Dr. Benjamin Hardy: Scale Your Business 10x Faster with This Proven Framework | Entrepreneurship | E361

After achieving massive success as a renowned author, Dr. Benjamin Hardy knew he was destined for more. Leaving behind a profitable collaboration with his co-author, he focused on mastering the art of scaling a business. As the co-founder of Scaling.com, he has helped top performers transform their strategies and unlock next-level growth in entrepreneurship. In this episode, Benjamin discusses the power of setting impossible goals and reveals his three-step scaling framework, designed to help entrepreneurs grow 10 times faster than they ever imagined. In this episode, Hala and Benjamin will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:27) His Career Journey and Identity Shifts (06:11) Building a Mindset for Future Success (08:13) Scale Faster: Why 10X Thinking Beats 2X Goals (12:46) The Biggest Blockers to Scaling Your Business (14:44) The Power of Setting Impossible Goals and Deadlines (27:45) Benjamin’s Framework to Scale Faster as a Founder (36:12) Finding Your “Super Whos” for Business Growth (42:17) Simplifying Your Systems to Scale Your Impact (48:27) Letting Go of Identities to Embrace 10x Growth (51:55) How Entrepreneurs Can Leverage Scaling.com Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and the co-founder of Scaling.com, a performance-based training program designed for fast-growth companies. As a bestselling author, his books, including 10x Is Easier Than 2x, have sold millions of copies worldwide. His latest book, The Science of Scaling, offers entrepreneurs a powerful framework to achieve 10x growth by setting impossible goals and aligning with their future selves. Sponsored By: Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/PROFITING OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first 6 months at OpenPhone.com/profiting. Airbnb - Find a co-host at airbnb.com/host Boulevard - Get 10% off your first year at joinblvd.com/profiting when you book a demo Resources Mentioned: Benjamin’s Book, The Science of Scaling: bit.ly/TheScienceofScaling Benjamin’s Book, 10x Is Easier than 2x: bit.ly/10xIsEasierthan2x Benjamin’s Book, Who Not How: bit.ly/Who_NotHow Benjamin’s Book, The Gap and the Gain: bit.ly/TheGapandtheGain Benjamin’s Audiobook: scaling.com/audiobook Benjamin’s Website: benjaminhardy.com YAP E206 with Benjamin Hardy: bit.ly/YAP-apple YAP E260 with Benjamin Hardy: bit.ly/YAP-BHapple The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steve Covey: bit.ly/7Habits_EffectivePeople Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Remelt: bit.ly/_GoodStrategy_BadStrategy Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: bit.ly/Search_for_Meaning_ Don't Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen: bit.ly/DontBlieve_YouThink Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Time is a psychological tool. If your goal is too far out, it's not going to impact your present enough.

• 0:06Hala Taha?

  Dr. Benjamin Hardy is a master at helping people reimagine what's possible in life and business. Ben's taken his own advice to heart, launching scaling.com, a bold, science-backed platform built to help entrepreneurs unlock impossible growth.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Most people and most business owners, they let their past determine their present and then their present to determine their future. And that's a very bad way of doing business. The whole purpose of the future is to shape and redirect your present. One of the problems that happens when people have even 10-year goals is that they're not actually solving the goal, they're solving their intermediary step.

• 0:37Hala Taha?

  How can we tell if our systems are too complex?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  A complex system is almost impossible to define because there's so many goals. It's like, who are we? What do we do? In order to scale, you have to take something that's complex and you have to make it simple. And the easiest way to do that is...

• 1:07Hala Taha?

  Yap, bam! Today's guest doesn't just talk about 10x thinking, he embodies it. Dr. Benjamin Hardy is back on Yap, and if you've read 10x is easier than 2x, or caught any of his past appearances here on Young and Profiting, you already know that he's a master at helping people reimagine what's possible in life and business. Since we last spoke, Ben's taken his own advice to heart, launching scaling.com, a bold, science-backed platform built to help entrepreneurs unlock impossible growth. In this episode, we break down the science of scaling, the power of impossible goals, and why raising your floor is the true mark of a high-performing entrepreneur. So buckle up because it's time to think bigger, move faster, and scale smarter. Now, I know you want to get into this episode, but before you do that, if you're new to

• 1:50Hala Taha?

  the show, don't forget to follow and subscribe to Young and Profiting so you never miss an episode packed with expert insights like this one. Ben, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Happy to be back.

• 2:01Hala Taha?

  I'm so happy you're here. This is the fourth time you're on Young and Profiting Podcast. You're one of my favorite guests to interview. I use your content all the time. I do these webinars now where I basically teach people about different things and they're always sponsored. And I'm always pulling up your episodes and like, what did Ben say about this and that? You know, so always using your stuff. I'm so grateful for you. So first of all, happy to do this in person.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  I know, first time. It's fun.

• 2:26Hala Taha?

  It is. So I've been talking to you since 2018 and I've really seen you transition in all these different phases. From psychologist to author to co-author with Dan Sullivan, where you did so many different books with him. And now you're the co-founder of scaling.com. So I'm wondering, you always talk about identity shifts and things like that. So what kind of identity shifts did you have to go through to say goodbye to this huge chapter with Dan Sullivan? And then move on to do scaling.com?

• 2:58Speaker 00

  So when I was writing 10x is easier than 2x, I was deep in the process and falling in love with the book. I knew it was going to be very special and Dan and I had already way past the goals that we had for that collaboration. Through my other books, Who Knows How, The Gap and The Gain. And I knew 10x would be a special book. And so we'd already achieved more than we thought that the collaboration was going to do. And so when I was about halfway through that book, I knew that I personally wanted to go do something bigger. I loved working with Dan. I'm not the kind of person who needs to be front stage, frankly. I love digging into the ideas. I'm happy to build up and support people. I'm not against being front stage, but I don't, I don't need it. And so I went to Dan and just said, I'm looking for something bigger.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  And I did try honestly to renegotiate the situation because I had built that collaboration back when I was a PhD student. It was a great opportunity. It was a transformational opportunity, but it ended up being too small for where I was going. And so we just, you know, shared, came together and said, let's finish 10x. They had already read early drafts. They're like, let's not pull the plug on this one. Like, let's finish this book. Let's launch it gorgeously. Let's finish well. And then let's just both be in the game, as we say. And so that was where it ended. And so I walked away from him in that situation. We launched 10x gorgeously and then. It was about a year of really considering things, a year of opening up opportunities with some potential people to collaborate with. I was going really, really deep, running thousands

• 4:20Speaker 00

  of people through my own program, really refining the framework that then became the science of scaling, or the scaling framework that we call it. So I was doing my own research, but I was also exploring big opportunities. And none of them felt right until a young man who's 10 years younger than me came up to me and just said, let's just own the world of scaling. And I, I mean, I had been studying it for a while, but I just never really thought to do that. And it's, there's a great quote that says, "A big part of strategy is choosing the game you want to play and then knowing how to win that game." And it just felt like a game that is obviously extremely noisy, but one that most people are saying the same thing. And so an easy one to very cleanly differentiate and kind of redefine. So it was just a great opportunity to start fresh. And then we just started bringing on collaborators and it became a lot bigger pretty quick.

• 5:01Hala Taha?

  So you're talking about your co-founder Blake Erickson?

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:04Hala Taha?

  How do you guys work together? What kind of skills does he bring to the table for scaling versus EO?

