring the fun into our lives and our business in this case and what made us stronger is that I started encouraging people to solve their own problems. And I'd used all kinds of little reminders for myself to make the shift, but when people came into my office, as people come into our offices as business leaders, and they brought a problem to me, hey, I'm struggling with this, I need some help with that, I stopped solving it for them. And instead, I asked them, well, what do you think about that? And what ideas do you have? And what could you do about it? And what do you think the best course of action is? So instead of solving problem, I started coaching them to solve their own problems. I started asking them what ideas they had, how they would approach it, what their concerns and considerations were, where they were stuck, what resources they might need. Like, I started working all that. So I was not carrying all the weight myself, which would make the business and the challenges suck. I was pushing it out to them. In the process, they were also being empowered and developed as leaders in their own right. So my whole leadership team got better at solving their own problems. They got more confident. They got more satisfied in their ability to do things. They were prouder of themselves. So the business got stronger and I got better as a leader by not doing so much, by not hustling and leaning in and grinding it out, by going home a little earlier.

Get a hobby and compartmentalize your time

04:48Bill Gallagher: I also started to do, actually, before then, I started doing triathlons. Right? Get a hobby is also a powerful thing to do. Busy yourself with something besides work. It'll make you enrich your life. It can give you more fun, but it also gives you thinking time, time out of the office, separation. There are benefits if it's physical or mental and some other activities besides just being absorbed in your business. Too many people say that your business can just suck every minute and every bit of your energy in the day, and that can make it a total grind, can make it suck, but it doesn't have to. If you resist that. Right? If you lean that, I learned this idea mostly from Dan Sullivan, the idea of compartmentalizing my week and day into different places and reserving a little time for play, for exercise, for romance, for, like, all these other things. Right? These are the kinds of things, resisting the pull of your business to just suck you in and make your life suck. And then it started into every other thing. So how do we run our day with our daily huddles, with our rituals around birthdays and other people events, celebrating quarterly wins, annual wins, the way we did our strategy and planning sessions. We didn't just do them in an ugly old conference room. We went to a nice hotel or to a resort or some other place. We got out. We changed the perspective. I do this today with my clients. We do lots of them by the beach or with a view of the ocean. We do them on the lake up at Lake Tahoe. We pick great places to find the fun and inspiration in what we're doing in the way that we're running our business.

Problems are inevitable but suffering is optional

06:31Bill Gallagher: So look, through all of this and through my clients, it's hard. We've learned and been taught culturally and otherwise that if you want to accomplish something big, you're going to have to make big sacrifices and that your life's going to have to suck and it's going to cost you your relationships and your family and your health. I heard a guy talking about that really recently. Nonsense. That's when you're doing it wrong. If it's costing you your relationships and your family and your health and other kinds of things to grow your business, you're doing it wrong. Right? Get a coach. Get somebody who helps you, who advises you to find some fun in it, to find some perspective, to bring some balance back to your life. It'll make for a better business. It'll make for a better team. It'll make for better you with more thoughtful, creative decisions. So stop overcomplicating things. Stop working too hard on it. Get everybody working along with you. Pull out of it. Get some perspective. Get some other influences in your life. Get a hobby. Exercise more. Meditate.

07:43Bill Gallagher: Right? Find some ways to step away from the business, to lean back, to lean out. It can actually make you and the business much, much stronger. Now, look, there will be inevitable breakdowns. There will be upsets. There will be emergencies. There will be painful events. There will be disappointments. People will rip you off or factories will burn. Like, things happen. Like, inevitably, there is some pain. There are emergencies. There are problems and difficulties in growing your business.

08:18Bill Gallagher: Here's the deal though. It's the suffering that's optional. You don't have to carry all the load and you don't have to suffer it. Suffering comes when you carry it all alone and you resist it. So look, something happens. A terrible thing happens in your business. So what there is to do is to lean into it, to choose it, to embrace the problem. All right. This is the problem that I have to deal with today. Having to deal with problems of growing a business is a high quality set of problems. It's much different or a higher order standard of problems than if you're trying to figure out where to sleep tonight or what to eat. Right? If you're just trying to deal with your basic things, that's a much lower order set of problems.

09:01Bill Gallagher: Solving huge company problems, even ones that threaten your company, is a very high order, and you should be grateful for that set of problems. And you should lean into them, choose them, embrace them wholeheartedly. There is no better person to tackle these problems than me and my team. So it's not all on you, it's your team, which includes not only your employees, but key contractors, business partners, suppliers. That's your whole team. And together, you'll solve the problem. So if you've got some massive economic problem or other kind of thing, open up, rely on people, welcome the support and partnership of people. I've had suppliers and bankers, vendors in my world who have helped me through all manner of it. And again and again, it's true of our clients, the companies that we work with, people like you.

Be coachable and stop doing it alone

09:51Bill Gallagher: And then finally, like, be coachable. Stop trying to do it on your own and figure it out on your own. Open up. Tell your coach. Tell your advisors. Tell your team what you're dealing with. Tell them where you're stuck, where you don't have any more ideas. Right? From all of this will come all manner of ideas, assistance, resources, partnering. Right? And that there will be real joys. And then when you overcome these things, like conquering a mountaintop, you can celebrate. You can celebrate on the top. You could celebrate once you get to the bottom. Right? Like, growing your business has many, many moments of challenge. The way you accept, embrace those challenges, the way you tackle those challenges makes all the difference in the fun and the satisfaction, the accomplishment of it, and reducing the suffering. So your business and growing your business doesn't have to suck.

10:37Bill Gallagher: All of that suffering is optional and it's all about the way that you hold it and then you relate to it and the way that you operate. And if you change your habits, right? And so talk to your spouse, talk to your friends, talk to—get a coach, talk to some peers, expand your approaches to the way that you've been trying to grow your business, and there'll be an awful lot of reward to that. There's a great deal of satisfaction. Maybe take your family on a great vacation. Maybe spend more time with something that you love to do, a hobby that you gave up long ago when you got busy with your business. Right? Reclaim that thing. Have lots of interests. Those can only make you a better business person if you do them and manage it all responsibly.

11:24Bill Gallagher: I hope that's been helpful for you. It's certainly something that's guided my life and I bring it to all of our clients all the time that growing your business doesn't have to suck so much that it can be fun. If you will lean into the challenge, embrace them, but not carry all of the load on your own and doing it in your own way, and if you'll have some outside influences, some things that make you more fun, happier, more balanced person, that doesn't get in the way of growing your business. Trust me. Take my word for it. I've worked with thousands of companies now around the world for many, many years, and it's true. It works. It doesn't have to suck. If it's sucking for you right now, give us a call.

12:03Bill Gallagher: And to that end, if you'd like to come and get on a workshop and share your present challenges, that kind of thing, your growth goals with me, I do workshops every month. I bring some to some groups, so that's possible if you've got a group. Or you could come to one of the public workshops that I run. I can run them on Zoom. I run them in person. You'll find all of those and more at scalingcoach.com as well as the 600 or so episodes of this show that we have with tips and lessons and interviews and conversations with people about business growth. Making the whole process easier and more fun is something that I'm deeply committed to. Thanks again to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework that is the core of our work, and the folks at Story On that produce our show and bring this show to you every week. So like it, subscribe, turn on your notifications where you're getting this right now. And then go to scalingcoach.com if you would like to join us in one of our workshops or know about our coaching programs. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to again next time. Until then, keep scaling.

13:03Announcer: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.