E196 - Lessons from Eric Dingler: The Ultimate System Change That Frees Entrepreneurs Doing It All

Rob Tracz: What's up guys and welcome back to another Friday recap. As usual, I'd love to kick it off by asking you guys something. this week's question is could business or project really survive 10 days of you being completely unreachable? Like no no email, no quick little check ins, totally off the grid.

And I ask because most entrepreneurs can't go 10 hours without their business needing them. They built something that like freedom but functions like a prison. And the whole thing really collapses the second that they step away. Trust me, because that's where I've been and taking steps right now to kind of build things to a little more automated and stuff up so that others can kind of step in for me.

And here's the really. If your business can't run without you, you don't own a you just own a job. And you can't ever quit that job, you can't call in sick or take a vacation. And the worst thing of your boss is crazy.

And ⁓ today's today's conversation's gonna be a pretty quick one and wanted to make sure that we dive back in. So if you haven't checked out this week's guest interview, I encourage you to go back and check it out now. because this week's guest spent ten days in the Amazon jungle. He was fully off grid and while he was this his business ran without him.

And the way he built ⁓ is something ⁓ almost any can just copy. So, in case you haven't, check it out. And ⁓ this week's guest interviewee is Eric Dingler. Eric runs a digital marketing and web design agency.

And runs it while traveling the world full time with his family. In the last four years, he, his wife, and their four teenagers have lived in 55 apartments across 20 different countries. All out ⁓ luggage, too, by the way. So really unique, more unique than that, is about Eric's story.

He's not a perpetual vacation influencer. He's working full time in between those Eiffel Tower photos and ⁓ whatnot. His wife homeschools the four kids at four different grade levels. They're on a budget, and the reason any of it works isn't location independence, it's leadership.

Before this, Eric spent 15 years running a summer camp. Every single year he had to hire onboard, train, and develop entirely new teams. And then when camp ended, sit back and ask what worked well and what didn't. And then do it all over again the next year.

didn't realize until recently that those 15 years were 15 laboratories, especially leadership and building. And that's the exact skill set that he now teaches entrepreneurs who want to scale without burning out. His agency, by the way, started as a side hustle, a fundraiser to adopt of his kids from Bulgaria This episode is about how you turn one person grind into a business that runs without you. And the core framework that I want you to go back and listen through the whole episode is right here.

So Eric said something early in the conversation that I think is the master to everything else. He said ⁓ your leadership capacity the capacity of your business. ⁓ No part of your life, your business, your finances, your health, your relationships ever go beyond your capacity to lead. This reminds me a lot of Jim Rohn with ⁓ law of personal development.

So your perf your professional success will never outpace your personal development. It's a big factor of what ⁓ prime performance is kind of built on. So sit with that for a second. It means the ceiling of your business isn't your marketing, your offer, or your industry.

The ceiling on your business is you. Specifically your ability to lead yourself and then lead others, which is both humbling and liberating. Humbling because it means that you're the bottleneck, but liberating because it means the single highest leverage thing that you can work on another funnel or another tactic. It's growing your own capacity to lead.

Raise that ceiling and then everything else underneath can finally grow. The whole episode is about how you actually do that practically, step by step, starting from a team of zero. So the first takeaway that I want you to internalize is that you're a leader before anyone else is following you. And this is one of the most important reframes of the entire episode.

Eric saved a version of it for his closing too, which tells you how much he really believes it. Most people leadership starts with a team when people start report to you, when you've got the and the org chart and everything else. But until then, you're just a solo operator doing the work. But Eric flips that completely.

He says you have to see yourself as a leader even if you don't have anybody else following you. Because if you wait until you have a team to start developing as a leader, you'll never build a team worth leading. The leadership has to come first. You lead yourself first.

And the version of you that's intentionally growing as a leader before the team arrives is the version that's actually ready it does. And here's what most people miss: leadership isn't a title that you just receive. It's the capacity that you build. And you start building at the moment when you decide to whether you're leading 100 people or just yourself.

what a good leadership so worth in, according to Eric, it's the most transferable skill that there is. He made this and he said, it's to take a skill like web design and use it to make family life better. Skills like that stay in their lane, but leadership If you grow as a leader at work, you lead better at home. you grow as a leader at home, you lead better at work.