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And we ended up bringing on multiple partners since then, including Joseph Nguyen, who I was talking about, who wrote, "Don't Believe Everything You Think," because he's a self-published author who's sold millions of copies. But Blake came to me, he's again, 10 years younger than me, very collaborative. What he brings is extreme grit, passion. He's been in the sales world. He's grown sales teams, loves growth, loves the deal, loves to train. And so he's going to be the one who's over the training program. For me, one of the things that I learned in this world of coaching or training is often it's built around the individual. And so I never wanted to be built around Ben Hardy, because that would be like a huge bottleneck. Having him be who it was built around would actually be smarter and better. And so that's why we put him on the book and he helped me further finish and develop the ideas. And I was like, okay, Blake's going to be the guy. I don't

• 5:54Speaker 00

  have to be built around me. I learned that from Stephen Covey. So when Stephen Covey wrote Seven Habits, he never wanted it to be built around him. And so he initially had lots of trainers and then he was out doing his own thing. Whereas a lot of people, most people, they end up having the platform being built around them. And so we just wanted to just go away from that immediately.

• 6:11Hala Taha?

  So you mentioned that you left collaborating with Dan Sullivan, and you felt like if you were to stay there, you would be playing too small. Now, one of the things that you talk about and that we've talked about before is this idea of your future self. You should know clearly what your future self is and you should be acting in a way that aligns with your future self now. So you can achieve your future self goals. So talk to us about how does this set you up for the future? What does your future self look like and why is scaling.com so important for your future self?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  One of the beautiful things about time anyways, and time as a psychology concept is that both the past and the future are just psychological tools. And then what's great is that the future is about 10 times more powerful of a tool than the past. The past is a huge tool. The past shapes our present, but the future is way more dominant in shaping our present. And so whatever view you have of the future is going to shape your present, your choices. And so that's something that you can't escape. Obviously, a lot of people, they don't think very beautifully or powerfully about their future. And I've had a view of my future self for quite a few years that shaped every choice I've made. I've known I've wanted to focus on helping leaders, helping teams grow, scale and do that very fastly and efficiently.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  And I've just never seen any model or thought process that actually teaches rapid transformation, rapid growth, rapid strategy. And really simplifying and then the psychology behind it, which is when you go for an impossible goal, what that does, not only to your psychology, but what that does to like your business. If you go for a huge impossible goal or an impossible future self, even what we wrote in 10x, almost everything you're doing right now, you have to really face the truth that most of it's got to go. And so the psychology behind that, how to let things go. And so my own future self is just someone who obviously loves God very much and someone who's building leaders and showing them how to grow things that seem impossible.

• 7:57Hala Taha?

  You just teased so many different things, guys. If you want to check out my three past interviews with Ben Hardy, I'll put it in the show notes because we went over 10x is easier than 2x. We go over the gap in the game and a lot of our different episodes. So those are amazing concepts. Just really quick though, let's talk about 10x is easier than 2x. Because I think it's really important just to set the ground here. Talk to us about why 10x is easier than 2x and maybe the Pareto principle and how that plays into that.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  So the reason 10x is easier than 2x is because going back to time, literally starting with time, most people and most business owners, they let their past determine their present and then their present to determine their future. So their past goes present and then future. That's a very common way of looking at time, but that's linear time. And that's a very bad way of doing business. And that's how most businesses operate. They would say, you know, we did 5 million revenue last year, so let's go for six or seven million this year. They're literally letting their past shape their goals. And so when you're going for 2x, the problem with it is, is that you're essentially just saying, let's keep doing what we're doing, right? So to the idea of the Pareto principle, which is the 80/20 model, while Dan and I were writing that book, we concluded that if you're going for 2x growth, you can keep 80% of what you're doing. All you have to do is tweak 20%, whereas if you're going for 10x growth,

• 9:09Speaker 00

  then you can only keep the best 20%.

• 9:11Hala Taha?

  And you burn yourself out too, because you basically do double of what you're already doing now. So you're not more efficient.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So 10x, the beauty of it is, is it's a future that is so much bigger that by applying the bigger goal, whether it's a 10x goal or 100x goal, and we don't talk about extreme deadlines in that book, but we do in the scaling book, by having such an extreme future, 10 times bigger, and you take your timeline, say you're wanting to get somewhere in 10 years and you make it three, right? Make it way shorter, you're pretty much forced to grapple with, I can't do it the way I've been doing it. And so it forces you to find much better and more efficient pathways. And so the beauty of it is, is the bigger goal forces you to strip out a lot of your bad practice, a lot of your dead end paths, and it forces you to find the most efficient ones. So those 20% things that create all the results, that goal becomes an incredible filter. It just strips out everything that can't work.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  That's why it's so much easier. Whereas this small goal, it just can't get you there.

• 10:03Hala Taha?

  So it's like that famous quote, I think it's Marshall Goldsmith's, what got you here won't get you there.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  And for 10x, what got you here absolutely can't get you there. The future is so much different, so much bigger, that it forces you to go find a different model, a different path. And that's the great part about it.

• 10:17Hala Taha?

  So there's a quote that you told me, I think the last time you came on the show, that I always think about. It was something along the lines of, if you want to have a healthy mindset, you basically have to have a happy past and an exciting future. And part of all this in terms of having a good mental state to proceed with becoming your future self is actually reframing your past and making sure that you reframe your past in a way that's happy, but then you also have an exciting future. So talk to us a little bit about that as well.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this just goes back to the idea that the past and future for us in our psychology, these are tools. And so the past is something that we own in the present. So it's really the present that owns the past, but often people say that the past owns the present. The past made me do this. The past is the reason why I am. And that creates obviously the victim mindset, but that's what's called an external locus of control, where you've taken the past and you've put it outside of you and you've said, this is causing me to be this way. And the main problem with that is, is it usually hard or painful experiences or failures? The reason those mess people up in the present is because they've taken some experience and they've devalued it. They've said, there's no value here. In fact, there's negative value. And so because this event happened, I'm just worse off and my future's gonna be worse off. And so how you reframe the past, in addition

• 11:27Speaker 00

  to gratitude, is you take what was a challenging experience, whatever it was, and you increase its value. You say, what are the reasons why there's benefits here? And you have to actually create that. It doesn't just come naturally. Like you have to proactively build value in. It's almost like you're creating a canvas and you have to put that in there. You have to put the gold in there. And so that has to be your choice. And so they talk about in psychology, you have to have an internal locus of control. And it's you and the present that determines the meaning of your past. It's not the past that determines the present. It's always the present that determines the past. But you do need to do that. Otherwise, the past negatively impacts your future. And that's, that's just what you don't want. You don't want a limiting past to diminish your future, because once you've diminished your future, then your present is screwed. And that's Viktor Frankl

• 12:09Speaker 00

  101, when he was writing Man's Search for Meaning, he talks all about how the only way to honestly handle the concentration camps, let alone thrive, is to have a future goal that gives your life meaning. And so that's the real problem with having a non-valuable past, is that it just shrinks your future. And then, once you have a small future, then your present, it loses purpose, it loses power, it loses direction. And that's when you get in trouble.

• 12:31Hala Taha?

  And I know a lot of our past conversations had to do with self-improvement. And now we're really talking about improving businesses with the science of scaling, which is a really cool twist. And I'm sure a lot of the same principles float across from person to an organization. So one of the things that you talk in your book that seems like a core theme is that businesses can be trapped by their past success.

• 12:54Hala Taha?

  So talk to us about what are some of the things that businesses think are good that actually might be preventing them from actually scaling?

• 13:01Speaker 00

  So what happens is if a business is doing well, the problem is that most businesses aren't scaling. Even if they're quote unquote successful, they may be at 10, 20 million a year in revenue, even 100 million, and they may be satisfied with 10, 20% growth, right? So like, they're actually very linear. But because they're established, because they're doing well, it's very hard to walk away from that. And so most of these companies, again, even small companies, but most companies don't actually have a true scale goal.

