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If your business looks busy but still feels financially shaky, there’s a good chance you don’t have a growth problem, you have a constraint problem.
In this episode of Business Growth Lab, Sam and Leon unpack why so many smart coaches and consultants feel stuck even when they’re doing “all the right things.” The issue isn’t effort, motivation, or another strategy, it’s removing the wrong constraint at the wrong time.
You’ll hear why pushing for speed before the foundations are ready creates instability, rebuilds, and unnecessary stress, even when revenue is coming in. Sam breaks down the most common scaling mistakes, why cheap or short-term decisions quietly slow long-term growth, and the exact order to remove constraints so your business can actually hold the next level.
This conversation is for business owners who are done chasing breakthrough months and quick wins, and are ready to build something stable, scalable, and sustainable.
You don’t need more tactics.
You don’t need a miracle month.
You need to identify the real constraint, and fix it in the right order.
WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER IN THIS EPISODE:
- 06:10 – Why scale is a choice, not a shortcut
- 10:31 – How to diagnose conversion issues properly and stop producing content that can’t do its job
- 12:34 – The two non-negotiables that make growth sustainable
- 14:22 – How marketing creates unrealistic timelines around success
- 16:26 – The money conversation most business owners avoid, and how it quietly limits growth
- 23:40 – Why so many businesses stall around 10K months
- 24:56 – The hidden cost of cheap tools and duct-tape systems
- 29:16 – Organic vs paid growth, and how money buys speed
- 37:10 – The exact constraint order that removes bottlenecks cleanly
- 42:43 – Why stability is built through weekly rhythm, not heroic sprints
Resources
The Bottleneck Audit – If scaling feels harder than it should, this audit will show you the single constraint limiting your growth and the next actions to fix it.
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
CONNECT WITH LEON FLITTON
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley 0:00
As an entrepreneur, we are wired differently. I actually wonder if every single one of us have ADHD quite truthfully, but we are wired differently, and we do get bored with doing the boring things. That’s a thing, and I’m pretty sure that every single one of us, at some point has known what we were doing and actually gone out and broken our business because we were bored, and don’t suggest it. Gonna recommend it. No, I do not recommend 10 out of 10 do not recommend and I think that instead of thinking I’m bored, let’s break it or I’m bored with these foundations and just refining getting them right, think about your business and your life a little bit differently. You are doing the boring foundations in your business, and rather than breaking it to try and get your excitement or your giggles, go and get your incitement or giggles somewhere else. This is not
Leon Flitton 1:04
the year that Sam’s going to bring your business. Everyone go get Barbies.
Samantha Riley 1:14
I’m Samantha Riley, and welcome to the Business Growth Lab, where visionary entrepreneurs come to experiment, evolve and expand what’s possible. Can you believe we are already in the second month of 2026
Leon Flitton 1:31
No, you know what I did this last year went right. We’ve got to get onto it. Because last year I felt like it was like the middle of of January, and I was already losing the year, and I feel like happened again.
Samantha Riley 1:44
Where did January? I know, and that fire horse energy doesn’t even come into the middle of this month. And then I think it’s going to speed up again, right? Like, holy moly. Is going to be a very quick year. I can I can feel it in my waters
Leon Flitton 2:02
way too fast. Yes, it does start speeding up. That’s a bit scary. Absolutely.
Samantha Riley 2:08
Hey, I’ve got a question for you, something a little bit fun to open the show with today. So get ready. I don’t think you’re going to be expecting What’s something that you were weirdly obsessed with as a kid,
Leon Flitton 2:22
you know, I really like building stuff, and so I love, yes, I love Lego. I still like Lego,
Samantha Riley 2:33
ah, so you were weirdly obsessed with it as a kid, and now I actually buy Leon Lego for date night, and we sit it’s not how I was expecting to be doing date nights in my 50s. Yeah, also true. But yeah, it is fun. It is fun. So I love that it’s weirdly obsessed with that. And that makes sense, because you’ve got how much behind you.
Leon Flitton 3:00
There’s a fair bit, actually. That’s not all of it. You can’t see, most of it, hidden away.
Samantha Riley 3:09
That’s so what about you? Oh, I don’t know that it, I would say weirdly obsessed with but definitely obsessed with Barbie dolls. Yeah, I was like the typical girl that did ballet and played with Barbies like you couldn’t get any more. You know, I can’t even think of how you say it. I’ll say typical than that. Really can you. And to be I don’t have a Barbie anymore, but to be honest, I have actually, I think it was about six months ago, actually looked into getting a collection of them, because they actually release them in collections. I love them. I love Barbies.
