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Jeff Munn, Creating Extraordinary Futures

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January 17, 2024 by Jeff

How To Have More Impact With Less Work

How to Have More Impact

This year I’m focused on getting more impact from my business, including more income, with less work on my part.

I’m seeing my high school son thinking about going overseas on an exchange program and the empty nest syndrome is beginning to rear its head.

I’m thinking about my marriage and how to redefine it in my son’s absence.

AND I’m wanting to continue to build my business while spending more time with each of them.

I’m eight years into building a business, and three years into growing a team to help.

I’ve recognized three things that help with that, and these same things seem to help my founder clients as well.

Every founder I have worked with at some point has fallen into the trap of thinking that the only way to grow was for them to work more.

Even the thought of it, especially at this time of year, can be exhausting.

But what if you ask a simple question?

“How Can My Working LESS Create More Growth?”

When you start a business you have to do a bit of everything. You have to figure out billing, sales, even product.

This is not necessarily a problem. It can be a good way to test some things cheaply.

But it can become a problem when it becomes a habit. When it looks like you HAVE to do everything, long past when you SHOULD be doing everything.

Focus On What Only You Can Do

There are things that I am really good at and love doing. These things, like enrolling one-on-one coaching clients for year-long engagements, are essential to the business and at least at this stage it doesn’t make any sense to give them up.

I also really enjoy content creation. It’s important to me to keep control of my message.

Finally, I have a vision for the company that I’m creating, one that can provide coaching to both founders and their teams as organizations grow. Coaching that can ultimately create companies as places that people dream of working, and wouldn’t think of leaving.

When I am enrolling a client, I am focused on one-on-one conversation and would not have it any other way.

When I am creating content or expanding my vision, though, I hire help to leverage both across as many people as possible.

Leverage What You Do Whenever Possible

I try not to do things many times when I can do them once.

If a message is relevant to one person, chances are it is relevant to others, too.

An email can go to a list of people. A video can go on YouTube. An article can be posted on LinkedIn.

I try to be in conversation with as many people I can. Because I want my vision to impact as many people as I can.

That leads to my last point.

To Maximize Growth, Give Up Control

One of my coaches, Rich Litvin, likes to say that if you can create your vision by yourself, your vision is too small.

What’s your vision? Likely, you need help. You need to hire. And once you grow to a certain point, you need to hire a leadership team to run the day-to-day.

Most founders mess this up. They get too attached to the vision, too focused on exactly how to execute it. They finally hire a leadership team and then tell them exactly what to do. This doesn’t save any time. It often COSTS time—micromanaging is a terrible way to get things done!

The founder concludes that there aren’t “good people” available.

The problem isn’t the people. The problem is you.

Hire people who are smarter than you, at least at the thing you are hiring them for. The finance person, the sales person, and the product person need to be better at what they do than you are. They need to be smarter than you. And you need to accept the ideas they have that are consistent with your vision.

Here’s a founder secret. The best people will ONLY work with someone who gives them leeway on HOW to execute your vision.

Because everyone likes to create in their work. Especially if they are creating in service to something bigger than themselves.

And that’s what we all want, right?

Filed Under: Founders

September 13, 2023 by Jeff

What if Generational Wealth is the Wrong Goal?

Wealth, Generational Wealth
What if Generational Wealth is the Wrong Goal?

When a successful founder thinks about selling, the goal is often something related to generational wealth.

That the proceeds from the sale can not only take care of the founder’s children, but multiple generations. That the family can be taken care of, forever.

The founders that I have talked to about this have never questioned this goal. It is taken as a given—that along with charity, taking care of the family forever is one of the principle benefits of building and selling a successful company.

While I have no issues with wealth creation, I question whether “generational wealth” is actually the right goal, or even a good one.

The Messed-Up Trust Fund Kid

What if never having to work is the worst possible result for someone?

Many of us know people who have been fortunate enough to have been born into wealth.

There are a few who use that wealth responsibly. They live within their means, they try to make meaningful contributions to society and to raise their children responsibly, for example.

Along with their money, they were gifted a set of values, including gratitude and responsibility to their fellow human beings.

They have a certain humility.