• 13:27Hala Taha?

  Well, what do you define scaling as? Because to me, 20% growth year over years sounds pretty good, like you're scaling, but you don't feel that way?

• 13:34Speaker 00

  No, there's a study by McKinsey and they talk about grow fast or die slow.

• 13:40Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  And so for them, they define scaling as 60% growth or more. And if you're not growing at that clip or higher, your chances of getting to true scale are almost zero. And so for me, scaling is, I'm not really worried about the year over year. I'm more worried about what's the actual goal? You know, so if it's a small company doing like a million, like, are they actually going for 10, 20, 50 million? Or are they going for 2 million?

• 14:00Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Right? Because if they're at 1 million and they're going for 2, that by nature is them using their past to shape their present and their future. And so if, just say if a company is doing 1 million and they're going for 2, if they were going for 10, they'd be making completely different decisions.

• 14:13Hala Taha?

  Got it.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Again, if the company was like, alright, we're going to go for 2 million this year. If I just said, no, you're going for 10 million this year, how would you do it? Their 2 million path and plan, would it work?

• 14:23Hala Taha?

  No.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  It wouldn't work. In Elon Musk's words, it would be optimizing things that shouldn't exist. And so when you move the goal up, your current plan, it falls away. And so that's the beauty of it is now you have to actually solve for the goal. You have to say, okay, what's the business model that would get me to 10? And so that's the problem with going for the smaller goals is that they don't force you to actually solve a bigger scale.

• 14:45Hala Taha?

  Tell me what makes sense to go over first? Should we go over the three-step framework, frame, floor, focus? Or do you feel like we need to define what an impossible goal is first?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Let me just start with explaining what a frame is. Okay. So like in psychology, we talk about you see the world through a frame. And you even talked about reframe your past. And so the frame is just the way through which you see things. But the really important thing that is coming more and more out of psychology is that our frame, which determines what we see, right? So even people who see your podcast, they see it because there's some form of relevance to them. Right? And so there's just infinite data, infinite information. And so what determines which data or information we notice, let alone pay attention to? That's our frame. And what shapes our frame is our goals. This takes us just to the idea that everything we're doing in the present is based on our goals. Literally. And so to the idea of an impossible goal, it fits very closely with what we were just talking about with 10x.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  When you pursue impossible goals, almost all of your current pathways, almost everything in your current frame starts to become noise. Like it goes from signal to noise and they become dead end pathways. And so the beauty of going for impossible goals, and there's a lot of research on this, both in scale and in timeline, you really want to use both. And when you do that, you actually create an extreme frame. But the purpose of it is to first off, relook at everything you're now doing. And often it is timeline. Let me just give an example. There's a young man who I interviewed for this book. He's a great guy. He wants to own a European soccer team one day. He's 22 years old. And so for him, often one of the ways we make a huge goal, like I want to own a European soccer team. One of the ways we make that seem realistic is we give it an extreme deadline.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  And by extreme, I mean like way long. Okay. So in his case, I'm like, so you want to own a European soccer team? You're 22 years old. That's great. When are you going to do it? He's like, I'm gonna get there by age 55. Okay, that's reasonable. You got 33 years. I'm sure you could maybe figure that out. I mean, it's still huge. You might need to be a billionaire. Like it's still gnarly. But I then said, what would happen if we move the timeline so that rather than 55, you got there by age 30? I said, how would that change your plan? Cause you seem to have a 33 year plan. And this is where he started to get nervous because he's like, well, there's a lot of things I feel like need to do before that to get there. One of them, he's like, I want to get a PhD. He's like, I want to run a firm. He's like, I've got these things that I want to do. And this fits very much with like a linear model where like, if you think about public education, there's first grade, second grade, third grade.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Often we feel like we have these intermediary steps to the goal. But what happens when you make it impossible? Even in this case, just moving the deadline to a lot forward. Most of his path couldn't work. He couldn't go get the PhD anymore. He couldn't go probably run the firm. Instead, he'd have to just start solving the goal. Like he'd have to say, what's the most efficient way to get to my goal? And so one of the problems that happens when people have even 10-year goals is that they're not actually solving the goal. They're solving their intermediary step. So in his case, he's not actually solving, how do I own a soccer team? In his case, he's literally solving, how do I get into a PhD program? And there's no correlation between those goals. Just as another example, someone who I've worked with, he's a lawyer. He runs a law firm and they're doing $2.5 million in revenue. They've got, you know, like seven offices. They're doing great. They're in Minnesota.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  And he actually had a big goal, again, to the idea of a scale goal. He had a big goal, which to me is rare. He's like, I want to get to 100 million revenue in my law practice. I'm like, okay, that's great. I haven't seen a lot of lawyers with that goal. That's really cool. When are you going to do it? He said, I'm going to get there in 10 years. Again, very common. And back to the idea that time is a psychological tool. If your goal is too far out, it's not going to impact your present enough. Like, the whole purpose of the future is to shape and redirect your present. And so I just said, in his case, Xavier, 10 years is a bad goal. I'm sorry. You can have a long-term future self, but a goal that's 10 years away isn't going to impact your present. Because what happened was, even though he had 100 million goal, Xavier wasn't solving for 100 million. He was solving for his next intermediary step, which was, let's get to 5 million.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  But what happened was, is when I said, let's move the 10-year goal to 3. Now it feels like an impossible goal, right? And so with it being an impossible goal now, he has to grapple with, I have no idea how to get to 100 million. And I was never actually solving for 100 million. I was solving for, how do I get to 5? And solving for 5 is fundamentally different than solving for 100 million. And so now that the timeline's forward, he has to actually say, how do I actually build a $100 million company? I was never even thinking about that. And he had to admit, he probably would have never gotten there. When you have a goal that's 10, 15, 20 years away, your odds of hitting it are almost zero. Because the decisions you're making today... Aren't related to that goal. You're solving some step that actually has no connection to the goal, like the kid with the PhD. And so Elon Musk, who has a really, you know, I know that a lot of people are turned off by his politics, but I really like his engineering thinking, his first principles thinking.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  And he has what he calls his five step algorithm. And the first step is just always question requirements. In the case of the young man, is the PhD really required for the goal? Or is it some false goal you've placed upon yourself? Is it some lesser goal that's holding you back? And so the beauty of the impossible goal, both in scale and timeline, is that it forces you to start reckoning with all of the false goals you've placed on yourself, all the false requirements, all the false steps. And those are all the things, going back to the framework, that fall below the floor.

• 19:52Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Like, the more honest you become. That's the beauty of going for the impossible goals. It forces you to start looking at all the dead end paths. So you have all the false goals you've placed on yourself, all the false requirements. And if you're willing, that young man, if he's willing, let go of that lesser goal. Like, strip it out. One of my favorite quotes, which I'm sure I've shared with you, is we're kept from our goal, not by obstacles, but we're kept from our goal because of a clear path to a lesser goal. And so it's like, we have these lesser goals, him with the PhD, that the sooner he lets that go, the sooner he can actually just start solving the real goal.

• 20:20Hala Taha?

  So the key things there is tight, shorter deadlines.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Impossible deadlines.

• 20:24Hala Taha?

  Impossible deadlines.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:26Hala Taha?

  Keep the same big goals. Because when you said, okay, shift it from 10 to 3, I'm like, oh, but then wouldn't you want to change the goal to be more realistic? But the whole thing is

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Impossible goal.

• 20:35Hala Taha?

