M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER

STOP HUSTLING!
CHANGE THE
WORLD!
Four simple steps for entrepreneurs
READY, SET, GO!
Hello and Welcome to From Hustle to Harmony: Four simple steps for
entrepreneurs. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Marcel from Minimalist
Multiplier. I am going to show you exactly how to get room to breathe again.

I assume because you're here you are an Entrepreneur or Founder in the tech
space. And you are stuck, constantly putting out fires to keep your business
running. Work turned into one single, never-ending crunch for months or even
years already. You are maybe even close to burning out, running on your last
fumes. Your original vision of changing the world together with your friends turned
into a grind and seems to be further away than ever.

I can whole-heartedly say, that I feel you! I went through the same when I was
building my first company. You probably tried everything by now just like I did back
then. Every piece of advice given to founders and entrepreneurs out there. Like…

“Hustle harder, you're probably not doing enough yet.”

“You just need to keep fighting it will get easier eventually.”
“You just need to make your first million, from there it will be easy.”
"Just hire top talent with a lot of experience, they will do the heavy lifting.”
“Have you thought about getting an investor?”

I hustled for years 60, 80, or even 100-hour weeks at times. How much harder can
you hustle? I fought with everything I had to the point I burned out. Should I keep
on fighting after being burned out? I made several millions with my company. It
didn't change a thing in terms of the hustling. The fires were just replaced with
bigger fires as now there was a team of 20 people to pay and a burn rate of 100k
EUR per month. I hired people with years of experience and fancy CVs to take
over parts that I am not an expert in — one of the most expensive mistakes I made
until today. And trying to get an investor is a huge waste of time for giving up

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
control over your baby when you could instead focus on releasing a top-quality
product. Oh, and I did all of this while living as a digital nomad, slow traveling the
world. Which was a lot of fun, but didn't make building a strong team easier.

Enough about the bad things. You want to know what I did to get out of there. You
want to solve problems not whine about them. Let's jump right in.

I reclaimed my freedom with the following four steps. Nicely packaged for you to
do the same with fewer mistakes, and cost, and in a shorter time.

ACTIVATE LASER MODE

First of all, we need to have a look at ourselves. The biggest problem holding you
back is first and foremost you yourself. When you're in the fire-fighting and hustling
situation I bet a big part of your time is actually only being busy instead of doing
what matters. So stop being busy and focus on the few things that really bring you
forward.

This is why I call this first step "Activating Laser Mode”. Figure out what your target
is and then focus all your attention like a laser on this target. So let me ask you
directly: What is your big vision? Your dream that you want to achieve one day?
Be as specific as you can. Describe the world after you reached your dream as if
you were there right now.

I know you heard a million times, that you should know your vision. The difference
this time is that you will make it more detailed and colorful than ever before. Put
your emotions in there.

I just recently had this topic with a client. When I asked them what their vision was
their answer was: "Well to make a lot of money.” Then I asked them what they
wanted to do with that money and their answer was: "Idk…buy fancy stuff and

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
have cars.” I asked them what their next step was to achieve this vision, and who
they needed to become to live this vision. Silence.

You need to exactly know where you want to go and who you need to become to
live that life, to be able to take actionable steps toward this goal. "Make a lot of
money” and "to buy stuff” won't cut it. So write down your vision. I left some space
below for you to write it out in full length. Do that right now and only then continue
with the rest of this. Take 20 minutes or even an hour to complete this exercise.

Now that you have a clear picture in front of you of where you want to go and who
you want to become. Figure out what is the single most essential step you need to
take right now to get one tiny bit closer to that vision. Only focus on this one
essential thing until you reach it and then take the next step by focusing on the
thing that is most essential then. This way you will create 1% steps that compound
over time. Improving 1% a day means in 100 days you doubled compared to
where you were before.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
Now let's relate this to your company. How does your company's vision align with
your personal vision? Is your company's vision one milestone towards your vision?
Is it exactly your personal vision? Is the company's vision something completely
unrelated to your personal vision?

I probably don't need to tell you that aligning your vision and the company's vision
is essential for you to be passionate about what you're doing and keep going with
that. If they don't align at all, I would even recommend you pivot or search for
something else to do. Because neither your company nor you will profit from you
leading it.

Now that you have reached this clarity for yourself, how about your team? Does
your team know what the company's vision is exactly? Every single person down
to the newest intern? If not get them all together and make the vision clear to them.
If they don't know where the company is steering they won't be able to support you
getting there. Even worse. They will sabotage you and go in a completely different
direction.