At the other end of the spectrum, we know the “trust fund kid” who blows through their inheritance and then wonders where the money went.

The More Important Inheritance

What if the most important thing you could gift to future generations was not your money but your time?

What if you weren’t the workaholic parent whose children accepted your gifts as a hollow excuse for your absence?

What if instead, you were there to teach them the values that enabled you to build your own financial independence, so that they knew they could do that for themselves?

To teach them to fish?

How powerful would that feel, to know that your influence had taught generations of your family how to both provide, for themselves and their families, but to love and be there for them, too.

Your Business is Better Without You

Your goal in building a business is that you be totally unnecessary to it.

That it run without you better than with you.

And yet that goal goes completely against why most people start a business.

They start a business to prove they are enough, that they are needed, that their parents were wrong about them.

And now they are showing their spouses, their own children that they would rather make money than spend time with them.

What if a different path were possible?

Are You Better Without Your Business?

I’m working with one of my clients on creating freedom for him. For the longest time, whenever I would talk about freedom, he would say that it meant “lifestyle cash.” And he would proceed to build more and more.

After a long weekend together, he realized what he most wanted was to be close to his family. And that he had no idea how to do that because he had not felt that growing up.

He had developed all these mechanisms to make himself feel safe and useful and that they were now isolating him.

Building a business can be like an addiction. There is never enough. 8 figures turns into 9 turns into 10 and still more beckons.

There is no number of homes or boats or planes that will produce freedom.

Because freedom is already there. You are made of it.

You only need to see it. Over and over and over.

But when you see it, it is always yours.

Freedom Is Always an Inside Game

Freedom can mean a lot of things.

Freedom fromthings like stress and negative self-talk.

Freedom to create in a more conscious way.

Including the power to create your legacy. To help your children see that they always have the capacity to create the future that they want.

Instead of relying on their trust fund.

How to Begin

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity (thought) that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If building a sustainable coaching business that will replace your corporate income is calling you, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

And when you’re ready to go even deeper, send me a private message or an email. I’m happy to help you in any way I can.

#insight #leapoffaith #innatewisdom #founder #founders #executivecoach

Filed Under: Coaches, Founders Tagged With: ceo, executive coaching, founder journey

September 8, 2023 by Jeff

Your Hard Work Is Costing You Everything You Say You Want

Executive coaching, founder, ceo
Your Hard Work Is Costing You Everything You Say You Want

“I want to work so hard that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that I deserve my success.” —Stephen A. Smith

I’m a big sports fan and eagerly listened to Bill Simmons’ recent interview with Stephen A.

But when I heard this, I thought, “What a prison to build for yourself.”

Then I started hearing my clients saying versions of this.

“I have to be the first one in and the last one out.”

“I want to be there enough for my team to know I’ve got their back.”

“I need to be there so I can provide for my family.”

What do all these things have in common?

They start with the idea that we are not enough. That we have to always do more to prove ourselves. To others, and more importantly, to ourselves.

The Nagging Sense of Not Being Enough

In almost every high achiever that I have come across, there is a sense that there is no amount of work that they could ever do that would be enough. Often this comes from a childhood in which they were only seen for what they did, rather than who they were. Sometimes there is abuse or addiction involved. And it can go back generations.

I have struggled with this for years. As a recovering overachiever, constantly trying to prove myself to emotionally absent parents, I have to constantly remind myself of my inherent self worth.

Recently this came up for me as I was thinking about what I wanted to work on at the end of the summer, a typically slow time for me.

Rather than accept the rhythms of the business and the downtime, I stressed out. I had to bring in some clients, and I had to do it now. It felt like my life and livelihood depended on it.

Did it change things? No. But I did get the “satisfaction” of trying some things before I saw what I was doing.

Caught. Again.

What You Get From Working Too Hard

A Harvard professor in human development, Robert Keegan, writes about what he calls “competing commitments.”

A competing commitment is often invisible to us but keeps us from doing what we know we should be doing.

“I have to work hard” is ingrained in many successful people I know, this “grind it out” philosophy of success based on rules that we do not see we have written.

That “success” (itself only a concept) only comes to people who work hard.

That our sense of self worth comes from working hard.