  Be unrealistic so that you can think differently.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  So that you can start solving the path. Because there often are pathways to the goal, they just are outside your base assumptions. They're not going to be based on your, you know, to your Marshall Goldsmith concept. They're not going to be the current path, they're not going to be the current model. So just as one example, there's a lady we worked with, she has a technology company and she works in the credit industry. She helps people improve their credit. And so she had 10 people using her software. And these are a bunch of credit repair companies. So there's like 50,000 credit repair companies in the United States. And so she wanted these 50,000 companies to use her software.

• 21:08Hala Taha?

  Okay.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And so her pathway to getting there was, I'm going to call them one at a time. And so after like 90 days, she had 10 of them using her software. They all loved it. Every single one who heard the software, they're like, we want this, we want to use this for our clients. And so I told her, Alyssa, I want you to set an impossible goal. Because right now, your current path is going to take you too long. It's going to take you a decade to have a sizable business. I want you to scale faster. And so she set an impossible goal. She said, I'm going to get 100 of these credit repair companies using my software in 90 days. And I said, that's not an impossible goal. A hundred and ninety days, you can just keep cold calling. You need a goal that's so big, it's going to force you to stop doing your current path because your current path won't work. And so she's like, Ben, I'm not, I'm scared. And so she's like, okay, I'll go for a thousand. I'm gonna go for a thou- And again, it took her like a long time to get even to ten. So I'm like, now you're gonna go for a thousand credit repair companies using your

• 21:53Speaker 00

  software in ninety days. And she had no clue how to do it. She sat down, she journaled, she pondered, she prayed. And then while thinking about it, and this is called pathways, thinking in psychology, you always want to think from the goal, never toward it, right? You always want the future to shape the present. You don't want the present to shape the future. And so she was thinking from the future. She was thinking from this impossible goal. Once she had no clue how to solve, but if you actually just start trying to solve a goal, your brain's phenomenal, but also you can go get the right information. So the thought came to her, which she had not considered before. What if I just partnered with other software companies that already serve tens of thousands of these companies? There's already a lot of other software companies in the credit space that serve these fifty thousand companies. Some of them serve thousands, some of them serve tens of thousands. What if I just partnered with them and got my technology, my software embedded into their software?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  And so that was just a better pathway that wasn't available to her from a small goal. And so less than a week later, she had actually partnered with a company called Credit Repair Junkies. And it turned out he had eight thousand of these people, these credit repair companies using his software. Immediately, he embedded her software in and boom, she went from ten people using her software to eight thousand in a week.

• 22:55Hala Taha?

  Wow.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  But that's finding a better path, which she would have never been able to filter and find without trying to solve a goal that seemed impossible. So that's the beauty of them is that they are pathways to get there, but they're gonna be very different from what's normal. And even just as another thought with strategy, Richard Remelt, who wrote a book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. He said that good strategy is extremely surprising because of how rare it is. It's like, that's a really good strategy, but most people in her space wouldn't be thinking that way. Because they're trying to solve again, rather than getting to ten thousand, she's trying to say, how do I get from ten to twenty, right? Or how do I get from ten to a hundred? And so that's just gonna produce really bad thinking, really bad strategy. Whereas you go for the much bigger goal, a thousand in ninety days, almost everything she's doing is, it won't work.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  And so she's got to find these really, really unique strategies that are just gnarly. That's part of the beauty of it.

• 23:43Hala Taha?

  I love it so much. You're giving me so many ideas. I'm like, oh, God, I need to like-

• 23:46Speaker 00

  I know, you share some. What's sticking out in your mind?

• 23:48Hala Taha?

  We want to be a hundred million dollar company.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Love that. Beautiful. Three years or less.

• 23:52Hala Taha?

  We were thinking, yeah, exactly. Like, I'm like, okay, I've got to shorten that timeline.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  What's your current timeline on it?

• 23:58Hala Taha?

  I think it was three years. We want to be 100 million valuation in three years. And one of the ways that we're going to do that is we've got to recruit huge podcasters.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  You do. You need the whales.

• 24:08Hala Taha?

  We need the whales. Did I ever tell you that that's part of our core values? Oh, one of our core values is about whales, that we need to like, secure whales. That's so funny that you mention that. And we always use the whale emoji in Slack whenever we get somebody big, you know?

• 24:21Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 24:22Hala Taha?

  But, you know, I always need to think creatively, like, how do I get more huge podcasters in our network? And I do think more incrementally. And this is making me think, I need to think, what do we look like as a 100 million dollar company?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  In three years?

• 24:37Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And who's in our network? And like, how did we do that? I guess, talk to me more about how I can think about it from the goal itself, rather than incrementally. Does that make sense?

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, just so I understand, you want the company to be valued at 100 million in three years?

• 24:53Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Do you know what that would take?

• 24:56Hala Taha?

  Probably us making 30 million dollars in revenue.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:59Hala Taha?

  And we make, we're on track to make 10 this year.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  So here's a question. If you change the goal from valued, just for fun, and this is a really important point, because people get this messed up. They get stressed out about goals, and so they don't set big ones or urgent ones, because they think if I don't hit it, I'm a failure. As I said, time is actually a psychological tool. Goals are simply tools. And so you can use a big goal and an urgent goal, simply as a tool to relook at your model, relook at your paths, and to potentially think of new ones. And so just as an exercise, if rather than going for 100 million valuation, you went for 100 million revenue, you're at around 10. So if you just 10x the revenue in three years. I know, it's gnarly, but what wouldn't work that you're doing right now to get to 100 million revenue?

• 25:42Hala Taha?

  Signing small podcasters. I have a whole social media agency, so like, maybe that whole thing needs to go away.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe.

• 25:50Hala Taha?

  You know?

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Would that get you to 100 million in three years?

• 25:54Hala Taha?

  No.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  So see, this brings up frame, floor, focus, that the big frame, and not you, that you have to do that. But the frame being, in this case, and the frame, as I said, is based on a goal. And that shapes what you see and what you don't see in the present. So if you just were to use the 100 million revenue as a tool, then that would set a floor, which everything below the floor can't get you there. So that's a no, right? A big part of strategy is what you say no to. So again, you don't have to get rid of the agency. Again, this is all just a tool, but it's like, okay, if the agency won't get us there, at what point is that agency a dead end? At what point does it become something we're gonna have to get rid of anyways? Maybe it won't, maybe you just keep it as a concept, but the beauty of just kind of thinking is it's like, at some point, that agency might become a dead end. And so it forces you to grapple with that sooner.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And it forces you to say, what things that you're not thinking about right now? Because right now, you might be solving for 30 million to get to the 100 million valuation, which is awesome. But what things are you not thinking about? And not that you have to have any pathways right now, but what pathways would likely or potentially get you 200 million revenue in three years?

• 26:55Hala Taha?

  Some of the things that we're working on, like building a creator house and studios. So we can get more podcasters in the door and have like more incentives. Having more money to give guarantees, like a record label does with advances to these really big podcasters.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 27:09Hala Taha?

  That we're trying to, so like, there's certain things that we need to do.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  But would those get you to 100 million in three years?

• 27:13Hala Taha?

  Maybe.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  And I'm not saying you have to do this. Remember, I'm just using this as a tool for pathways. I wouldn't expect you to have the answer to this because I just threw this at you. But it's like, what would it take, what would a single model be to get you to 100 million in three years? Again, I don't know. I'm just saying, what could it be? The cool part about if you tried to solve that is 30 million then becomes a cakewalk. You know, if you start thinking from that future.

• 27:36Hala Taha?

  Well, let's back up.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Sorry for throwing all that at you.

• 27:39Hala Taha?

