3 Bottlenecks That Keep You Stuck at $100K

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, episode 169.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach, and then on to multiple six figures as a fulltime money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. I want you to know that I got goosebumps as I was recording that intro that this is episode 169 because that means next week is episode 170, and that means that I'm closer to 200 episodes than I am to 100 episodes. Now I know that might be obvious, but there's something about the 160s, which still kind of feels like 150s, which kind of feels like 100s.

But now it's mind blowing to me that I've been recording this podcast for nearly three and a half years, consistently every single week. And it really has a huge reach. There have been over 30,000 downloads of this podcast in the last three and a half years. And I really see how consistency matters and how consistency compounds over time to create growth. And it is so much in alignment. It's so congruent with the message that I have to share with you today.

Now, before we jump into today's podcast episode, I want to remind you that as this episode is dropping, it is also the last day of the masterclass that I'm running From Burnout to Making Bank. And it has definitely been the theme that I've been discussing on the podcast and in this masterclass about how you, as the CEO of your business, can extricate yourself from the business.

We're gonna be talking about bottlenecks today and really compound and explode your growth. They talk about quantum leaps in the industry, but really when you can get yourself out of the day to day, and we're gonna talk about specifically how to do that so that you can scale your business, then making money becomes easier. It's not that you can sit on the beach and drink margaritas and eat bonbons, but you just have a different way of operating in your business and that's when your income starts to grow, multiply and really scale.

If you haven't been part of the masterclass, you can still join us today and you can get the replays. If you listen to this podcast episode after we have already finished the masterclass, you can buy the masterclass separately and you can listen to the replays. The feedback has already been amazing.

One of my clients said, "This has given me time away from the day to day in my business so I could actually sit and think like a CEO and strategize about my next steps for 2025." So if you are listening on the day of the masterclass, then go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/makebank and join us today and you will get the two previous replays as well. They're all individual modules. They definitely do connect from one to the next, but you can join us today and then you can go back to day one and day two. And if it's afterwards, send me an email, Debbie@DebbieSassen.com and my team and I will make sure that you get access to the replays.

All right, so now let us jump into today's episode. What exactly does it mean that you are the bottleneck in your business? And if your business has grown to the point where you're making about $100,000, maybe even more, sometimes even less depending on your business structure, but you know that you're running out of hours in the day and you probably feel like you're running around, like chasing your tail all the time.

Now, for me in my business, it actually took me till about $200,000 of income. And part of the reason why it took me to $200,000, that kind of sounds weird saying that, but I already had an assistant working with me. So I wasn't doing all of the admin tasks in my business, but I was working with 21 one-on-one clients, my income was over $200,000, and there was just no more room to add one-on-one clients.

And you will know when you are changing, exchanging time for money and you just don't have any more time in your calendar, that it is time for you to grow and to scale and to implement a leveraged business model. You'll notice when you're thinking like, "I'm working so hard, I'm doing all the things and my income isn't growing," that's another reason. So you're either, you're burnt out as we're talking about in the masterclass, you just feel like you're always running around, chasing your tail, you're stretched so thin. And what I would like to encourage you to do, depending on where you are in your income, is to start taking steps before you reach that like chokehold place where you just don't have any more time to give and start implementing measures and bringing people onto your team so that you can scale without as much frustration, burnout, feeling pulled to the max. And that's why I was able to continue the one-on-one model, continue making sure that I had a waiting list for my offers before I actually scaled to a group program.

So you will probably get stuck at some point. And I don't want you to think that this is you doing business wrong. I am 100% in favor of you going out and making client acquisition your number one priority until you get to about the, you know, even at the $50,000 income, when you start seeing that there is a consistent flow of income, it doesn't mean every day, it doesn't even mean every week you're getting a new client, but if you sort of blow out the calendar and you're like, oh, I can see that over time my income has been increasing and I am at about that $50,000 income point, maybe 70, maybe 80 for you, it is time for you to bring people onto your team who can take some of the admin work off of you, some of the work that you are not uniquely wired to do.

And if you wait too long because you're afraid, you're like, oh my gosh, but what happens if my income dries up? What happens if I don't get any more clients? That fear cycle that you being in scarcity is absolutely going to cap your income. You're going to plateau because there just aren't enough hours in the day and in the week for you to continue to grow a scalable leveraged business.

So if you're believing that you just have to do more, you can't outsource, you can't delegate, you can't even automate. And automation, by the way, takes time. Ask me, I'm in the middle of doing it right now as we speak. But if you're thinking that you have to do everything, it is absolutely going to cap your income. Unless of course, you're gonna move to an income model where you're gonna show up for one hour and charge like $10,000.

