The business becomes sustainable the moment it stops depending entirely on you to survive.

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]A few years ago, my business was making over $30 million a year. But the problem was I was working 60 to 80our weeks and I was completely burnt out. At 24 years old, my business was making over $4 million a month and I had over aundred employees in a business that was selling digital marketing, consulting, coaching, and agency services. On paper, everything looked great. Every single month, we were setting a new sales record. We were enrolling more clients.

[00:00:24]The problem was all of these clients were enrolling in to get my help, my knowledge, my expertise about marketing.

[00:00:31]And as the business grew, as the number of clients that we took on grew, the amount of involvement that I could have with every single client started to decrease. So the business model was fundamentally broken where as I took on more clients, the client experience got worse. This was why even when we were hitting record months, I was completely stressed out, working 60, 80, sometimes 100 hour weeks, and it still wasn't enough to sustain the machine. And it was because I had a broken business model where I was selling myself as the product rather than selling a system which ultimately meant I was basically just selling my time which is never a scalable way to actually build a business. Now having gone through that extremely expensive mistake I've completely rebuilt my business model. So it doesn't depend on me and my clients can actually get personalized help without me needing to be personally involved. It's the exact same knowledge.

[00:01:17]It's the exact same expertise about marketing that's being sold. The only difference now is that it doesn't rely on me at the center of it. Within 6 months of us hitting a record month, the revenue had completely collapsed to zero and I had to lay off over a 100red team members. Because of this, I obviously knew that the next thing that I built had to be different. So, for anyone that is stuck in a similar situation and it feels like you're never going to get ahead of your business model, it's worth thinking about taking a step back and really looking at the system that you're using to deliver results to your clients and asking yourself if it actually gets better or worse as you scale.