The Compounding Business: Why Systems Beat Hustle Every Time

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Hey guys, listen, there are two kinds of business growth.
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The first kind's linear, right? You work, you get paid, you stop working, and the money stops too.
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And every client is a fresh hunt. Every month starts at zero.
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It's exhausting, and most people just call it running a business,
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because they don't know there's another option, right?
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The second kind is compounding, where you build something once.
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A system, piece of content, a community, a course.
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And it keeps working after you've moved on to the next thing,
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the asset stacks. The output's going to start growing faster than the input.
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And eventually you're going to wake up to results from work you did six months ago.
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And it's going to help you today.
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And that's the business that I'm obsessed with building with people.
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I love building compounding asset businesses for people because,
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the most important thing is to not do things twice and not to always be stuck
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in that cycle, that wash dry cycle of business hell.
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And today I want to start talking about why systems are the only path to get
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there, which is ironic because I'm a massively disorganized human being. But yet.
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I'm able to build systems for folks that are wildly organized. Go figure.
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All of these businesses and all these business owners, every hustle-based business,
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really, like when you think about it, it hits the ceiling, which is a lot of
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the coaching world, a lot of small business owners.
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And it's, at the end of the day, it just becomes a math problem.
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You've got a fixed number of hours.
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You can optimize them. You can protect them. You could charge more per hour.
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But you can't create more hours. You can never get a day back.
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I tell this to my kid all the time. Live today because tomorrow is unpromised
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and you never know what can take up your time tomorrow.
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So when you have time today, enjoy every damn minute of it.
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And it's no different for your business. When you're working,
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work on assets that are going to compound for you.
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Work on things that are going to build for a future. Putting out fires every
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day is the worst way to live.
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It's always being reactive. You can optimize those hours like we talked about,
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and you can build the business entirely on your time.
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But there's a hard upper limit there, right? When you're just on your time,
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no matter how much you optimize, it's only so many hours you're going to be able to work.
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And it's usually somewhere around the point where you're working as hard as
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you can possibly work. And that's your ceiling, right? And most people hit it
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and assume the answer is just to work smarter.
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Delegate more is what everybody says. Delegate more, raise your rates.
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And those things will help at margins. but they're not changing your fundamental
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structure of your business. And the structure has to change.
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At the end of the day, that's most important. And the structure changes when
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you start building things that work without you.
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That's important. That's a big thing that people seem to miss.
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Having structure changes when you start building things that work without you. So what's a system?
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It's just a documented, repeatable process, and it produces a predictable result.
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It's a plan. That's it. It doesn't have to be crazy and complicated.
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It doesn't have to be some 800-step automated process.
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It just has to be repeatable without requiring you to reinvent it every time
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and to always have to intervene.
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Your content workflow is a system for your social media, for your community,
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for your website, for your business documents, for everything else that you do, for your clients.
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The way you onboard a new client, that's a system.
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Your community structure, that's another system. The way a podcast episode becomes
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five pieces of content is a system, right?
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The one to five method, which I talk about in a new community video that'll
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be up the unshakable AF community.
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Every time you do something more than once, there's an opportunity to turn that into a system.
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And every time you turn something into a system, you get a little bit of your time back permanently.
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And that's what's most important. Everybody talks about, oh,
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I love my business because I could spend all the time with my family.
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How do you think they got to that point where they could run my business on autopilot?
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They're building repeatable systems that don't require them to be repeatable.
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Think about that for a minute. Just pause your brain. As Josh Hart of the Knicks says, pause. Okay.
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So why has AI gotten into all this mix, right? Here's what's different now compared to five years ago.
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Five years ago, we would build systems that required either significant money,
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you had to hire people to run them, significant time, you had to build it all
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yourself, and it usually meant learning tools you didn't even want to learn.
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I've learned all these tools over the years because I've been building this
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for countless people, for thousands of people in my career.
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It's AI manipulated that in a way, right? There's a transition layer,
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that first draft, the repetitive cognitive work that used to be human-based.
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A lot of that has become automatable now at a cost and complexity level that
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a solo coach or a consultant or a small business owner can actually access on their own.
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Now, for me, the problem I see is people take those tools and take those AI
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tools and they just use it the wrong way.
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And that's a huge part of what the community is about. It's about helping people
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guide themselves to that right way.
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And these will be entire episodes on their own of the right way to use AI instead
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of what I call the lazy way.
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You don't need a team. You just need the right tools connected the right way,
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and then have your own personal judgment to know what you're going to feed them.
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So that way you have that system in place where AI could be useful to you.
