The first thing you need to realize is that the concept of working in a hustle culture is a broken mindset. It’s just not possible to work all the time and be happy. You need to ask yourself, what is important to you in life? Working all the time and making little headway towards achieving your goals or working smarter so you can have time for those you care about the most? I don’t know about you, but I prefer the second option. It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur or an employee, you can set yourself up to achieve your goals in a more sustainable way.
I like to ask anybody who is interested in making a difference in their life, “What are your personal, professional and financial goals?” I also like to ask them to elaborate on this concept by going through the following exercise.
- What is most important to you in life?
- Describe your personal, professional and financial goals.
- List the steps you will take to achieve your goals in the next 12 months, as well as 3 and 5 year increments.
When you map out these steps it makes life easier to build into your business what you want to make each month and what you want life to look like. Each of these categories feed into one another.
When Work Stopped Working
There was a time in my 30s when I worked three jobs just to make ends meet. I worked this way for a while because my wife and I didn’t have kids at the time. She was in grad school and we only had a dog so life wasn’t that complicated. We were also younger and had the energy to learn and work all the time, but I knew this wasn’t going to last forever. I would eventually burn out and my health was affected.
Once we started our family, I no longer had the time available to work around the clock. I realized real quick that I had to figure a way to work less, multiply my productivity and exponentially increase my income. As any parent will tell you, kids become the reason you do everything and they are the most important part of your life. “Hustling” all the time wasn’t an option. Hard work doesn’t create success. Directed, structured work does.
I had no idea how I was going to achieve this accomplishment because all I had ever done my entire career was work hard. I hustled my tail off every way I could just to make $60k a year to make ends meet. It truly was unsustainable and I had to figure out how to not work this way any longer. Eventually, I made the decision to hire a coach who could help me learn faster, avoid pitfalls and develop a process to achieve my goal of increasing my income with less work.
This investment ended up being one of the best investments of my life at the time. It fast tracked my belief system in a way that taught me my value was far greater than what I believed and that I simply had to make a shift to achieve more in less time.
Return on Effort (ROE)
Most entrepreneurs build their business on a familiar assumption: if they simply work harder, they’ll earn more. It feels true because it’s what we were taught growing up. Work more hours, push harder, grind longer, and eventually success will follow. But in reality, hard work alone doesn’t create growth. It creates exhaustion. What actually produces growth is a different measurement entirely: Return on Effort, or ROE.
ROE forces you to ask a better question: What result is each hour of effort actually producing? Two entrepreneurs can put in the same eight hours and end up with completely different outcomes, not because one worked harder, but because one focused on the activities that deliver the highest ROE.
High-ROE tasks are the ones that directly impact revenue and momentum.
- Creating sales-generating content
- Publishing ads that drive targeted traffic
- Calling warm leads or following up
- Fixing a bottleneck in your sales process
- Writing an email that produces revenue every time it sends
- Recording a video that converts viewers for years
- Improving your offer so it converts at a higher rate
Low-ROE tasks are the busywork that keeps you occupied but not growing.
- Endless tinkering
- Designing things that don’t affect revenue
- Responding to every comment and message personally
- Jumping between tasks just to feel busy
- Getting stuck learning instead of implementing
When you shift your focus from “How many hours did I work?” to “What did my hours return?” everything changes. Your days become more meaningful. Your results compound. You start thinking like a CEO instead of a hustler. ROE isn’t about doing more work, it’s about doing the work that produces more.
Shifting from Labor to Leverage
In the beginning, every entrepreneur builds their business through labor doing everything themselves, trading hours for outcomes, and manually solving every problem that arises. Labor is necessary at first, but it becomes a ceiling if you never move beyond it. The businesses that scale the fastest all make the same intentional shift: they stop relying solely on their own effort and start building leverage. Leverage is what multiplies your time and allows your business to grow even when you’re not working. It’s the power of systems handling repetitive tasks automatically, of paid ads reaching thousands of people while you sleep, of automated follow-up converting leads around the clock, of content continuing to build trust long after you publish it, and of a small but capable team extending your capacity.
Where labor keeps you busy, leverage keeps you growing. It shifts you from being the engine of your business to being the architect of it. This is the point where effort stops being the primary driver of revenue and structure takes over. Revenue becomes consistent, time becomes abundant, and momentum begins to compound. The moment you shift from labor to leverage is the moment your business stops depending on your energy and starts depending on your systems.
The moment you stop relying on labor and start relying on leverage, everything changes. But leverage doesn’t appear on its own, you must build it intentionally. And that’s where structure becomes your greatest advantage. To shift into predictable growth, you need a framework that organizes your time, focuses your energy, and moves your business forward in a measurable way. That framework is the 90-Day Success Sprint, and it’s the system that took my business from unpredictable hustle to consistent, scalable results. In the next chapter, I’ll show you exactly how it works and how to put it into motion in your own business.
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Chapter 2: The 90-Day Success Sprint Framework >