"Would You Like Me to Sign Those Handcuffs for You?"
That’s exactly what I said.
Not my finest coaching. But it worked. So maybe it was?
I (kindly) threw that out to a client to get him to pause as he was considering jumping back into something that he’d committed to stop doing.
The client is a founder, growing his business trying to get out of being the bottleneck. (Getting un-handcuffed.)
He'd spent months building this process where his assistant qualified inquiries first, so only the serious ones reached him. It was proving effective and had more room for improvement.
Then he hit a small revenue dip.
His initial reaction was maybe he should jump back in and take over all of the sales calls again.
It was a behavior we had talked about and he’s working on. He’d spent years building the habit, so we knew it might take the occasional reminder to break it.
So I reminded him with the comment about handcuffs. That’s how we’d discussed the feeling a founder has when they’ve built a business that’s completely dependent on them.
Relief or Leverage
He needed to pause and think: was he choosing relief, or was he choosing leverage?
His process just needed tuning, not scrapping. The relief move was to throw the process out and go back to doing it all himself. The leverage move was to look at why good leads were slipping through and fix it.
Did he want to reach for the thing that helped with the immediate discomfort, or did he want to work on the thing that would compound in value?
And how you make that decision, I will tell you, is what separates those who are always handcuffed from those who rise from producer to leader.
Which option do you reach for when the pressure hits: relief or leverage?
The Founder in the Story
The founder in the story is Daniel Wakefield, and we’ve laughed a lot about the handcuff story.
He’s traveling the path of producer to leader right now. If you want to hear from someone fighting these battles everyday, and mostly winning them, Daniel a good one.
He shared the handcuffs story and other all-too-relatable examples in a recent episode of the podcast.
Like when he chose relief and turned it into his best revenue month to that point (>$50k), without realizing it set him back more than 3 months.
Or how the relief of shiny objects have undercut his real priorities in the past. But he used the experience to create high leverage offers for his business, like his retainer packages and Visionary Sessions.
He’s evolving from being the doer-of-all-things to the leader that Top-Tier needs him to be, un-cuffing himself along the way. It’s inspiring to watch it unfold.
Relief Keeps Billing You
He sees the difference between the relief choices and the leverage choices.
A founder who chooses relief keeps paying over and over and never gets free.
A founder who chooses to invest in leverage pays once and gets time back.
You can hear it from Daniel himself.