Leon Flitton 3:53
Is there any like, crazy, really expensive ones? Like, you know they have like, yeah,
Samantha Riley 4:01
I don’t know enough about it to tell you which ones they are. I do know that our daughter, and you probably don’t even know this, was collecting them for a while, because there’s certain ones that have got numbers, and she had, she’d collected a whole set, and she sold it for 1000s of dollars not that long ago, only for years ago.
Leon Flitton 4:22
I didn’t know that interesting. Yeah. Did you have a particularly favorite Barbie?
Samantha Riley 4:27
Though I did not. When a Barbie is out of the outfit that she comes in her box in, she looked they all look exactly the same. So it’s not actually like a Barbie that I liked, because I just liked all of them. And I love to have all the clothes and all the shoes and our family was, I’ll say our family was poor. I think I’ve said it before on this podcast, our nickname at school for me. My sister and my brother was the poor kids, which was very embarrassing, but it meant that I did not have the Barbie pony, I did not have the Barbie camper van. I didn’t have the Barbie bus or the Barbie sports car. Like I didn’t have any of the Barbie stuff. I had the most generic, like the cheapest
Samantha Riley 5:26
walking Oh God, well, no, no, we were too poor as well. We just had Barbie expensive dude. That means multiples. Did not have multiple I actually did have multiples. I did have multiple Barbies. But, yeah, I did love Barbie and, no, I don’t. I don’t have Barbie anymore.
Leon Flitton 5:51
Exactly, room for those in the house with the shelves on it, the collection
Samantha Riley 5:59
totally I feel like, you know, our word for the year a few years ago was fun, and it’s not our word for the year this year, our year, our word for 2026, is precision. But I also feel like, behind the scenes, there’s also a lot of fun happening. You know, I’ve gone back to dancing. I’ve decided to start playing golf, which means I definitely need lessons, because I have no idea what I’m doing, and probably no golf course wants me to go and rip up their green because I have no idea.
Samantha Riley 6:36
I’ve got a painting in the family room that I’m doing on an easel. I’m doing all sorts of really fun stuff this year. I’ve just gone, you know what? I just I want to have a lot of fun this year. So even though it’s not our word for the year, I feel like I’m very much leaning into it.
Leon Flitton 6:52
That’s great. I like it. Like it. It’s okay. As an adult, you can just choose your own hobbies, and you can choose whatever you like. Give me Barbie, exactly whatever, jet ski, whatever, exactly.
Samantha Riley 7:06
Let’s talk about choosing, because we’re talking today about scale, and specifically how real scale takes time. And the reason I’ve used the choosing to go into this episode is that you get to choose how you do this. And I guess I want to start with this. And I think last week we talked about not downloading the all of the lead magnets and trying to paste them together to create a business. But I think it’s really important to ask yourself, if all I needed was one more hack to get my business to scale to 30k 40k 50k 100k months wouldn’t have worked by now. Like, really think about that, because I think so many people get in the loop of, oh, I just need this one more shiny thing, and we’re going to have an anti marketers episode today, because if someone does promise you the shortcut to scaling, really check out what they’re skipping. Because systems stability, like building solid foundations. They don’t just need a trick. They need solid foundations. And it takes time. It takes time, and time isn’t sexy for a marketer to sell, right? So we’re going to dive into this.
Leon Flitton 8:37
And what you mean is that I was gonna say there’s no magic pill I make. The marketers always tell you that you can make seven figures overnight if you just buy my day. Yeah, cool.
Samantha Riley 8:47
Yeah, yeah, just do this one thing and, like, you’ll be totally filled tomorrow with a waitlist of 15,000 people.
Leon Flitton 8:55
Yeah? And we just talked about the hack there before. Like, if it was one more hack, wouldn’t it have worked by now? And I think it’s like the opposite of, I’m going to call it doing the boring stuff.
Samantha Riley 9:07
So, yeah, it really, really is. And I know that I’ve got a really good friend, and we’ve talked about this, and he said, you know, as an entrepreneur, we are wired differently. I actually wonder if every single one of us have ADHD quite truthfully, but we are wired differently, and we do get bored with doing the boring things. That’s a thing, and I’m pretty sure that every single one of us at some point has known what we were doing and actually gone out and broken our business because we were bored, and don’t suggest it.
Leon Flitton 9:44
Gonna recommend it.