Now there are people who do that and they can make a beautiful six, seven figure income charging extremely high fees. Again, it's not scalable. It's not gonna be a leveraged business model. And if you can get a super high consulting fee for the work you do, that might be perfect for you and the way you want to run your business. 

But most people are not gonna be running their business, charging $10,000 an hour, $50,000 an hour, or very, very large numbers like that. So I just want you to have a little bit of a mindset shift about how you think about your business so that you stop thinking like a freelancer, you stop thinking like a solopreneur who solo, right, you do everything. 

And now if you want to lead your business, you want to be a business that can leverage, you can increase your income. Now is the time that you have to think about your business from a leadership standpoint. You are the CEO and your business needs to be able to grow without you doing everything. 

If you're doing everything from washing the dishes to doing, you know, the floors and cleaning the toilets, and if you're working from home, that actually might be the real thing you're doing. Although, thank heavens, I do have a wonderful cleaning lady. She's been with me for probably almost 10 years. Anyway, I digress, but you cannot do everything in your business and you have your zone of genius and what you have been uniquely wired to do. 

So if you find yourself, you're always doing the marketing and the selling and the serving and the marketing and the selling and the serving, and you kind of can feel this hamster wheel cycle, your revenue can be fluctuating. There can be inconsistencies on a monthly basis, but over the year it's pretty good. 

Now it's time to think about how you can take yourself out of some of the things you do in the business so that you stop trading your time for money. And you want to shift to either, like if you're in a coaching business like I am, or you're in the healing business, you're something, you know, that works, someone who works with one-on-one specifically with clients where you're helping your clients get the transformation that they're looking for.

Now you can see how you can scale to a one-to-many model that's working with groups, working with a mastermind. If you're a creative or you can be an accountant, you can be a lawyer, how can you run an office, how Can you run an agency? So again, you are the CEO, your agency or your firm provides accounting. Your firm provides legal work. Your firm provides creative design, branding.

So when you pull yourself out of the day-to-day and the working with clients, that is the way that you are able to leverage your business. It allows you to earn more money without you increasing the hours that you're working in your business.

So think about your business right now. What do you need to shift in order to get yourself out of that one-to-one space? What do you need to shift in order to get yourself out of that one-to-one space? What do you need to shift in order to start exchanging that time for money model to being a one-to-many model?

And then the third thing that keeps you stuck in that sort of, let's say a $100K ceiling in your business where you're the bottleneck, is that you keep reinventing the wheel. Rather than looking at new things that you wanna bring in, new offers that you wanna have, you have a great idea.

If you're a CEO, if you're an entrepreneur, most of us get into this work because our brains are very creative. And we don't just wanna do the work that maybe a boss told us to do back in the day when we were working in a corporate office, we were working nine to five.

And hey, as I'm recording this, I'm in my socks, my nice, warm, fuzzy winter socks. I love showing up to work in bare feet in the summer, socks or Uggs in the winter. And I don't wanna go into any office where somebody's gonna tell me that I have to put on shoes.

I think people actually these days don't necessarily have to wear shoes in the office, but I wanna wear my socks or go barefoot when I want to. So think about what you're offering in your business and stop creating new offers every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Focus on what's working and do fewer things in your business and what you're doing, do it better so that you don't have to keep being like a new person, a new offer. If it was working already, that means that there are more people out there in the world who want what you're offering. Don't go creating something new. 

If for example, you are a weight loss coach, don't start creating personal training videos because you think that your weight loss clients want videos on how they can lift weights. Leave that to the personal trainers and you double down on weight loss, helping your clients and talk about that and focus on that. 

Similarly, if you are a copywriter and you love writing and until now you have been doing copywriting for law firms and accountants and you have also been working with coaches and creatives with their business, focus double down on the work that you are really, really good at. Will you get clients from outside of your niche area? Of course you will because people will see you as skilled and talented. But if there is a kind of work that you love to do and you're really good at it, and you are already standing out from the crowd, do that and do it better so you become the go-to person in your field. 

All right, let's talk about bottleneck number two. We talked about bottleneck number one, which is the one-to-one model rather than the scalable offer that you can have. Number two is that you are stuck in short-term thinking. And we kind of alluded to this before when you're always marketing, selling, signing new clients, delivering marketing, selling, signing new clients. 

