Can you endure boredom?

When I'm trying to predict whether someone is going to make it in business or not, I ask:

can they endure boredom?

Can you sit down and write standard operating procedures?

Can you train the same person on the same process four times so that they can do it on their own, without you in the room, and understand not just what to do but why - so that they can adapt when something new comes up?

Can you look at the same dashboard week after week, notice the same handful of numbers drifting, and calmly hold your team accountable to the same behaviours you've been reinforcing for months without losing patience or reaching for a shiny new framework?

None of that is fun, it’s mind numbing work.

It also sounds a lot like bureaucracy, and if you've been reading agency content for any length of time, you've probably absorbed the message that bureaucracy is the enemy.

But high repetition and high standardisation are a ton better than the alternative, as you’ll know.

Most entrepreneurs are the personality type that struggles most with this.

Founders are shiny-object people by nature.

They see an opportunity, they get excited, they dive in.

Which is exactly the temperament that gets a business to a million dollars - and exactly the temperament that stalls it there. Because past a million, the work is no longer about finding the next exciting opportunity. It's doing the same three or four boring things exceptionally well, for years, without getting distracted by the next shiny thing.

So when someone tells me they want to scale their agency past two, three, five million, and I want to know if they're going to make it, I don't ask about their vision. I don't ask about their goals. I ask, in one form or another, whether they can tolerate the mundane.

If you look at your own last six months and you can see a pattern of chasing exciting new things (starting a new initiative instead of finishing an existing one, adopting a new tool instead of using the current one properly, exploring a new offer instead of tightening the pricing on the existing one) instead of putting your head down with the boring known then that's a signal your temperament is failing you.

It’ll pay to get a handle on it.

Nick

P.S.

When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help:

1. Find out what your agency could sell for

2. Identify the biggest profit leaks in your agency

3. Book me to deliver a keynote at your event