Samantha Riley 9:45
What I do suggest, no, do not recommend. 10 out of 10 do not recommend. And I think that instead of thinking I’m bored, let’s break it or I’m bored. With these foundations and just refining getting them, getting them right, think about your business and your life a little bit differently. So you you are doing the boring foundations in your business, and rather than breaking it to try and get your excitement or your giggles go and get your excitement or giggles somewhere else. Can we see the theme this episode? And what we’re talking about this is not the year that Sam’s gonna
Leon Flitton 10:30
break lads, everyone go get
Samantha Riley 10:38
Barbies. Oh, dear. So I think that it’s really important to talk about because every single person that’s in our world, Leon you would agree they’re really, really good at what they do, right, like our clients, blow me away with how amazingly talented and experienced they are. And I find that everyone in our world that comes into our orbit is but their income can still feel fragile and unpredictable. And if that’s you right now, just understand that if you’re doing content that doesn’t convert, doing more of it isn’t going to change it adding some shiny new type of content, platform or way of putting your content together isn’t going to change it, because there’s certain things in the foundational areas of your business that probably need to be fixed.
Leon Flitton 11:35
First, I worked for corporate for a long time, and I was laughing that day because I saw an ad post on LinkedIn. I don’t even know why I was looking at it, but they want to employ someone in corporate that had entrepreneurial spirit. And I thought that is just so not going to work. Also, too. You can imagine entrepreneur going into corporate and then being hamstrung.
Samantha Riley 11:56
It’s, oh yeah, there’s very there’s a big difference between entrepreneurial and corporate. However, in say, in saying that, I think that there is a little bit of substance there. I think where you’re going is that entrepreneurs make decisions fast, they pivot, they change, they get feedback, and implement it immediately. Where a corporate, it’s, it’s very much like trying to turn a cruise ship around. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, it takes, like, I don’t know, half an hour to turn the ship around. It takes, it feels like forever. You know, by the time it slows down and turns around. And you know, as entrepreneurs, we move a lot faster, but at the same time, I think that sometimes we do need to slow it down and just really get the foundations right, because nothing of substance is is built overnight. Real results take time to create so they’re sustainable. And if your business isn’t sustainable, it’s not there. Well, it goes without saying, or I do, it’s not there for the long run. We don’t need to explain that. And it’s just interesting. The other day, I remember I was saying to you, oh, it’s just occurred to me, I haven’t seen, you know, I’m not going to say real names here. I haven’t seen that specific person with that big name for a while. Hang on a minute. How long has it been? Oh, five years. Let’s do a quick chat. GPT where that person went. And like, once I’d thought about that person, another name came into my head, another name came into my head, another name came into my head, and they were people that seemed like they had come out of nowhere, really, really quickly, with really big, multi, seven figure businesses. And I looked up every single one of them, and they all were but because their business wasn’t built on sustainability, and because it wasn’t aligned, and they just completely gone, like gung ho all in and just, you know, made a lot of sales very quickly. Number one, they burnt themselves, because you can’t there was problems with delivery. There was problems with people not getting what they paid for, because they were just building it so quick, and that all the people that I had sort of remembered had all gone, and they’re all doing other things now, they sort of just came in and,
Leon Flitton 14:30
yeah, it was actually really interesting to look at that. So do you think that part of this issue, or the want to scale overnight, is almost caused by marketers? Is that what you would say?
Samantha Riley 14:44
Yeah, it is what I would say. Because I think that for anyone that hadn’t been in business before, they’re told by marketers that you can have this thing and it can happen quickly. So of course, you believe it, because that’s what you’ve been told. Right? But in actual fact, most of the time, if those results have happened, it’s from someone that’s maybe already been in business, or they’ve been in business for a number of years, and they’ve just pivoted, and it’s all just fallen into place. It’s not always the entire story. And so what happens is people go, All right, well, let’s do this, and they go for it, and either get frustrated because it doesn’t work, or it does work and it breaks right. The point isn’t to grow fast. The point is to grow in a way that you can actually hold, that you can actually sustain. So if you want to dopamine hit and a quick win story, you going to hate this episode. If you want to scale to stable 30k months as your new baseline, so you can scale up to seven figure years, then you’re my person where that’s what we’re here because overnight is really tempting, but having that story at the back of your head and shaming yourself that it’s not working is going to keep you stuck.