  No, that's okay. It's great. I can't wait to do this with my business partner and like think strategy. It's such great strategy advice. So let's talk about the framework. Let's go through frame, floor, focus, and just like walk us through at a high level each one of those stages.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So as I said, your frame is what you see. It's really all the pathways you see and it's based on your goals. And so when you raise your frame or your goal to a seemingly impossible level, that then raises your floor. And your floor as a person or as an organization is defined by what you don't do. So when you raise your floor, that means you're actively stripping things out that you used to say yes to. And in order to scale and grow, you have to raise your floor. You have to say no to the things that can't get you to the higher goal.

• 28:20Hala Taha?

  So what's the floor analogy? Like, help us understand that.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  In a company, a floor could be like, you know, in your case, I don't say yes to podcasts below this floor. Or podcasters.

• 28:30Hala Taha?

  Got it. So it's a requirement.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it is like a requirement. That's one way of looking at it. It's like, I don't accept things below this. And so you set some floor, or we don't work with people below this. So as an example, like, one of the companies I've worked with, he's an advertising agency and he helps people get into retail stores like Walmart and Walgreens and he scales their products. And so for him, he doesn't work with people who can't get their product into a big store and can't be doing like 20, 40 million. So like, he has a very high floor. If he goes below that, he's just gonna get muddled in all the competition of everyone else. And so he has a very high floor. But your floor can also be spiritual and emotional, where it's like, the floor is kind of your own internal integrity or accountability to your future. If you're going for a big future, right? Even your 100 million goal, there's a lot of things that are below the floor

• 29:16Speaker 00

  that won't get you that goal that you're still saying yes to. And so whenever you say yes to things that are below the floor, you're actively lying to yourself and contradicting yourself. And we do this all the time. We all go below the floor. We lie to ourselves actively and justify it, or we do things that we know, you know, we hold on to things that are out of security or FOMO or to not disappoint people. And so when you're below the floor, you're actively lying to yourself. You're not being honest with yourself or others. You're not clear on who you are. This can even be true in relationships. My dad, just speaking personally, you know, is going through, you know, a relationship challenge. And like, he said, I've not been clear on my floor. And because I've not been clear on my floor in terms of who I am and the kind of life I want to live, I've had relationships that are muddled because I wasn't really clear on what I wouldn't do.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  You know, it's really important to define what's a no.

• 30:02Hala Taha?

  So it's like your boundaries. What are your boundaries in business and in your personal life? What are you saying yes to? What are you saying no to? And everything you're saying yes to has to align to your impossible goal.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  And when you raise the floor a lot, more and more things are no's. One of the things I've worked with is professional athletes. And often when someone's going from college to pro, the floor goes up extremely. So like, if you look at the difference between like a superstar like a Steph Curry versus some other really good basketball player who we don't know his name. The difference, yes, Steph's ceiling is higher. He's the best shooter ever, but it's really his floor that distinguishes him. The floor is, is that consistently, he operates it. Say he makes 25 points a game, that's his average. That's where he's always at. So he has an extremely high floor. Whereas this other player maybe gets 25 once every 10 games. The floor is really what divides the pros from the amateurs. There's a great quote that says that amateurs work until they get something right.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Whereas pros work until they can't get it wrong. I've seen in working with people that someone might have just incredible potential. They go from college to pros, but they never succeed in the next level because they keep their floor low. They keep hanging out with their old friends, right? Or like eating the way they did in college, right? And like they don't raise their professionalism. They don't raise their floor and how they do everything. And so therefore their performance is not to the level required.

• 31:23Hala Taha?

  So practically for businesses, how can they implement some of the things that ensure that they have a floor and that their organization knows what their floor is?

• 31:32Speaker 00

  And by the way, the floor protects you. If you go below it, you've not only muddled yourself, you've muddled your team. So the first thing is actually setting the goal. Cause the goal always determines what it would be the floor. And then, once you've raised the floor, you can then focus on the pathway to the goal. And so the first thing is actually really well defining the goal. Cause the goal defines basically the floor. Once you've said, we are getting to 100 million valuation or revenue, whatever you decide. We're doing it in three years. And so what are all the things that absolutely we're doing right now? They can't get us there. All of that stuff now is below the floor. If we keep doing it, we're not being honest with ourselves. We're not being honest with the goal. And so we have to start eliminating these things. The core element of any system is accountability. And so if people keep going below the floor. The system's not holding them accountable to the goal.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  And so then the system is contradicting itself and it's going in too many different directions. And so it has to be established. Another way of looking at the floor is that it's the same thing as the culture, right? And so there's probably members of the team, if you're going for the higher goal, that aren't going to get you there. And it's like, well, if they're below the floor, you're sending the wrong message by either keeping them in their same role or keeping them on the team. And so it can be very difficult, painful sometimes to say, this is no longer a fit for where this company is going. And so you have to be willing to make some of those uncomfortable moves of letting go of things, clients, even team members. Until you do that, you're not ready to scale. You're not ready to go for the growth that's required. You're still keeping things in the business that are amateurish when you're trying to go pro.

• 32:56Hala Taha?

  This is so helpful and it just makes me realize like we're in this transition period. I recently let go of employees that have been with me for a long time and it was really hard.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  That's a huge signal that you're ready to grow, though.

• 33:08Hala Taha?

  And it was really tough, but they were actually thankful and knew that they were struggling and that I kept trying to put them in different roles and it just wasn't working.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  People know, especially if you tell them, we're going to get to a hundred million valuation in three years. This is the level that we need to get to. Some people will stretch into it massively. Like, some people are going to be super aligned with it, excited about it. One of my favorite quotes is that the system is designed to defend the system. If you have team members that when you tell them the impossible goal or the massive new goal, if they're like defending the system, defending the SaaS quo, then like you know that you don't want a future that you're trying to avoid or trying to like delay. So it's a very good signal that you're ready to grow when you start letting go of legacy team members or things like that, even though they're beautiful, you love them, you honor that they were vital to you getting here. It's an important indicator, again, back to the idea that good strategy is rare and it's surprising because most people don't do it.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  When you start letting go of people or team members, sometimes family members that are team members, like some people have a hard time doing that, then you're like, okay, this person's serious. Like this person's raising the floor. And that's the hardest part about scaling is raising the floor and beginning to strip out the stuff that has no bearing to the new goal.

• 34:17Hala Taha?

  And as you grow a brand, the opportunities get better and better. So for example, I constantly get people who want production services from us. But production services from me and my business, I have a 60-person team. But what ends up happening is we want to do such a good job that I want to get involved. He wants to get involved. We don't want to launch a show without all these different approvals and things like that.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Because you have a really high floor and standard.

• 34:39Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and some of these deals could be 20K a month and we're just like, we just can't do it. And so now, in order to help us make that decision, I made a business relationship with a guy that produces podcasts that I've known for years, my really good friend that I know is awesome. And he's gonna like white label stuff for us and I trust him and then we can focus.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Yep, focus.

• 35:01Hala Taha?