But let's expand the definition of short-term thinking to think about you having a growth plan, right? You actually have to think about your business from a long-term perspective, a two-year perspective, a three-year perspective, a four-year perspective, and really think about where you're taking your business. You don't wanna get stuck in the month-to-month, always throwing spaghetti at the wall, always like shooting from the hip and just like throwing things out into the world. Once you have people who love you, they're working with you, they know you, you are getting known in your industry for the kind of work you do, now it's time for you to think more broadly. And part of your growth plan is going to make sure that you have a cash reserve on the side for fluctuating income, number one. And number two, as you shift your business model, people might be used to working with you one-on-one and now you're offering groups or you might have an agency where somebody is working underneath you. 

It might take time, not necessarily, but maybe for you to be able to sell your new offer. Even having like a paralegal, let's say do some of your work when your clients are used to you as the lawyer in your office doing all the work, might be a little bit jarring to some of those clients who are used to working with you and only you. 

So think about having money in reserve for your scaling. Also, if you're taking somebody on in your business, just practically speaking, you need to be paying that person who you brought onto your team before some of the cash has come in. 

So think about your growth plan long-term. Where are you taking your business? And I love to think in three year time periods. It's very hard for your brain to go beyond that, like four, five, 10 years. It might be nice, but it's very fuzzy. There are gonna be a lot of detours along the way. 

So I like to stick to a three year growth plan and think about where my business will be in three years from now, and then back it up to what I need in terms of money in cash reserves, the hires that I need, the systems, the processes, the automations that I need for my business as I grow and scale. 

And then part of your work as the CEO is to look at the data so that you're making data-driven decisions instead of reactive decisions. What happens is, and I've seen this from people that get stuck at the $100K mark, is all of a sudden there's a slowdown in clients and then they're going out with a quick offer, a fast action offer. 

And again, there's nothing wrong with it. If you want to get some cash into your business, that's a beautiful way to run your business. I wanna make sure that your business survives for the long term.

And if it needs cash, listen, we all know stores that are doing end of season sales and all of a sudden they're having a seasonal sale, something new, something extra to keep cash flowing in the business, that's a beautiful thing. But you don't want to be the business that is always relying on quick cash injections. So think long-term about what your business needs and look at the data. So rather than reacting to what's going on, you are responding to both the seasonality of your business, you're responding to shifts in the marketplace, and you are leading your business by responding or being proactive rather than reactive in your business.

Number three, this is the third bottleneck. And again, we've alluded to this because these themes run through everything in terms of the way you run your business, but it often happens that you, as the CEO, as the leader of your business, you're not leading. You are doing everything. You are in the trenches. You're making all the decisions, solving every problem, answering all the questions of your team. And in order to grow, you have to be able to take yourself out. You have to be able to delegate to your team members.

You have to have people who are doing the bookkeeping for you, if you're not running a bookkeeping business. If you're running your own bookkeeping business, have somebody on your team do it. But you need someone to do your invoicing, your billing, your interfaces with your clients. If there's a question, there is a credit card, you know, either a default or the credit card was hacked. So somebody has to go back to the client to get new credit card details. Somebody needs to upload your videos to a membership portal or up to YouTube or Vimeo, wherever you're housing your videos.

Somebody needs to be, you know, working on your podcast. Shout out to Digital Freedom Productions, who's doing the podcast production. They are part of my team for my podcast production. I'm not doing everything myself, and it's really kind of a black box. I record to you guys, and then I press a button and poof, it ends up all over the interwebs, and that is such a beautiful thing. And I have two different assistants, also in a business, one of them in Israel and one of them outside of Israel, who are helping me and supporting my team with the billing and invoicing and some of the client-facing work, and then also with some of my Instagram and social media and part of the tech work on my membership platform. So you have to take yourself out of always doing the day to day so that you can work with your clients so that you can be thinking about your business so you can be planning your business. 

And one thing that will keep you stuck forever in that one-to-one model is not taking time out as the CEO. Your CEO, you, needs a CEO day. And I'm not talking about the day that you go and you have a massage and you go have acupuncture and you go and just enjoy a spa day. That is a 100% like you taking care of yourself self-care day. But the CEO needs a day to think about the business and plan for the business as the CEO, where you open up your calendar and you look at what's happening next month, what's happening in three months from now, what's happening at the end of the year, what can I be offering, what can I be selling, what can I be promoting, what does my business need? 

You also need to take time out as the CEO to put systems and processes in place, to write your SOPs. By the way, one thing that you can do is you can have your assistant write the SOPs for what they do in your business, and then you can review it. Because it might've been a year or two or even six months since you've done it. So when you have your assistant write down and you'll be like, oh, here's a place where I can actually add something to what my assistant is doing so that I don't need to do it. 