In volunteering and everywhere. Leadership is the one skill that pays off in every single area of your life at once. So if a solo entrepreneur ⁓ right now Hey, I'm not a leader, I don't have to lead, you gotta stop. You you're leading the most important and most difficult person you'll ever manage, which yourself.

And every bit of capacity you build leading yourself now is the capacity you'll draw on when it's time to lead the other people. this is ⁓ much the heart of principle one from the prime performance process. the whole framework behind it is the idea of what Eric is saying. You rise as a leader of others only when you've learned to lead yourself.

The foundation is internal and you can't pour leadership into a team from an empty cup. So build first and then then the business follow later. Second lesson I want you guys to remember and take away is want to buy back your time, then what you do with it. and this is super insightful and most practical too.

⁓ So copy tomorrow, lesson in the whole episode. And I want to really hear the mechanics behind this. So Eric's very first was somebody to take on for two hours of work per week. That's it, just two hours.

And here's the genius moment. The moment he made that hire, he immediately carved out hour a month for what he called his CEO time. Just a legal pad, and a cup of coffee. And he spent time working on the business instead of in it.

That one hour a month grew into a CEO day. And now leadership is the only thing he does in his company. But the real r or lesson is what he teaches his students about what to do with the time you buy back. He calls it the 101080.

Let's say you hire somebody for 10 hours a week. Here's how you spend the 10 hours that you just freed up. One hour is yours. So go to Starbucks or watch Netflix, That's the benefit of being the owner.

But other hour goes to leadership. So you're developing yourself and developing ⁓ the you just hired. And the other eight hours go to revenue generating work, calling past clients, working the pipeline, the stuff that actually makes ⁓ you the business money. And here's trap that most people get stuck in.

They hire someone to take a task off their plate, and then they that freedom. time to go do another task. They just shuffled the busy work around. Eric's whole point is no.

When you buy back two hours, you spend those two hours making more money, not doing more low-value work. here's how Eric reframes the cost of hiring. And it's a like ⁓ credible of looking at it. He says hiring isn't about how much it's going to cost you.

about how much it's costing you not to hire. If free up eight hours and spend those on revenue generating work, you'll make back that salary multiple times over within a month. The hire pays for itself, but only if you're disciplined about what you do with the time that it creates. So let me make this real for the hustlers listening.

You need to hire a big team. You should probably hire two hours. Find the lowest value task eating your week, like the creating flyers or juggling the schedule or cleaning out your inbox and hand it to someone for a tiny amount of money. Then take that time you just bought and put it directly into the activity that grows your income not another task.

That's how side hustles become real businesses. ⁓ in one giant leap, in two hour increments reinvested into the things that actually move the needle forward. And is the exact kind of ⁓ intentional that I teach with prime principle number four ⁓ on The core idea of the framework is that sustainable growth comes from deliberately reinvesting your freed-up capacity ⁓ the highest value activities, not filling the time with more motion. Most entrepreneurs stay busy, few are intentional.

And Eric's split is intentionality in action. And the third lesson for you guys is get out of the technician's seat. Real estate agents don't build the houses that they sell. And this mindset is what helped Eric take his business to the next level and is one I think most listeners are quietly stuck in right now.

Eric shared advice from a business coach that hit him hard a few years ago. The coach told him, Eric, real estate agents don't build the houses that they sell. And at the time, Eric was still elbow deep in website projects, doing technical work himself. And that one line really helped him reframe everything.

Today he says he hasn't even logged into a client's website in three years. principle is simple, but it's a brutal one. If stay in the technician role, the person the actual production work, your business will be capped forever at the number of hours you personally can work. ⁓ You'll never because you are the product.

The only way grow beyond your own. two hands is to get out of the technician seat and into the leadership seat. skill that built your business is often the exact thing keeping it small. You're good at the craft, but staying as the craftsman is what's trapping you at the ceiling of your own capacity.

then Eric told a story that should hit home for a lot of you. I a friend of mine with a s a specific business who blew special thanks to a TikTok video, and he got flooded with email orders. And he could never get past doing the emails himself because he swore that nobody could respond to the customers like he could. So he stayed buried his inbox instead of doing the actual work that grows the business.

⁓ Eric's seen it a hundred times. So here's the question I want you to sit with. If you're still doing it in your business out of pride or fear or the belief that nobody else can do it as well as you, keeping you stuck in the technician instead freeing up and being the leader. Because the you cling to the craft, the longer your business stays exactly the size of you ⁓ and no Eric developed his of web services, Peter, ⁓ from a guy barely knew how to log into WordPress into ⁓ someone who build website imaginable.