  And take the demand, right? So let's move on to focus.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Focus is really about how do you solve the goal? Back to a hundred million or whatever the goal is. Focus is all about what's the model and what are the pathways to the goal? So back to Alicia who went from 10 to 8,000 credit repair companies using your software in a week. Her focus shifted. It shifted from how do I get these people one-on-one to get on the phone to? How do I get other software companies to partner with me? So our focus in the present is all about what are the pathways or the highest signal, right? Signal versus noise. And so our focus is really about what's the model? And what's the pathways to our goal? And who's gonna help us get there? That's the focus. Focus is really about just how do you solve the goal? And if you are trying to do five or 10 or 15 different things,

• 35:46Speaker 00

  if your model is complex, meaning you've got like multiple competing goals and things like that, then you just have to admit you're not focused. And if you're not focused, what that means is that you're below the floor and you're saying yes to too many different things and you haven't started to strip out the lesser goals or just the false requirements or just the shiny objects. So focus is crucial to scaling and it's not just about focusing. It's about where you focus and it's about focusing on the right path and about getting the right people involved. And with the right focus, again, back to Alicia, you can 800x in a week with the right focus. If you're looking for those right paths, if you bring on the right who's. One of the books that I read after I wrote 10x, which I wish I had read before that book, was called The 80/20 Individual by Richard Koch. And I might've even talked to you about it. He talks about super leveraged who's.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  You know, when I wrote Who Not How, I thought about people who can get a job done. But what that book taught me was is that one super leveraged person can create not just 10x the results of an average person, but 100x or even 1,000x. So like Bill Gates even has a very famous quote where he says, "A great code writer isn't worth 10 times an average code writer. It's worth 10,000 times." And so. If you think about a podcast, there are some podcasts that get 10,000 X the views of most podcasts. If you think about the S and P 500, there's seven main businesses in the S and P 500 that produce more revenue than millions of businesses. That's what they call the power law. It's another way of looking at the 80 20 principle, but the

• 37:14Speaker 00

  80 20 principle on extreme. There are certain people that can create 10 times or 100 times or even 1,000 times the results of one, back to your idea of whales. And so when you think about focus, if you're trying to solve an impossible goal, 100 million revenue in three years, your focus is going to shift and you're going to start looking for things you never would have been looking for. You're going to start trying to solve what you weren't going to be solving for the more linear goal. Where you focus and what you're trying to solve and how you're trying to solve it and who you're finding and how you partner with those people. That's how you start making days that are worth months or years because now you're focusing on just such a more powerful path.

• 37:52Hala Taha?

  As you're talking about super leverage, something that me and he's mentioning my business partner, Jason.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  He sounds awesome. Good for him.

• 37:58Hala Taha?

  We're always talking about, man, like what me and you can get done in a day would take the team months. And sometimes if I just have a problem, like I'll just do something and it'll be like, that would have taken the team a month to do and multiple people. I guess, how can you find these super leverage? And it's just, is it more about putting people in the right place with the right experiences? Or I guess, how do you think about that? Or how do we find those people?

• 38:25Speaker 00

  First off, you need a goal that demands one. The thing is, is you don't need 10 super who's, right? But what I will say is, is as you go for the higher goal, that floor goes up where the performance expectation just naturally goes to a more higher performing room. So you might end up having half the team, but they're all the super performers. But in terms of these super who's that I'm talking about that create 10,000 times the results of a Norman, of a normal person.

• 38:51Hala Taha?

  Norman. I like that word.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  You know what's funny is we actually literally just watched City Slickers yesterday, which is like an old movie and like Norman's the cow that he saved.

• 38:58Hala Taha?

  Oh, got it.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  And so that was like a total Freudian slip. But anyways, if you don't have a goal that requires a super who back to the idea of focus, you won't find one. But if you do, what's cool about pathways thinking is is that the super who's bring the pathways with them, right? It's kind of the idea of who, not how, but again, on steroids. So for us, with our goal at scaling.com, we want 5,000 members scaling and scaling.com. And the best and easiest way to get there is through that book, The Science of Scaling, which I wrote. But then it's like, okay, I've sold millions of books, but there's people out there who are better at selling books than me. And so that's what got us thinking about this guy named Joseph Winn, who he wrote the book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, and it was self-published. And he's just a marketing genius. He's 26 years old and like, when we identified Joseph, we were like, okay, this guy's a super who.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  This guy, if on our team, not only almost ensures we're going to hit our goal, which feels impossible, we're basically going from startup to the goal is to get to like 120 million revenue in two years. But knowing that in our case, the book is the crux to solving that goal and knowing that Joseph is one of the best book marketers in the world. Once we identified him, we're like, this guy transforms our company. Not only does he maybe half the timeline of the goal, which was already like an impossible goal and almost ensure success, but by bringing him on, our company is now fundamentally different. And so that's a super who. And so how do you find them? You first off, just have to have a goal that requires it. You won't find it, by the way, if you keep your floor low. Because if your floor is low, that means you're saying yes to those $20,000 opportunities, right?

• 40:28Speaker 00

  I know you've already offloaded that and you've white labeled that. But if you're down below the floor and you're focused and you're saying yes to all these things, then you're not solving the goal. So you'll never see those super who's because again, your frame determines what you see and that frame is based on the goal. And so those pathways or those high signal opportunities, they just won't be available to you because you're not filtering for them.

• 40:47Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Our goal shapes how we filter our experience. And so when you start filtering for how do I get to 100 million in three years, you're going to start to ask yourself those questions like Alicia found that super who. She went from 10 to 8,000, bang, right? And so you'll start looking for those. They might not be exactly what you think. One example is often I've worked with people who they've taken a company and they've scaled it, like they've gone 10x, right? Maybe they went from one to 10 million or they went from 10 to 100 million. And to go 10x again, they just have to acknowledge, maybe it's someone who's the CEO. But to go 10x and to do it fast, they can't be the CEO anymore.

• 41:20Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  Right? So they actually have to step out and they need to bring someone in who can do it better. And when you have a big goal, sometimes you don't become the centerpiece. You can still have a huge role. That's what I love about what you've built. You have a phenomenal show, but you're building this network where you don't have to be the center. You've built a concept that's bigger than you. That's a really good signal. And if your goal is so small that you have to be the center, then you're not going to find super who's. Those super who's are not going to see you. They're not going to be compelled by your goal or your vision. And I see that too much is where someone, it has to be them. They can't let someone outshine them. They can't create a space where people can be more successful than them. And so that's what I wanted to set up at scaling.com was, you know, to the idea of Blake Erickson coming in. He's 10 years younger than me. Joseph Winn is 10 years younger than me. I would love to create a space where I'm not the center.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  It doesn't have to be about Ben Hardy. How can I make these guys 10 times more successful than me? I start then riding their coattails.

• 42:10Hala Taha?

  And then elevating your success in the process too.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  A million percent. It's like, that's when you can start finding super who's.

• 42:16Hala Taha?

  So let's talk about complex systems and why complex systems prevent us from scaling? And how can we tell if our systems are too complex?

• 42:25Speaker 00

  So a complex system by nature can't scale because it's going in too many different directions. There's too many competing goals. Often the goals aren't well defined. Steve Jobs said, you have to work really hard to take something that's complex and to make it simple. So when he went back to Apple after he'd been fired and he went on his hiatus and he was at Pixar. He came back and Apple was very undefined. They had 350 different products. And he's like, which one of these really defines Apple? And they had no answer. And so he's like, we don't even know who we are. We have no definition. We have no clarity. And so a complex system is almost impossible to define because like there's so many goals. It's like, who are we? What do we do? Well, we do this, we do that, we do this, we do that. And so in order to scale, you have to take something that's complex and you have to make it simple.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  And the easiest way to do that is to have a goal that forces you to start stripping out all those other goals. Like the young man who I was telling you about with trying to become a professional soccer team. He had a complex system to get there because according to his system, well, in order to get to soccer team, I got to first get a PhD, then I got to run a firm, then I got to do this. Like this is like a complex system or pathway to get to his goal. It's like, what if we just again, move the goal forward and said, what's the most direct path to the goal? Forget all the other stuff for a minute. I know you've been attached to that idea of the PhD or whatever, but like, let's just let that go for a minute. What's the most direct path to the goal? Let's just start solving that and then let's start to create a simple, direct focus path to that. Let's just solve that one thing. Let's not solve five or 50. Let's solve one. And so a simple system is something that is very thoughtfully crafted and it's something

• 43:54Speaker 00

  that can scale. And so you have to ask yourself, what is my current system? How many different directions is it really going? Could it really get to 100 million in three years? And you have to be honest that some of this stuff we have to strip out because it's overly complex. It's making us overly diluted. We need to get ourselves focused again. We need to have a simple model that is going one direction.