Leon Flitton 16:12
Yeah. So what is it that you think that is probably like the key factors that make people want to shift so far
Samantha Riley 16:21
fast, because we all want to make money. Well, that’s true. Like, I don’t even need to listen to the rest of that answer, because the question, sorry, because we all want to make money. And even the people that say they don’t want to make money still want to make money, because there’s some sort of impact. You know, I don’t need that money, but I want to be able to help this, or I want to have the freedom for choice, or I want to, you know, donate my time to this cause, whatever it is. I mean, even if you want to donate your time to a cause, you still need money to be able to create lifestyle. Or maybe it’s you want the freedom to make choice. Well, that requires money so that you can make choice that you like. So I think essentially, it’s all like, I want money faster, and I don’t see a problem with that either. I think that we don’t talk about money openly enough, and the fact that we do want it like money does solve problems. Like, if I’ve got a anyone in my family that needs to go overseas because they’re ill and they need some sort of, you know, amazing treatment that’s only available overseas, I want to be able to provide that to them, because I love my family so much. You know, if I get an offer to go and join my kids traveling around Australia for a year, for example, I want to be able to say yes, and I don’t want that that thought of I can’t do that because I don’t have that money to be in the way. So yeah, I think it’s money.
Leon Flitton 17:59
Think you’re right. So I don’t think, for some reason in Australia that it most people feel okay talking about money, and I don’t know why, because that’s why you have a business, so you can earn money, so you can do, do cool stuff, live, whatever it is that you want to achieve, help people. Yeah, we just don’t seem to talk about it that much. And I don’t know why that is.
Samantha Riley 18:20
I think there’s a lot of beliefs and a lot of stuff. I’ll say that instead of swear words, there’s a lot of stuff that’s laid on us as kids like I remember, like when we were kids, my dad would walk in on a Thursday night from work, and he had cash in a little paper envelope. I don’t know, lines on the front, Yeah, mine wasn’t, I never, never got cash. It always went into my account, so, you know. But he used to walk in and he’d put his money on the counter, and mum would just pick it up so quick, and it was like, hidden straight, like straight in her apron pocket, because she’d be cooking dinner when he got home, straight in the apron pocket. It was never talked about. Nothing was said. He didn’t say anything to her about it. She didn’t say anything to him about it. There was nothing said in front of us about it. Money wasn’t talked about. And that’s the way their parents would have been. It wasn’t that they were doing like anything on purpose, you know, it’s what their parents did. And I even remember with my first business, and, you know, we were really successful in our first business. And I remember being so excited one day, and me and my business partner at the time, were, were talking to my parents about, Oh, we’re so excited. We’ve done this thing, and we’ve created, you know, like, all the exact this extra money through it. And we were like, it was celebration station, right? And he turned around, and he just with and it was, I’ll never forget it, because it was so it. Bitter. And he just said, What do you want to be rich or something? And I was like, Oh, well, yeah, but that that reaction and those words to me didn’t match, yeah, does that make sense? And so I knew never talk about money with my parents again, because, yeah, I did want to be rich, and that doesn’t make me evil, or it doesn’t make me a bad person, or, you know, all of those things.
Leon Flitton 20:26
Yeah, as an entrepreneur as well, I don’t think you can, well, talk to your family about a lot of these things. I just just don’t think you can. And I heard, I’ve heard, like quite a number of other friends in their in business as well. Say exactly the same thing, that they just don’t because of that, they just don’t get it.
Samantha Riley 20:46
So, yeah, you have to be really careful who you speak to business about. I think I got all of those words, put them in a hat, threw it up in the air, and took them whenever they wear that wherever they fell. That didn’t make sense. But I think everyone should know what I’m talking about, what I’m trying before.
Leon Flitton 21:07
A number of times, there’s all these things that we come up with, these in these episodes, that I really think we should come back to at some stage, because I think that in itself, you know, for as far as mindset is concerned, not you jumbling words up, but not talking about money, and
Samantha Riley 21:20
I was wondering what you were talking about.
Leon Flitton 21:23
Then B roll bloopers coming out. But I think, yeah, there’s, there’s, that’s a definite thing to be aware of as an entrepreneur, that you just can’t talk to just anyone, and finding your people is important that community. So because they get
Samantha Riley 21:37
it totally because we’re in quite a few communities and, like, how much are we on a high when we get home from going out to lunch with or, you know, going to an event with people, and you know, they’re sharing their wins. And instead of getting that, that, Oh my God, what you want to be rich or something, or whatever the version is of that, we’re like, oh my goodness, that is so awesome, and you are genuinely so happy for that person, yeah. But also, you come home on a high going, Oh my God. Like, I can, I can do this. Like, you know, you just come home full of confidence, and it’s the proof that what you’re doing does work, and you are a good person. And you know all the things, because, you know the people that we’re surrounded with, they’ve all got hearts of gold, big hearts, very generous hearts, all very well off and always striving to be better than they were the day before, whatever that means for them. Absolutely.