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Because it's great. There's a lot of great useful methods of AI use and methodologies
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where you can take an AI tool and really superpower yourself, right?
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It's little things. It's the things we don't think about. automating transcriptions
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from a podcast. I can get that in a minute now when it used to be I had to either
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send it out, go to a service and pay.
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It's now so close to accurate. I don't mind editing the one or two errors while
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I'm watching it with my mouth moving in a video or I'm watching it,
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or just listening to it and I'm going through it and I'm cutting out the ums
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or the uhs or the you knows or whatever we have that we say.
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Now, typically I don't cut a lot
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of that stuff out because I believe the natural vibe of a human is good.
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I don't see the need to over edit. I think people make things too perfect.
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And if you saved 11 seconds on a 10-minute episode by being too perfect,
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it's kind of stupid to me.
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That's just my opinion. We're all different. We all do things our own way.
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But that's really the shift. It's the systems that you use to require a staff of five.
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Now just need one person with the right setup so it's already something saving
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time it's just a matter of how we apply it,
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and save that time while we're doing it right that's really the bigger difference
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how do we apply that time to our universe because that is.
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What becomes our compounding business in the end. So look, here's what happens
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when you start building those systems instead of just doing the work.
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Month one, you build a content workflow. You record one item and it becomes five things.
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You're doing the same creative work, but you're getting five times distribution.
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A couple months later, you add a community. Now your content's driving people somewhere.
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That somewhere builds on itself. Conversations happen. People invite others.
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It grows. Maybe you have an affiliate program connected to it. Your community grows.
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Maybe when you launch it or maybe it's after you launch it, your course goes live.
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Because everybody should be building courses on their sphere of knowledge to help others.
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And now people who aren't ready to work with you directly, they've got somewhere
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to go that still generates revenue for you.
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And it does that whether you're working or not, right? You could be on vacation.
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You can be at a concert. You can be wherever you want to be.
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And that system and that community is still there running and building and people are communicating.
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And you can post a quick picture outside of something and be like,
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yo, what's up? Here's where I am right now. And create a little conversation.
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Wish everybody a great weekend. It doesn't always, that's the thing people don't get about community.
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Half of community is actually being a community.
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Communities share their lives. They share their experiences.
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They share their ups and downs. And it's good to do that in your community.
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That is also something that creates a compounding effect because the compounding
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effect there is an emotional connection with people.
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So now your course is live. Those people, they're in there when you're there, when you're not there.
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And each of these items compounds on the last. So six months later,
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you've got a business that's working while you sleep.
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Not perfectly, not passively forever, but the ratio of output to your direct
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input gets better and better every time.
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And that's what I call compounding business, right? Because the hustle,
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it gets you going, it gets you started, but the systems get you out.
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The systems are what gets you out of being in a permanent hustle mode,
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which is exhausting for any human being.
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Nobody should have to feel like that all the time. I'm a big believer of self-care,
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and I feel like so many people leave that on the table. I've told so many people
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to go not work on a weekend over the years and to go spend time with their family.
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I literally Google things in people's hometowns and find shit for them to do
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with their family so they don't work for a few hours because people need energy,
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positive energy from your friends, your family, your hobbies, your interests.
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You can just want to sit in your backyard and crack open a cold one. I don't care what it is.
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But there's got to be something in the universe that recharges your mind,
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your energy, your soul, your spirit, what have you.
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So that way you can attack your days with that real energy and gusto that you're supposed to.
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And if you're still building the same way you were two years ago manually,
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everything from scratch, just trading hours for dollars. Yeah.
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This is at an inflection point. The tools exist now, guys. The model works.
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The only real question is whether you're going to build it.
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And look, that's what we do in the community. That's what we do in Unshakable AF.
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And you can join us at stevelichtman.com and just go right there.
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Or you can go to shakableaf.com and it will forward right to the community.
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So look, if any of this actually landed with you, if you're sitting there going,
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oh, yeah, man, that's exactly my problem.
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The place I'm building all this out loud is on Unshakable AF.
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You've got seven days free on the trial.
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You'll look around, kick the tires, see if it's your speed.
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$79 a month after that. And here's the thing. If you join now,
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that rate's going to be locked in with you forever. It's a founder rate.
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I'm not going to be the guy who jacks up the price on the people who show up
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for me early. It's just not the way I operate.
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You can go to stevelickman.com or unshakableaf.com.
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Either one's going to get you there. And look, this was another episode of Unfiltered
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and Unshakeable, and I'll catch you on the next one.