• 44:15Hala Taha?

  And then how do you think about offers? Is it possible to achieve a big goal and have multiple offers?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  I think it's possible, but I think that people often have too many offers. And those offers, back to Musk, he says that the most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn't exist. And so a lot of those offers would fall below the floor if they had a better goal. If you have like three or four competing offers or 12 or 15, the question is how many of those are optimizing things that shouldn't exist? How many of those are dead end paths that if you just went for a higher goal and did a shorter timeline, you just have to admit that offer's got to go. That's cannibalizing this, right? And so, no, you don't have to have just one offer, but again, just back to good strategy is rare. How many people do just have one offer?

• 45:01Hala Taha?

  Lewis Howes is a great example of this. I think he wrote about it in the book and he's been on the podcast. Do you want to share that story?

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I learned this from Rory, who's one of his friends.

• 45:09Hala Taha?

  Rory Vaden, yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is a story that I learned from Rory's book and I think some of the interviews that they had together, that Lewis had a complex system. That's to your point, one of the hard parts about becoming successful is that there's a lot of easy pathways to success or easy pathways to things that would have been impossible to your past self.

• 45:26Hala Taha?

  Especially as a creator entrepreneur like Lewis, you could just keep selling all these different things to your audience.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so from what I understood about the situation, he had 12 to 15 to 20 different offers, right? He had a mastermind, he had courses, he had this, he had that. And his podcast was very marginal in his mind. And in having that strategy conversation with Rory, it was like, what if you just went all in on that one path? You had a simple system, right? Actually focused on that. At the time, I think he had like 30 million downloads. And so he's like, yeah, maybe I will create a simple model. Maybe I'll get rid of this and that. And he got rid of a bunch of things and just totally focused on his podcast. And the byproduct was two years later, he was one of the biggest podcasts in the entire world, right? He went from like 30 million downloads to 500 million plus. And you can do incredible things with a focused, simple system and a focused, simple model.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  And you have to work hard to keep it simple.

• 46:17Hala Taha?

  Talk to us about that. So we can start off a simple model, but then day to day, so many team members touching it. It can end up becoming complex over time. So how do we maintain a simple model over time?

• 46:30Speaker 00

  So you have to keep the goal front of mind. You have to keep the floor very low. You have to be very honest when you're going below the floor. Honesty and transparency are vital. And so it's good to have team members openly acknowledging like this stuff is probably a distraction. So like you've with your partner, I think it's good for you guys to have rigorous conversations with each other where it's like, this is good. But is this really going to get us to the 100 million valuation in three years? And when you can have that level of rigor and honesty and continuousness. And just because great opportunities come and they do, really good ones come. You have to say, is this, even if it seems incredible, is this below the floor?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  And the more honesty you can have about that and start saying no, or being honest about the things you gotta get rid of. And sometimes the goal can shift, of course. Sometimes it's like, you know what? This thing just changes the game, but just continuous honesty, continuous transparency. The floor is the level of accountability you have to the goal. The floor is the level of accountability you have in your system. And it's very rigorous. And so just continuously checking it and then being honest as things creep in, because they always will. To say these things are below the floor. We have to strip these things back out. And so for me, on like a very practical level, really like every week I get back with my assistant and we're like, let's relook at the schedule for the year. What are these things that it made sense last month, but now it doesn't, it's below the floor. Like my past self was lying to themselves or they weren't as clear as I am now.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  So like just continuously looking at your agenda, continuously looking at what you're doing, what you're saying yes to, what you're up to for the week or for the month or for the rest of the year. And just saying, how much of this stuff is really below the floor? How much of this stuff have I just uncommitted to? And they might be business stuff, it might be relationships, it might be other commitments you've made to yourself, hidden commitments, false commitments and just saying. If I said no to this, that'd be a massive signal, right? To my future self, that'd be a massive signal to the goal that I'm serious. And it would surprise people and it would disappoint people and it would frustrate people. But it's me being honest. It's being more transparent to who I'm really wanting to be.

• 48:25Hala Taha?

  We started up this conversation talking about identities. And even companies can have these identities that are preventing them from scaling. You talk about a lady named Stephanie, who's the CEO of a family business. And she basically had to let go of a legacy identity to scale. Can you share that story with us?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  So Stephanie was part of a family business. It's been around for 50 years. Her father was an inventor, patented these incredible products that were very valuable in the marketplace that they were in. And very like high end, very niche products. But her father passed away like over a decade ago. Their company's been known for these legacy products and his inventions and his patents and stuff. But they've been around for 50 years. They do like 25 million in revenue. And again, always just using a different frame to look at the things. Her goal is normally like 10 to 20% growth a year, right? And they've been growing stagnantly, but growing consistently for decades. And I just said, I just said, what is your goal for the year? And this is at the beginning of 2024. And she said, my goal is to get to 30 million. And I said, what if you just doubled that and went to 60? And she said, there's no way we can get there.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  She said, we couldn't get our current products and services that we have to 60 million revenue in a decade. She's just like, it's just not there. And she's like, the only way I could get to 60 million is I would have to go this other direction. Rather than going products, I'd have to go like these services, which I've honestly been thinking about for a decade. But I've never pulled the trigger on it. She's like, there's even companies that have teams and these products that have these services that we could buy that I've been wanting to buy and having conversations, but I've just been thinking about it for a decade. And I said, well, what if you just committed to the 60 million and you? And so she started to think about that. But then I just said, Stephanie, let's think a little bit bigger. Rather than just thinking to the end of this year, what if we just 10x your company? What does your company look like? Yeah, because you're currently at 25 million.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  What does it look like in three years if you're doing 220 or 250 million? She's like, we would have to be like one of the best service based businesses. She's like, it's totally there. I say, that's the funny part is like I often ask like, is there? A pathway there. And often the answer is like, yeah, but it would have to be this way. And so I said, well, what does that do to your father's legacy products if you wanted to go this way? She's like, well, I've actually been working on this and like, I'm just going to put it away and ignore it. And I'm like, well, what would happen if you just sold it? What if you just let that go, that part of your identity go and just sold it? And she's like, literally audibly was like, she got audibly gasped. Cause like, she's just like, I've never considered that. And I was like, well, what would happen if you sold it? She's like, honestly, we have someone who we've worked with for 40 years that would love to buy us

• 50:54Speaker 00

  and like buy us at a huge price. He's just like, it's just so hard to let go because that's who we've always been. Right? If we sell that and we go on the services, we would have to redefine ourselves. And what's really interesting about the research on impossible goals is that the bigger goal forces you to redefine yourself.

• 51:09Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  It forces you to redefine who you are, what you do, who you do it for. Uh, it forces you to let go of that old identity, the old models, the old way of doing things. Right? So to your point, like even to your questions with me before, it's great because I have a PhD in organizational psychology, which is business psychology, but I did do more like broad, like just general future self. And so, and it was like, when I moved the goal really high, it forced me to remodel to like, let's just figure out how to apply this to business scaling. Right? And so like, it forced me to remodel or redefine who I am, what I talk about and what I do. And so that's just a very common thing when you elevate the future self to very high levels. It forces you to think in terms of a redefinition, a remodel. And most people are too afraid to own the new definition.

• 51:50Hala Taha?

  I loved this conversation. I want to be respectful of your time. We just have a few minutes left. So first, tell us about scaling.com. What kind of tools are available there? How can people leverage what they're learning in this book, The Science of Scaling? And then go on that platform and put into practice?