And you might've forgotten, especially if you already have people on your team, but I highly recommend that you write down from, you know, during the course of your day, take a highlighter, take one of those yellow highlighters and highlight the tasks that you can outsource to somebody else. Or highlight the task that you want to be creating a Zapier automation for so that it can be done without you being involved.

It's just a press of a button, and then voila, something happens without you being there and managing every minute of the day. So in order to lead your business and shift from doing all the things, right, you need to be that business owner. You need repeatable systems. You need SOPs, standard operating procedures. You need the right support.

As I said, I have, you know, I've just mentioned three different supports that I have in my business, my podcast production team, and two different virtual assistants, each of whom works part-time, and she has specific tasks that she does in my business. These are strategic hires that I have made to move my business forward so that I can serve you, my clients, better.

And now, as I'm elevating my business, I'm going to go back and review. I said in the beginning, I'm doing some automation so that I can more easily produce content for the podcast and social media. And yes, it does involve ChatGPT, my new business bestie. I love ChatGPT. If you're not yet using it, you really have to get on there and use it as a brainstorming partner, if nothing else. But we're gonna be actually be doing some deeper work with ChatTPT in 2025, it's already in the works.

But you need people on your team that can help you so that you can do the work that G-d gave you to do in the world. You have this mission, right? You have your zone of genius, and you wanna stay in that zone of genius so you don't have to spend your days fighting fires.

So think about your CEO time, you as a CEO. This is non-negotiable. I think that you need at least one day a month and you probably need two, maybe three, maybe even once a week where you can sit down and you can think strategically long-term about your business.

But strategy isn't enough. It needs to be implemented. This is why you might need more than one CEO day. It could be that the first of the month, you sit down and you have your strategy day. Now you can also do implementation on that day, depending on how many hours you block out, but it could be the next day or the next week, there is time for you to actually execute and implement.

So these aren't projects that are sitting on a Google Doc that actually never get done. But if you really want to grow your business, you must take time out of the client facing work. And I include marketing and selling in the client facing work. But you really need to focus on where you're going and who you need to be as the CEO of your business in order to run this larger operation.

All right, friends, let's go back and recap on everything we discussed in this episode because it is very actionable if you actually take the time to action what we've talked about. So we've talked about you getting stuck as the bottleneck in your business and you will absolutely know the feeling, the constraint that you feel that you're under when you are the bottleneck in your business. And it happens because you're doing everything or almost everything.

Number one, you're trading time for money and you shift that by thinking about how you can scale your agency, your office, your practice, or your coaching business, healing business, going from one-on-one to one-to-many.

The next thing that gets in the way is that you're always scrambling and you don't have any long-term strategy. So take that CEO day, put it in your calendar and do not let any one-on-one clients have that day. That is the Holy of Holies, in other words, in a sacred way, right? That is the Holy of Holies of your business. You need to be focusing on the long term of your business and actually planning it out.

Once you've planned it out, you need to have leadership. You are the leader. You need to have systems. You need to stop micromanaging everything, and you need to have really strategic hires in your business. Don't just go get a warm body, someone with a pulse, someone's like sister who is looking for a job. Find someone who actually has the skill set that you don't have, like that is not your unique wiring. Somebody has the wiring that's different from you. Somebody who loves details, loves to be detail-oriented, and she would be the perfect addition to your team, or he would be the perfect addition to your team.

You're growing an empire, you're growing a legacy business. Don't settle for someone who just seems to be a good fit. Find the right fit for your business and go out there in the world.

And once you've taken this time, once you've taken this time to actually put proper foundations in place in your business. That's what's gonna give you the strength. Think about that as the rebars of your business. If you're building an empire, if you're building a skyscraper, you need strong rebars to hold up your building. That's what's gonna give you the opportunity to scale and grow a leveraged business where you are not burning out and you are making bank because you are doubling, tripling, quadrupling your income because you are leading more and you are working less.

All right, here is a quick reminder that today is the last day of my three-day training From Burnout to Making Bank. And I really want you to be in there if this is speaking to you, if this is the right place in your business. And by the way, it's never too early for you to start thinking in this leveraged model.

So go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/make-bank, sign up for the masterclass. Yes, today it is still available and the replays will also be available for purchase. Give me an email and or DM me on Instagram or Facebook, and I'll make sure that you get access to the replays, debbie@debbiesassen.com.

And this is your year, 2025 is the year for you to go from one-to-one to building a leveraged business that has an unlimited income potential. Like the sky is really the limit. And I will see you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.