Leon Flitton 22:40
And I know we’ve got off track a little bit now, but I think it was important to talk about that because that that mindset coupled on top of everything else, when you’re, if you’re, you know, a business owner that’s trying to get something up and running, and you’re trying to scale, and you’re under pressure, and you’ve got no one to talk to, then that becomes a big deal, because you can’t talk through it with anyone, you feel like you’re by yourself, you know? And so, well, I suppose that’s when things you can get reactive, because you’re not able to unload that, you know, that mental weight. So, you know?
Samantha Riley 23:14
Yeah, well, there’s a lot of fear there. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Like, it’s not, it’s mental weight and it’s fear. Let’s face it, I’ve got to be honest. I cannot remember who said this, but it was a clip I was watching last week, and it may have been Alex hormozi. I’m not 100% sure, but it was essentially one of the reasons that most people get stuck at 10,000 a month or less is because they take every single piece, like every single dollar of that money, and they use it for in their life. They spend it essentially. The people that grow and scale understand that a portion of that money needs to be reinvested back into the business, like it has to be. There is no way to that. You can do it without doing that. Yeah, yeah.
Leon Flitton 24:12
Do you think that the the ones that are probably like spending all that money also then start to rely on things like quick fixes, like, kind of the next shiny object to try and get their business to go because they’re spending all their money, but then
Samantha Riley 24:26
they need more. Yeah, and I think those quick fixes as well are like those sticky tape solutions that we were talking about a few weeks ago. It’s like, I don’t really want to spend $80 in that piece of software right now, because there’s this $5 version that’s cheaper, but that $5 version requires an extra 80 hours of work to try and manually, like, create the like, fill the gap rather than All right, so that $80 software, I don’t need the full. The capability of it right now, but if I build that system now, I know that in two months time, I’m going to be sweet, yeah. So it’s like acting like the 30k 50k a month business owner now, so that that’s what it turns into. And I think that it’s funny because as we’re speaking, we were going into this episode with like strategy, but, you know, it’s all mindset. Every single piece of it is mindset and perspective of how we think about these things. And it’s like we have to show up as that future person now, and sometimes it is going to be uncomfortable spending money on some of those systems to create the stability and the foundational pieces so that you can continue to grow. Yeah.
Leon Flitton 25:55
So I actually think there’s multiple costs to doing things that way. One of them, as you just mentioned, is time, which is a huge cost, because every minute that you have that’s spent doing the wrong thing is a massive, massive cost to you. The other side of it is the and something we see quite often is grabbing a product that barely does the job because it’s 510, $15 whatever it is, rather than 8090, 100, $200 for example. And that product that you should have bought has the capability to scale with you as you grow, whereas the other product just doesn’t. And what ends up happening is you either have add ons that cost you a crap ton of money, so that’s how you pocket Yes, or it costs you a crap ton of time, or it costs you both, or it costs you clients because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do for you. So there’s a lot of involved in that.
Samantha Riley 26:52
Yeah, do you know the cost? One of the biggest costs is rebuilding, so getting a piece of software that doesn’t quite do the job that you use and duct tape it together. But not only does it not really do the job now, but as you grow it doesn’t work at all. And you need to not only pay more for a piece of software, but you need to rebuild it as well, and that is really expensive. I see this a lot with people choosing free CRMs or, like, email management, yep, the one that I hate, Mail Chimp. A lot of people go, I’ll just choose Mail Chimp, because it’s free and, well, a it’s free until it’s not free, yep. And it actually gets really expensive really quickly, and you still don’t have the full capability in app purchases say no to the chip.
Leon Flitton 27:53
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s definitely yes. You can start a business with just a phone and not much else, but that only gets you so far. And that may have also been something that was actually true a few years ago, but now it’s probably not. In that particular case there of having a phone and nothing else and going for it, maybe a social media account, your trust factor was going to be super low as well. So you know, in that case
Samantha Riley 28:22
there, you were saying something really interesting that I want to bring up here, because it almost goes against what we’re saying. And I think that I do want to bring it up because there is no black and white in business. Yeah, true, and that as someone that’s been in business for over 30 years in multiple industries, there’s always an exception to every rule, right? And you and I were talking about paid marketing, and you were talking about the fact that meta ads now are like what yellow pages were back in the 90s. It’s you need to put money into an area so that people can find you that was yellow pages back in the 90s, and it’s meta ads currently. I don’t know what it’s going to be in a few years, but that’s what it is currently. And you were talking about the difference between organic and paid. Can you explain it? Because you’re going to do it so much better
Leon Flitton 29:21
than me. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, there’s a couple of things here. One of them particularly was the fact that I know with the first stores that you had, you had quite a substantial outlay to get the best advertising Yellow Pages, and it was a lot. And if we talk about the timeframe, it was quite a number of years ago. Now, I’d hate to think what that is now, it would have been absolutely massive.
