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In the Tinker Phase, the entrepreneur’s focus shifts from building their first business to building themselves.   At this level, the Founder of one company diversifies his portfolio to include cash-flow assets, second locations, and maybe new businesses. This requires a larger team, a management layer, and growth as a leader. Tinkers work through the “valley of death”, when the entrepreneur has to make larger investments to grow. This could mean hiring ahead of cash flow, or buying a building, or scaling up equipment; and usually occurs between $1M and $3M in revenue. This is a stressful period, and Tinkers need both 1:1 mentorship and peer support. Are you in the Tinker Phase? Take the test here.   Our Tinker program will launch in January 2019. In its first year, we expect that many members won’t actually be in Tinker phase yet. But they’ll be close: after reading this list, they’ll identify one or two key elements to overcome before 2020. And in 2020, everyone in the group will officially be in the Tinker Phase. Here’s the basic list, from “Founder | Farmer | Tinker | Thief”: Are You Ready To Be A Tinker? Have you hired an “administrator” to oversee the Client Journey? Have you begun managing staff instead of performing front-line duties? Have you done an Energy Audit? Have you launched at least one opportunity for intrapreneurship? Have you hired at least one replacement for yourself in your primary service? Have you done the “apples” and “weed” client exercise? Have you fired one “weed” client? Have you started hosting regular staff meetings? Have you begun to extend your marketing to people you don’t yet know? Have you started a retention strategy and taught it to your staff? Have you budgeted for a staff development program? Have you begun evaluating your staff quarterly? Have you reached 33% gross profit margin? Have you started tracking your enhanced metrics: leads, conversion ...

When you pay $50,000 per year for mentoring, you usually want to get the most out of every phone call. But I’ve cut the last two calls with my mentor short. After 45 minutes, I said, “That’s it. I’m good.” and we ended the call. Because I had enough to take action…and no more. The longer you have a mentor, the better you get at being mentored. When I hired my first mentor, I was definitely in the Founder Phase. I had owned my gym for nearly four years. I expected him to give me a marketing silver bullet; instead, he gave me the Roles and Tasks exercise. It took us months to get that done. Then we moved onto the staff playbook… Now gym owners get more accomplished in 8 weeks of the Incubator than I did in over a year with my first mentor. And it’s simply because you’re better students than I was (well, maybe the templates help a bit.) My second mentor basically stopped taking my calls. I hammered him so hard on the minutae that I really didn’t get the “big stuff” done. I think I wanted him to do the work FOR me. Or maybe I was using the little details as an excuse to avoid the big, hard work. My third mentor was a lot different. Instead of piling ideas on me, we spent most of our time discarding ideas. We trimmed my buffet of opportunities down to 3, and then applied the Kingmaker equation to each: Was this idea worth my Effective Hourly Rate? If not, I didn’t do it. And when we decided, I hung up and got to work right away. When I visited Jason Atkins at 360Insights, a billion-dollar company in the incentives industry, he told me he uses the same strategy when he attends seminars. Atkins pays for the seminar and books a hotel for the weekend. But he plans ...