And that took years of Development, but it only happened because Eric was willing to stop being the builder and start being the leader. the final takeaway I want for you guys ⁓ bring home is it's a people problem, ⁓ it's systems problem. This last is the deepest insight in the episode, and it solves the thing that holds almost everybody back from delegating: ⁓ the belief nobody can do it as well as you. Eric said when resist delegating, ⁓ they almost always it as a people problem.

I can't find anyone good enough. Nobody can do it like I can. However, Eric's response is that's not a people problem, that's a systems problem. he made a distinction that genuinely changed how I think about things.

He people confuse unique knowledge with unique judgment. When you I'm the only one who can answer these emails, ⁓ what you mean is I'm the only who knows the answers. But knowledge can be You can put it into a system. What can't always be transferred the judgment.

The specific decisions that genuinely require. as the owner and and only those should filter up to you. Eric said, don't give my assistants the knowledge I put the knowledge into our system and then I plug my assistant into the system. the whole secret.

You don't train a person, you build a system and then you connect people to it. He to get 80 emails a day and it was killing him. Now he logged into his email in a long time. His assistant Emily handles ⁓ all of through a system.

And only two three that genuinely require the owner's judgment ever trickle up to him. The knowledge lives in the the people are plugged in. And this is why Eric is obsessed with SOPs. if you're not familiar, that's the standard operating procedures.

His has over 200 of them. And he wrote one called How to Make Eric a Cup of Coffee. And then another on how to create an SOP. Using the coffee SOP an example.

Those are the only two ever personally written. ⁓ His team creates all the because he's built a culture where documenting the is just. What they do. here's why this matters for you, even if you're a team of one.

Every you do a repeatable task, you have a choice. You can do it ⁓ and it and move on, or you can document it once and turn it into a system. And never to be the only person who knows how to do it again. The entrepreneurs who are the ones who turn their knowledge into systems before they hire.

So when they do the new person plugs into something that's already working. so Lot of great takeaways here, but the biggest thing I want you to walk away from the episode is the freedom that you're chasing, the time, the location, independence, the ability to step away built on working harder. ⁓ built on leadership and systems. Your capacity is the ceiling on your entire business.

So you that first, starting with leading Then you buy back time two hours at a time. And you guard those two fiercely, specifically keeping towards revenue and leadership development, not bit more busy work. get out of the technician seat because the craft that built you will keep you small if you cling to it. And stop trying to find people who can do it like you ⁓ and build systems that hold your knowledge so people can plug in ⁓ and whole thing runs without you.

That's how guy spent ten days in the Amazon, ⁓ fully off while his business keeps running. It's not luck, not magic, ⁓ leadership and systems. one intentional step a time. So if you're a founder who wants to make your first hire, if you're trying to get out of the technician seat and actually start building a business that runs without you, Eric the guy to learn from.

So you can get connected with him over at ericdingler.com. And there two great free resources there. So go to ericdingler.

com forward slash first hire to download his first hire readiness checklist that's called. It helps you figure out what role to hire, what to take off your plate, and includes list of 25 revenue generating activities for time that you're buying back. Or you actually to ericdingler.com forward slash call ⁓ to book a 25-minute diagnostics call where he'll help you out your specific next step and whether that's hiring or ready and planning to hire.

So, Eric, if you're checking out recap episode, thank you again for coming on, man. This was seriously a master class ⁓ scaling and leveling up. So want to leave you with something that Eric said at the very end of the guest interview, because it ties to the whole episode together. He said, yourself as a leader, even if you're or even if you're leading yourself.

Lead better to live better. And he meant it literally. Because your leadership capacity isn't just the ceiling. the ceiling of your finances, your health, your ⁓ and part of your life.

And the way you raise the ceiling isn't complicated. It's by intentional about what's next for you. Pick up a book, find a leadership podcast, start taking in the content and growing the capacity today ⁓ before you think need it. And no part of your life will ever outgrow your ability to lead.

So if you want a bigger business, a richer life, a stronger family, start by changing the circumstances. Start by becoming a better leader of the one person you can always control, who is yourself. Live or lead better to live better and take one step at a time. And until until next week, stay sharp, stay keep surviving the side hustle.

⁓ Peace, peace, peace.