The Origin of Fire Yourself First

Good morning. It's 10:30am on a Tuesday.

And where am I?

I'm here at the Phoenix mountain reserve going for a hike, thinking, enjoying the sun, enjoying the fresh air. And why can I do this because I fired myself from my business. I only work 10 days a month and how I came about this interesting way of living is I was thinking, okay, my business I've had for 16 years. It's working really well. It's running well, but I need to be involved in the business every day. And my team never remembers they need me. And what I realized was that was actually holding me back it was training me to my business and in reality, I didn't have a business at all I had a job.

And so from that, I started doing research, and I tried to find out all the information I could listen to book or listen to books on tape or audible podcasts, read books, talk to other business owners who kind of exited their business and how that felt. And what I discovered was a lot of people that exited their business actually felt more lost than they ever were. And so one thing I wanted was I really love my business and I don't want to leave it but I don't want to be chained to it and have to work 40, 60, 80 hours so we can hit either. And so I came up with these processes and over two, three years I started implementing them. Little strategies, little procedures, little systems in my practice, and then jump back. You know, about 18 months ago, I was able to keep my business, it actually makes more money than it's ever made before. I only work 10 days a month in my business. So I actually have lots of free time to do things like this enjoying nature, be outside spend more time with my family, all because I fired myself first and the lucky thing is I've distilled 10s of 1000s of pages of policies, procedures, strategies and best practices and created a simple five step process for firing yourself first. So whether you want to keep your business and treat it like an ATM, or you want to generate more money because you want to expand your business and focus your time and another part of it or even sell your business at the highest valuation. Because businesses that don't require the owner sell at higher valuations that businesses that do so you're actually investing in your long term exit strategy, which may be finally settling your business. So anyways, is fire yourself first work? Absolutely. I love it. And I'll never go back to working the hours that I used to so uh, get out there and fire yourself first.

Jeff Russell