That we can feel like we are enough, that we deserve success, if only we work hard enough.

That working hard is based on output and efficiency and productivity. We must constantly be thinking about how to get MORE things done.

However hard we work, though, it never seems like it is enough or could ever BE enough.

And notice how much working hard gets in the way of what you really want in your business.

What You Actually Want From Your Business

To maximize your income and net worth, you want a business that runs itself. You might set the strategy, at least for now, but eventually you must give up even that.

If you are essential, you can never sell the business.

You have only maximized the value of your business when you are completely unnecessary to it.

This means—

Delegating everything.

Turning your knowledge into systems and culture and teams. (Or better yet, hiring someone who can do that for you.)

Getting out of the way.

The very things that your “I have to work hard” self would call lazy.

This is the paradox of scaling your business. The very reason you got into business, to prove yourself, constantly gets in the way of everything you need to create a sound business.

But that ignores an even bigger paradox—the relationship paradox.

The Biggest Cost—The Relationship Risk

The biggest cost of hard work may be something even more tragic than exhaustion.

One of the main upsides to having a successful business is the security that it provides for your family.

But you can feel like you have to neglect your family to get there.

And then you feel unappreciated for neglecting your family. That they don’t understand your sacrifice for them. That they complain about your absence without understanding WHY you are absent.

I am working with multiple clients right now who are dealing with different aspects of this.

One has been incredibly financially successful, yet realized in a quiet moment that what he most wanted was a close relationship with his wife.

Everything he has built from the outside looks like success. Yet he is still afraid to be vulnerable, to show any signs of weakness, of humanity, even with his wife.

The work of the business, which he is quite good at, is taking him away from what he most wanted, not helping him move toward it.

Because there is no dollar amount that can give him what he most wants—the sense that he is worthy of love, even from himself.

Freedom Can Only Be An Inner Game

Seeing these strategies—both how they have worked for us on the outside and what they have taken away from us on the inside—is the first step to true freedom.

Seeing the thought-created reality that you have been living in. Seeing that the stories you have created to protect yourself in that reality are no longer serving you. Seeing that you have the power to create something new—not on top of your old reality, but in place of it.

Seeing that freedom is a state of being, not something that you will ever create outside of you.

Having a partner or a coach who will keep pointing you back to you to this inner freedom is critical, because like any habit, it usually takes some effort to change it.

How to Start

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity (thought) that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If a building a sustainable coaching business that will replace your corporate income is calling you, here’s a video where I share the the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

And when you’re ready to go even deeper, send me a private message or an email. I’m happy to help you in any way I can.

Filed Under: Founders, Uncategorized Tagged With: executive coach

August 31, 2023 by Jeff

The Most Powerful Creation I’ve Ever Heard

executive coaching, self creation
The Most Powerful Creation I’ve Ever Heard

We humans are creators. Nonstop. 24/7.

The most creative thing I ever hear someone say is this—

“I’m not creative.”

Really? REALLY?

You’ve taken this thought, “I am not creative,” and built your whole identity around it.

And then you have lived in that created identity as if it was solid, as if it was TRUE.

For how long?

“I could never do that.”

Really. REALLY?

I did this for years until I saw it.

We believe our words describe the external world, but just as often they create our internal world every moment we say or think them.

Any sentence that begins with a noun and ends with an adjective creates.

I am ____.

You are ____.

People are ____.

Money is ____.

All creations.

You BELIEVE they are statements of fact and that is why their creative aspect is invisible to you.

You are constantly creating your world, even if—especially if—you create yourself as “not” creative.

See this, and your whole experience of life will change.

See this, and you can create whatever life you want.

Are you ready to begin?

How to Start

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity (thought) that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If a building a sustainable coaching business that will replace your corporate income is calling you, here’s a video where I share the the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post here.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

And when you’re ready to go even deeper, send me a private message or an email. I’m happy to help you in any way I can.

#insight #leapoffaith #innatewisdom #founder #founders #executivecoach

Filed Under: Founders Tagged With: business owner, ceo, founder

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Jeff Munn



(970) 922-9272
jeff@jmunn.com


Carbondale, CO

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Email: jeff@jmunn.com
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