The Achievement Formula: How to Unlock Your 30% Profit Edge

Mastering Business Flow, E01

The biggest impact on your long-term profits isn't another marketing course or a new piece of software. It is the effort you put into becoming a CEO with exceptional character and finely tuned executive functioning skills.

If you want to move from stuck to sustainable, you have to stop chasing technical skills and start building the best version of yourself.

The CEO Skills Gap

If you’re a small business owner, you know the feeling. You started with a brilliant idea and your core expertise, but now you spend your day doing a million other things: managing project timelines, wrestling with specialized software, or trying to create a viable budget.

You are responsible for everything.

The overwhelming need to master every technical "hard skill" can stop your business growth dead in its tracks. While technical skills are necessary, they are not sufficient for your success. They can get you started, but they won’t sustain you.

The Science of High Achievement

Experts like Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth have studied what makes people reach the top of their fields. They discovered a simple formula:

$$Achievement = Skill + Effort$$

1. Skill (The Brain)

Skill is what is built into your head—your talents and your ability to think. This includes your Executive Function: your ability to organize your thoughts, stay focused, and prioritize your workload. Skill helps you go fast, but it also requires the "smarts" to slow down and be analytical.

2. Effort (The Character)

Effort is your Character. This is your inner drive, persistence, and self-discipline. No matter what your skill level is, your character acts as the multiplier. It determines how much time you are willing to stick with a challenge.

Research by Adam Grant found that business owners who focused on learning these character skills increased their profits 30% more than those who just focused on technical skills.

Mastering Your Executive Function

As the CEO of a scaling business, executive functioning is critical because you are constantly juggling priorities and making decisions with limited information. To master this, you need three specific skills:

• Impulse Control: The ability to stop, think, and decide. This allows you to eliminate distractions and focus on what really needs to be done.

• Mental Juggling: The ability to manage information. Since your active brain can only hold so much, you need a "second brain" or digital system to capture information so you can find it when you need it.

• Cognitive Flexibility: The ability to bounce back and quickly switch gears when a new problem arises without being crushed by it.

The FLOW Framework: Your CEO Operating System

To help business owners develop these vital skills, I developed the FLOW Framework. It is a way to integrate your growth and ensure your business moves forward intentionally across four areas:

• F – Focus: The ability to stop distractions and focus on one thing at a time using SMART goals as your filter.

• L – Love: Leading with emotional intelligence. This means regulating your own emotions and learning to see your products and services through the eyes of your customer to build trust.

• O – Operations: Technical systems for managing information overload. You need simple prioritization systems to track your next steps today.

• W – Wellbeing: Maintaining your mental capacity through rest, exercise, and nutrition. Even 10 minutes of exercise a day helps your brain flow better so you can think clearly.

Moving from Stuck to Sustainable

The "soft skills"—persistence, resilience, resourcefulness—are actually the hardest skills to master. But they are also the ones guaranteed for your success.

Investing in your own character helps you spot better opportunities, stick with challenges, and build deeper trust with customers and employees. That is what makes the bigger profit in the long run.

Take Action Today

I want to help you take action right now without adding to your overwhelm.

Sign up for my no-cost Business Growth Email Course. Every week, I’ll send you one simple, actionable step based on the FLOW Framework to help you build high-impact CEO skills and get your business flowing.

Want to hear the full breakdown?

While this post covers the framework, the full podcast episode dives deeper into the science behind the "Marshmallow Test" for CEOs and how to apply these systems when you're in the thick of daily operations.

Listen to Episode 3 now: [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] | [YouTube]

Key Moments in this Episode:

• [05:10] – The Adam Grant Study: Why character beats technical skills by 30%.

• [08:50] – A deep dive into the FLOW Framework.

• [12:10] – How to implement the CEO Operating System today.