Samantha Riley 29:43
So with yellow pages, back in the day, whoever paid for the biggest ad automatically went to the top of the listing. And of course, you wanted to be at the top of the listing without being I don’t know if you remember this a furniture. Yeah. So unless you you know, and even then, they were still only at the top of the line listing, right? But when you went for the the graph graphic ads, the bigger the graphic AD, the higher it came up in the listing. So the more you paid, obviously, the bigger ad you got, and you were at the top. If you paid for that ad, you automatically kept that position. No one could get ahead of you in that position, unless they bought a bigger ad the next year. Does that make sense? So to be able to get to the top, the bill was quite high, and we made the gutsy move to go to the top, because we were like a newer kid on the block, and the two, our two biggest competitors, had been around for years and years and years. One of them had been around, like I was three years old, and in that store, like they’d been around for a long time. And then, you know, I came onto the scene. Oh, we’re gonna have the best. And so we paid more to get that Yellow Pages add to the top, yeah.
Leon Flitton 31:19
Think about being on the number one spot in like Google search, or being on page seven? Yeah, no one goes past page two, even, I don’t think does anyone go to page two?
Samantha Riley 31:31
Oh, occasionally I do, but most that hasn’t been for a long time. Yeah, be honest.
Leon Flitton 31:36
So, but that you can see why that will be so important to be at the top there. So that’s that’s paid advertising of a day. Now, you could have also just put a sign up on the front of your shop and left out that. Now it would have been mighty slow, right? Like that. Yeah. Much going on at all? Because only people that drive past you that happened to be looking for a dance shop on that particular street, that particular street, that particular time, I actually noticed it so really slow where, as opposed to, you went to where the people were that were looking for the dance shop, and you advertise there makes way more sense. The other part of it is, there’s, you know, drag racing. We always go, how fast you want to go. It’s just a question of money. Well, let me put it this way. Yeah, you want to get from here, so we’re in Sydney, and you want to get to the Gold Coast. Now you could walk and it’s free. That sounds Yeah. Well, I don’t about walking, but you could walk right and it’s free. No, no, take your while, Yep, yeah. Or you can pay and you can Uber to the airport and get a flight up and be there pretty quickly. And I always think, which way do you want to go? But then you can see that organic versus paid going on. Well.
Samantha Riley 32:52
To take that even further, you could catch Do they still have Greyhound busses? Yeah, busses will run. You catch a you could catch a bus. I’ve done a bus from Adelaide to Melbourne, it is mighty slow, because they stop and they’re just like, awful. I don’t think I’d ever do a bus overnight again. That’s faster than walking. Then you can do the car, and that probably costs a little bit more because you’re paying for all the fuel, and that will get you there a little bit faster, but that’s a little bit more expensive. And then you can, you know, get on the plane, and that’s more expensive again. So money is buying you speed, yeah, and I think I really liked the way you explained this when we were just chatting yesterday, because it’s absolutely the case. I just and and this came up in our conversation because I’d seen a post by someone the other day that was a post by someone we know, and we know the story behind the scenes, and they put into a business that, essentially, you can start with nothing. They put $180,000 into it. And I was like, Oh, wow, that’s actually quite a lot to put into it in and it was in six months. They put 180,000 into it in six months, but had a seven figure business within 12 Yeah. So it Yeah, money by speed, yeah.
Leon Flitton 34:14
You’re saying before as well, that a lot of things are relative, and not everything is what it seems in the background. And if you don’t have a spare 180k in cash to throw into whatever you need to do with it, then it will it’s always a trade off between like time and money. So neither way is incorrect. One way may be faster or slower, but in each particular circumstance, it will be what will be according to the the assets and the what you have access to at a time. So the other part I was just thinking about then as well is that when people go trying to go fast without proper foundations, in which is what we see quite a lot. It’s like, you know, we just talked about not having the right CRM, and it brought. X, and it’s cost you money big time. Down the track, you lose clients, or don’t get leads, or whatever the case may be, is that you don’t have the foundations in place, you won’t be able to actually scale it without breaking almost everything totally.