To give you an example from my past there was this one time when my co-founder
built one part of the product with one of our devs, and I built the other half of the
product with another dev. You probably already see the inevitable catastrophe.
After 2 months of work when we wanted to put both halves of the product together,
we noticed that we worked towards two completely different visions. Well, the
vision on paper was the same, but both teams had their own picture of the vision in
mind and these diverged a lot. Two months of work for the trash. Just because we
didn't take one more hour in the beginning to make things clear.

To conclude on the Laser Mode. Be always 100% clear about where you are,
where you want to go, and what the most essential thing is to do next. If you don't
know one of these components, the most essential thing you can do is to get clear
about these components. If you are stuck with this get help. It's okay to ask for and
accept help from others. Together we can achieve so much more.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
Without being in Laser Mode the next step won't work.

CUT, OPTIMIZE, DELEGATE

After achieving Laser Mode the next thing to do is exterminate everything from
your schedule and your to-do list that is not essential.

Go through your to-do list and mark the things that contribute directly to your
vision. Everything else you delete now. I left some space below for you to write
down your to-do list. Come back when you're done with this.

Next, we need to simplify and standardize these essential tasks that are left over.
Why do we do this step now and not before? Because an optimized unnecessary
task will still be unnecessary.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
Simplifying and standardizing the essential tasks will give you a great overview of
what you are spending most time on, and which steps are recurring most often.
This is crucial for optimizing the right things. I know I repeat myself, but even if you
optimize something that has no impact on your goal outcome it will still have no
impact on your goal outcome after it is optimized.

Take now the most recurring steps of your remaining to-do and the ones that eat
most of your time and automate them. This is the most fun part for me. There is
nothing more satisfying than seeing a well-oiled machine run fast, right?

After simplifying, standardizing, and automating all these essential to-do you
should be now in a position where you can delegate most of them to someone
else on your team. Remember to first cut, simplify, standardize, and automate and
then delegate. Because if you delegate a time-wasting, unnecessary, bullshit task
to someone else, you are only wasting their time.

If you have done this second step thoroughly you should already be down to about
20 hours of work per week. Insane, right?

Personally, I took this phase even one step further and built myself a Life OS. This
system made execution so easy for me, that I was able to stay as productive as
the average person even in phases of deep depression. There were times when I
barely got out of bed in the morning and that for months. Still, I got the essential
things done every day and brought my company forward. I hope you don't have to
experience leading your company while depressed. It makes everything so much
harder than it already is.

Let's talk about how to make delegation even easier and build an army of Clones.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
CLONE YOURSELF
Wouldn't it be great if instead of working with random people you could work with
clones of yourself? People who think like you. Know to make the right decisions as
if you would make these decisions. Whom you can give responsibility over a part
of your product knowing that they will produce the best possible outcome?

Don't make it more difficult for yourself let others help you make your dream a
reality. And you can achieve such a company of clones by crafting a strong
culture.

The difference between a great company and a hell hole is culture. And this
applies to everyone involved in the company. You, your team, and your
customers. Especially, your customers will notice when your company has a
strong culture — a strong identity. Everything will look like it is made by one hand
and every aspect they touch will give the right feeling. Nothing will feel off for them
and spoil their experience with your service or product.

Therefore, craft a culture that works for you and your team, and only hire people
who fit into this culture. This little advice of hiring for culture fit instead of
experience alone would have saved me ~200k EUR in losses due to bad hires
alone. And I didn't even calculate the damage these people caused in terms of
delays and productivity decline of the rest of the team.

I again left some space below so you can write out your current culture. Not what
you think it is but what it actually looks like. Be honest with yourself. What are the
values you and your team base your interactions on? What hierarchies do you
have? What does pay look like in your culture? How are tasks handled and
worked off? Take some time now to get a clear picture of your company's current
culture.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
Now that you know what your culture looks like. What kind of culture would you
want to have to create the best outcome for everyone involved, and support your
vision best?

Pro tip: If you want to clone yourself, you probably want a culture in which
everyone takes ownership of the vision as if it were their baby too. Only this way
you can let go of big chunks of the doing and free up time to do the designing of
the vision and your dream.

I left some space for you below.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
Great work! What differences do you see between your current culture and your
dream culture? Make sure everyone lives in this culture. One single person who
isn't aligned with the culture can damage the whole team.