• 52:05Speaker 00

  So one thing that came with Joseph Nguyen and just his incredible strategy, like I said, he's one of the top self-published authors in the world right now. We actually went to my publisher, Hay House, and they are allowing us to give The Science of Scaling audiobook away for free. So if you went to scaling.com/audioobook, you can get The Science of Scaling audiobook for free, which I've never had that option available to me, but that's part of Pathways Thinking with Super Who's, right?

• 52:29Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  So that's scaling.com/audioobook free.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Full book, The Science of Scaling. But at scaling.com, one of the things that frustrated me, me being in some of the biggest coaching programs in the world for entrepreneurs is that, first off, none of them are goal-based. You don't go in and have a goal and then be held accountable to that goal and like strategize on that goal. Instead, you just go through tools and prompts and, I mean, they're very valuable, but, and so I wanted to create something that was like, no, you're going for a 10x goal or more, and you're gonna do it in three years or less, or you can't come. We're going for extreme scale here. And so we're gonna apply this framework, which even people like Tony Robbins said, this changes the game of business strategy and scaling. We're gonna help you apply this framework to your business, and we're gonna help you scale 10x more and achieve an impossible goal in three years. And actually, if you don't have an impossible goal, our framework doesn't work. Because it's based

• 53:17Speaker 00

  on everything we've been talking about is what I call strategic psychology. So if you're not willing to go for an impossible goal, our framework doesn't work for you. Because then you're gonna be operating from your past. And then you're not gonna be able to raise your floor and strip everything out and build a new model. And so, we wanted to create a performance-based program where people actually come in and where scaling is the norm, rather than it being like some rarity, right? Like where, here in some room and most people are growing at 10, 20%, and there's that one person who's flying, we just said, we're just gonna cap the environment. Our floor is that everyone's scaling. And so, the only people we let in are people who are willing to commit to something that massive, and then go through the process. And there's one-on-one strategizing and things like that. And there actually is accountability, like, we're like, now that's below the floor. You have to do

• 53:59Speaker 00

  the weekly reports. You get your monthly report. So, I just wanted to create something that I felt was reflective of true scaling, and I wanted to create an environment where that was the norm.

• 54:10Hala Taha?

  So basically, companies are applying to be in your program, and they go through your framework, and they're held accountable to hit these goals. Do you get like a percentage of their revenue or something like this?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  We don't. No. You know, we've had many people say we should, especially as we're scaling companies 10x, which we do. No. We have a flat fee. It's $2,000 a month, right? You go to scaling.com, you apply. If you're at a certain threshold, you have to, for us, the threshold is $500,000 per year revenue. So you have to have at least 500,000 revenue. A lot of the companies in ours are doing tens of millions, even hundreds of millions. But we want you to have at least a threshold of 500,000, and you have to be like the entrepreneur or a decision-maker, because the framework, by its nature, transforms your company. And so you have to be the one to implement it. And you've got to be committed to an impossible goal. Like, if you're not committed to an impossible goal... Then you're just in the wrong room and that's okay. There's lots of great business thought out there, so this would be a bad room for you.

• 55:01Hala Taha?

  This is just so interesting. I wish I had more time to talk to you about it.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  I'll come back anytime. I love talking to you. You're one of the most like high floor, like professional, like you are incredible what you do.

• 55:12Hala Taha?

  Oh, thank you.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Every time I've had a conversation with you, it's this is the gold standard, period.

• 55:16Hala Taha?

  Oh, thank you.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  It's just true.

• 55:17Hala Taha?

  So as you know, we end our show with two questions that I ask all my guests. Since you come on so often, maybe answer from the frame of this conversation.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Whatever.

• 55:27Hala Taha?

  What is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 55:33Speaker 00

  You have to have an impossible goal. If you already have some big 10 or 20 year dream, bring it to three years or less, because that will force you to start solving it now. It'll force you to let go of all your false requirements, your dead end paths. Obviously, an easy one is go get the free audiobook, you know, and just listen to it. But or listen to this and our other conversations, but have an impossible goal. If you don't have that, by virtue, you're operating from your past self.

• 55:57Hala Taha?

  I'm gonna go now and just try to think about our goal and how I can shorten the deadline and make it bigger.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  And then re-look at your system. See where it's where there's some bits that are a little complex.

• 56:07Hala Taha?

  Mm hmm, and increase my focus. There's so many next steps. What is your secret to profiting in life?

• 56:12Speaker 00

  First one for me is always God. God is my core relationship from there, my family. And then from there, choosing really big goals that stretch me and give my life purpose and force me to become better, force me to become more humble. So, starting at the core and another one that really helps me profit is that, kind of like I already said it with Blake and Joseph and even our other partners, I genuinely am happy to make other people more successful than me. Like, it doesn't need to be about me. And I'm happy to set up games and systems where other people and hopefully superhoos can be enormously more successful than me. To me, that's very profitable, but it's also very enjoyable.

• 56:53Hala Taha?

  So everybody can go to scaling.com to learn more about that. I get the free audiobook, The Science of Scaling. Where can everybody learn more about you more generally?

• 57:02Speaker 00

  benjaminhardy.com. It's just my regular website. But I think that honestly, the easiest way to learn about current me and future me is just that audiobook.

• 57:09Hala Taha?

  Thank you, Ben. It was such a pleasure.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  It's always a pleasure.

• 57:17Hala Taha?

  Yeah fam, Dr. Benjamin Hardy never disappoints. Whenever he comes on the show, he delivers such powerful insights, and today was certainly no exception. And one of the most powerful ideas we explored today was the science of scaling. As Ben explained, most entrepreneurs are stuck solving the wrong problems because they're chasing linear incremental goals. But 10x growth requires a complete reframe. It's not about doing more, it's about doing differently. Real scaling happens when you simplify, focus, and build something that can grow without breaking under its own complexity. We also dove deep into the idea of impossible goals, not just big goals, but impossible ones. Because when you set a goal that feels out of reach and give it a tight deadline,

• 58:00Hala Taha?

  you activate a different level of thinking. This is called pathway thinking. You start shedding false steps, exposing your real challenges, and aligning your actions with what actually matters. Time, in that sense, becomes a psychological lever, and when you stop solving the wrong problems, you can start scaling for real. You think more creatively, and you can align better to your goals. And another game-changing concept Ben talked about is raising your floor. That's what separates professionals from amateurs. It's not how high you can reach, it's how solid your baseline is. Once your impossible goal is set, the pathway becomes clearer. That means identifying the right model, aligning with the right people, and cutting the noise. Because complex systems don't scale, focus

• 58:44Hala Taha?

  does. And the more you can filter down to the essential few, the faster you can grow. So yeah fam, I want you to ask yourself, are you solving the right problems? Are you setting impossible goals that stretch and scare you in the best way? And have you raised your floor high enough that excellence now becomes your new normal? Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting. If you listened, learned, and profited from this powerful conversation with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, then send it to somebody who you know is ready to think bigger, move faster, and scale smarter. And hey, if this episode helped shift your mindset, do us a solid and leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It's one of the Best ways to support the show and help more people discover this podcast.

• 59:28Hala Taha?

  And if you prefer to watch this podcast instead, you've got a couple of options. Of course, you can head over to YouTube. We've got almost 60,000 subscribers on YouTube now, which is exciting. And we're also recently now on Spotify Video. At least all of my in-person content will be on Spotify Video if you're a premium user. So if you like watching your podcasts on video, you've got those options. You can also connect with me on Instagram at @yapwithhala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name, it's Hala Taha. And of course, special thanks to my Yap production team. I love everybody in my Yap Media family. Thank you so much for all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.