Samantha Riley 35:15
There are some things that you must, must, must have in place, and they need to the constraint needs to be removed in order. So I think this is the the next part of scale that that goes wrong is that everyone goes, Oh my God, I don’t have time to do everything. None of us do. And that trying to do everything is also keeping you stuck, rather than trying to do everything, just concentrate on the first constraint and do one to two projects around clearing that constraint, systemize it and then move to the next constraint. Because if you’re trying to do everything, it won’t work. I know it’s not great for the ego, because you want to have all the fancy things, but you’re far better off just to work on one or two things at a time, because they’ll compound. And it might feel like forever as you’re moving through but when you look back at the end of 12 months, if you’ve just been removing constraints one at a time, and one to two projects at a time, but moving fast, making decisions fast, like really going deep and getting those constraints removed, looking back over the year, be like, Whoa. I cannot believe we did that much in a year. Yeah, it only feels like a long time when you’re in it. I just want to quickly talk about the constraints in order. And the first one is alignment. It’s alignment with you and your being you and your niche, also being really clear on your niche, like, what is it? Who are they? Who’s that ideal client? Is your messaging aligned? Are you? Is your messaging on point, and what is your offer? So it’s alignment with you, your niche, ideal client, messaging offer. That’s constraint one. Constraint two is lead generation. You can’t generate leads unless you’re really, really clear on your offer, your messaging, your niche, ideal client. So lead generation is the second constraint. The third constraint is sales because there’s no point removing a sales constraint if you don’t have the leads coming in. And then the fourth constraint is team that you need team to be able to scale. And if you remove the constraints in that order, you will have a solid foundation. But if you remove the constraints out of order, it’s a little bit shaky and it’s a little bit broken, and you won’t really have solid foundations. So as you remove the constraint, you’re Systemising it as you go. And it sounds so simple, because it actually is. You’re just systemizing one thing at a time.
Leon Flitton 38:10
If you try and do all the things at once, you’re going to have anxiety blowout, for sure, guaranteed when you go to do something that’s
Samantha Riley 38:19
quite and we all do, right? You and I both do as well every now and again, because we’re human. I know you won’t believe that, but we are. So we still have mental breakdowns and overwhelm and tears and all the rest of things, until we listen to our own episodes and go, No, it’s okay. We got it.
Leon Flitton 38:40
Yeah, because you want, you want things done, like now, yesterday, whenever it was, you want everything done and finalized. But I think the truth of it is that that you can’t do it all in one go that quickly, and especially if you’re in startup mode, if you know what you’re doing, you’re very well versed in the field, you’re in all that kind of thing. But if you start off with one person running a business, and you’re trying to get moved trying to get moving, you can’t go and wear all the hats and do all things. Good way to have mental breakdown if you try it. But yeah, it really won’t, won’t get you there, and if it does, it’s probably seconds away from disaster. So what’s that show seconds before disaster?
Samantha Riley 39:17
And have you ever heard anything they say also those video
Leon Flitton 39:21
clips, they go second supporters asked, or someone’s all nice and calm, then they get washed.
Samantha Riley 39:25
I thought you were gonna say, oh, it could be something I just made up in my head,
Leon Flitton 39:30
probably tick tock or something. And I think I learned this when I was working in corporate, because you have these tasks you need to do, like the, you know, if you’re like, you know, the site manager and the group manager will come in and go, I need this fixed. And you have to have to stand your ground and go, Oh no, that’s gonna take us six weeks to do that, because they would think and and try and push you around and go, Oh, well, that needs to be fixed right now. Yeah. And reality is no, unless you want to blow the hell out of your wages and whatever else and wreck everything else on the way through, it’s not going to happen. You need to do it piece by piece by piece, a bit every day. And then you get to where you need to go. And while you’re doing that, nothing else is falling over as well. So just because you’re focusing on your niche, for example, and trying to get that sort out, you can’t let everything else everything else go. It likes to keep ticking along. No, that’s right, so yeah, a good bit of planning, good bit of realization and and working out what you can actually accomplish in that in the time you have without breaking yourself, is something to consider.
Samantha Riley 40:39
Totally Yeah, because stability is a weekly rhythm. It’s not a heroic sprint or let’s burn everything to the ground, or any other crazy metaphor that feels horrible and hot and fast like it really is a weekly rhythm. And you know, bringing it back to how we started this episode. It can be boring because it really is just getting the foundations right. It isn’t anything fancy, it’s not shiny, it’s not sparkly. It is just getting the foundations systemized and running well. And it might seem boring and it might seem slow, but like I said, coming out the other side, like the day that I figured out in my dance wear stores that I actually didn’t need to go in was a very weird feeling, because I put so much work. It like right from day one, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to build a business that didn’t require me. I knew that I actually like sort of the business behind the business, not actually like showing up and doing everything I I love creating systems. I love refining and making things better. It’s, I guess it’s part of my human design, right? That’s, that’s the way that I’m designed to be so right from the beginning, even when I was in there all day, every day, and I it was just me. There was no staff. You know, seven years later, you know, hiring that last person, realizing I’d created every single system in that entire business, from, you know, opening the store to closing the store, to rosters to ordering. There was systems for every single supplier. And we have, we had over 70 suppliers, and there was a system for every single one of product builds. And you know how much people could spend? There were systems for everything. I never needed to go in. And it was, it actually was a weird day to go, wow, I’ve actually done it, but also I’m bored.