When we crafted our culture in my gaming company, the results were astonishing.
The team got done more things, in a shorter time while being happier. Every single
member of our team gave us the feedback, that they never worked in a company
like ours before. They never felt happier working because they were doing what
they were passionate about, together with people who were passionate about
what they were doing. This resulted in a self-reinforcing spiral of people inspiring
each other and driving higher-quality outcomes each time. It worked so well, that
we had to force people to take vacations from time to time. They simply didn't use
their flat-rate vacation days because they loved what they were doing so much.

This passion was also noticed by our customers who repeatedly gave us
feedback, that our content was of the highest quality with love for the details.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
You can craft such a self-reinforcing culture too, let me know if want help with it.

LEAD YOUR CLONES

Nice! You made it to the last step. When you come this far you probably will notice
that you now need to "do” a lot less. You're probably down to making decisions,
delegating to your clones, and designing the future of your company. When was
the last time that you actually worked on the future of your company instead of
constantly extinguishing fires?

The last step is to lead your clones. And leading means you will only be designing
and delegating. The master class here would be to become completely obsolete,
but I am getting ahead of myself.

Think how you would like to be led. After all, you're not working with random
people anymore but your clones. Every one of them is like you and would like to
be treated well. If you were in their position what of your behaviors as a leader
would bother you?

Here is an important mind shift for you to get to the next level with your leadership
skills. You are not the hero of your company. Your team are the heroes. You are
their supporter, their healer. The best leaders out there are in a support role.
Tyrants will never get the full potential of their subordinates and will always need
to continue putting in more effort to stay alive.

Check your Tyrant traits conscious and unconscious. Remove all of these
Accidental Diminisher traits to make leading your team effortless and get more out
of them for free. Ask yourself:

Who is talking most in meetings? Your team or you?

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
 Who is coming up with solutions?
Do you need to repeat yourself often?
Does your team bring the expected results in the expected time?
Do you often need to make decisions or are you delegating the outcomes and
you receive good results back?

I encourage you to really go deep into this and also talk to your team. It might be
uncomfortable, but growth is always at a place where it is uncomfortable. Evaluate
your leadership skills even if you think that you're good. There is always
something to improve.

I was surprised myself by my results. I noticed that in meetings people were

usually more quiet than I was, and I thought it was because they weren't as
prepared for the meeting as I was. Or they simply didn't know anything to add to
the topic we discussed. Little did I know that I was muting them. I was jumping in
with solutions right away on every topic. Being the first to respond. This taught my
team that I would solve all the problems. They just had to wait and do nothing and I
would save the day. This way they let me talk and disengaged from the
discussion. Damn, I felt like a fool! Don't make the same mistakes as me. Measure
even if it is scary.

This method convinced me so much, that me and my HR team (we called them
Geeks & Culture Managers) spent hours, developing a questionnaire and
evaluation method for Diminisher Traits. We used this method every quarter to
measure to progress of everyone in a leading role, including me. Eat your own dog
food!

When you improve your leadership skills, and step into the support role, you will
become a Multiplier for your team instead of being their last bottleneck. Bringing
their output to never-seen levels.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
HAPPY EVER AFTER
After these four steps, you should be down to about 10 hours of work per week or
made yourself completely obsolete. Great Success!

Awesome that you made it here! You know now exactly how you can achieve
more freedom, get closer to your vision, and stop the constant hustle and fire-
fighting with these four simple steps. Let's recap:

Activate Laser Mode: Always know where you are, where you want to go,
and what is the essential next step.
Cut, Optimize, & Delegate: Cut the non-essential. Simplify, standardize, and
automate the rest. Delegate everything that is left.
Clone Yourself: Build a strong culture and hire the right people for that
culture.
Lead Your Clones: Let your team be the heroes. And become a Multiplier for
your team.

I used this method for years leading my own multi-million Euro company with 20
team members while living as a digital nomad all around the world.

With a bit of help, I'm sure you can reduce your working hours to 10-20 hours per
week within 3 months.

Just imagine what you can do with all that free time. You could think about how to
grow your business, reach your dreams, or be super crazy and go out and do
something with your friends and family for once.

Take the first step towards your dreams now.

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER
Did you learn something new about your company or yourself today? Are you
curious to dive deeper into these topics? Or are you not sure of how to implement
some of these steps in your particular case? Let's have a chat or grab a virtual tea
together (I'm a tea person not fueled by coffee ).

FREE CONSULTING CALL

See you around!

Cheers,
Marcel

M I N I M A L I S T

MULTIPLIER