Leon Flitton 42:47
Well, you really could ask yourself, you know, do you want to be the business owner, or do you want to be another worker? And I think that’s and it’s also a hard mind shift to make as well. And you said that was a bit odd that day. It was we didn’t have to go in. And if you look at it now and go, if you’re scaling that certain points, you have to hand over stuff and not do that stuff, yeah, and move back into be the business owner and the CEO and the CFO and all those things. Move back that way, rather than being the one that gets in there and does the admin so and to me, that’s an exciting thing to look forward to when you’re starting a business, you know, when you’re moving it through. So I think that’s actually pretty cool.
Samantha Riley 43:29
Yeah, totally, absolutely. So you don’t need a miracle month, you need a build. Year, it’s about building foundations slowly, one piece at a time, and luckily for us, it’s a universal one year. So it’s literally the perfect time to do this, like we’ve got energy on our side. The energy is supporting us. So it’s something that I’m so super passionate about, because I know that this works because I’ve done it multiple times, and I know that not enough people do this because they get caught in marketing hype, and then all they do is burn out. They shame themselves because they’re like, how come I can’t make it work for me, man. Like, just like I said, it’s a build year. Just get in. Just get one constraint at a time. Systemize it, move on, and your business will thank you for years to come, and you’ll not only have the money, but you’ll have the time as well. And even though I said we all want the money, the money will give us the time, and that is truly what we want. I think everyone wants the time, but it’s the money that buys you
Leon Flitton 44:44
that Yeah, yeah. I think one of the biggest things you can you can do is realize that the money gives you the time and looking back at or forward, even when people tell you different things. Remember that they’re relative to their situation or someone else’s situation, and no one is exactly the same. You’re not all in the same place. So this seven figures overnight thing, maybe, if you want to throw half a million dollars at it, it might work, might not, but that might not be where you’re at either. So everything’s relative to where you’re at at the time. So put your unbiased hat on for a minute and then actually ask yourself the questions. Have a good look at it and go, where am I at? What am I doing? You know, is that actually possible in that timeframe, doing it, to make changes all those things, but don’t just assume and go full bore into something, thinking that because that guy over there said it that it’s okay
Samantha Riley 45:44
totally just choose the right next step. Stay with it long enough to compound, and you’ll create something sustainable. Now I mentioned clearing the constraints in the right order, and if you’re listening and you’re like, that’s great, but I don’t actually know which one of those constraints is mine right now, because they can hide a little sometimes what you think is your constraint isn’t actually a constraint. I put together a bottleneck order which will help you to instantly, well instantly, in two minutes, discover the number one thing that’s holding you back from scaling to moving through those 510, 20k, months and getting the next three action steps to unlock your growth in the next 30 days. Like I said, it takes just two minutes. It reveals that number one bottleneck, and it gives you your next three steps, not more information, because you don’t actually need more information. You just need to know, what is it and what do I need to do next? And you can get a copy of that, Samantha Riley, dot global forward slash audit. And of course, we’ll pop that in the show notes so that you can go and download that. But it’s definitely worth spending just two minutes. Actually, I’m not going to say spending investing two minutes to go and discover what your number one bottleneck is, or your number one constraint, so that you can just focus, use this universal one year to focus on that constraint, fix it, build a system, move on to the next one by the end of the year, if you have hit your goals and doubled it, and you’ve got a systemized business. How would that feel like? It butterflies in my stomach. So cool, Leon, thanks for hanging out and riffing with me for another episode. It did not go anywhere in the direction that I thought so. Thank you for being my partner in Riley for another episode.
Leon Flitton 47:40
But please go and do the bottleneck audit. It’s got some great questions in it. I really like what they ask, and I think you can just relax and be honest with yourself about it, and it’s something that’s really going to help you find that next one thing and keep you moving forwards.
Samantha Riley 47:58
Thanks for joining us for today’s episode. We look forward to seeing you next week for another episode of Business Growth Lab.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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