Imagine two business owners running almost identical businesses.
Same market. Same team size. Same revenue.
Then, almost overnight, both experience a sudden drop in sales.
One immediately tightens their belt and works longer hours.
The other starts looking at their systems and their people — asking what needs to change.
The situation is the same.
The response is different.
And over time, so are the results.
That’s because business challenges don’t just test what we know – they reveal how we think, and what we believe.
And how we think is shaped by who we believe we are in our business.
The Cashflow Quadrant: How You Think
Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant describes this perfectly.
- Employee (E) – trades time for security
- Self-Employed (S) – is the product
- Business Owner (B) – builds systems and teams
- Investor (I) – allocates capital, not effort
These are notionally income levels, but they are more than that – they’re ways of thinking.
Look at how each identity reacts to the same challenge – say for that fall in revenue:
- Employee mindset: triggers a panic response
- Self-Employed mindset: cut costs and work harder
- Business Owner mindset: fix / change the system, train / upgrade the team
- Investor mindset: reallocate capital
Same problem.
Different interpretation.
Different future.
The big problem arises when you want B-quadrant results with an S-quadrant identity.
The Entrepreneurial Ladder: Growth Requires Letting Go
If you stretched this out and fine-tuned it a bit, you’d get something called the Entrepreneurial Ladder. And this is a great mirror to challenge your self-perception.
Advancing up the ladder requires learning new skills, but the bigger impediment is identity friction. Each rung up the ladder requires the death of a previous identity; otherwise, the pull of the familiar becomes too strong.
Life being life, this isn’t a binary thing. We don’t sit neatly on one rung of the ladder day in and day out.
We change according to external pressure and internal anxiety. You might act like a business owner when it comes to marketing – but with a Self-Employed mindset when it comes to handling customer complaints.
You see this identity friction playing out every day.
- Feeling the need to jump in and fix things whilst wanting your team to take more ownership
- Wanting to be the one with the ideas – but lamenting your team’s lack of engagement
- Needing to be the hardest working person in the room
In her book Multipliers, Liz Wiseman talks about Accidental Diminishers: traits that are often seen as positive yet have negative consequences. She labels these diminishers as:
- The Rescuer: always jumping in to save the day.
- The Ideas Guy: constantly generating all the solutions.
- The Pacesetter: setting the pace so fast others barely keep up.
On paper, they look like strengths — but they quietly cap growth.
The Identity Iceberg: Why Change is Hard
This is a simple model to help you delineate between behaviour – and what drives it.
The visual metaphor is simple enough. There’s the aspect of a person we see – above the metaphorical water – their actions, decisions and habits.
And what we can’t see below the surface – that drives them. Beliefs, Values and Identity (self-image).
3 things to remember about this:
- If there’s a gremlin in the wiring at any particular level, it affects everything above it.
- The deeper you go, the harder it is to change – permanently
- Environment is not just places and things – but also people and media
This is why good strategies can fail. It’s not the strategy – the problem is to be found deeper in the iceberg.
If the founder still believes “I’m the fixer”, “I’m the ideas guy”, “I need to be the busy-est person in the room” – they will sabotage every system designed to replace them.
Identity dead ends: the compound effect
The real kicker is what happens over time. What happens to teams where your behaviour – no matter how well intentioned – goes unchanged.
The Rescuer – always donning the Superman cloak and flying in to save the day – simply creates a more dependent team. A team who knows they can rely on you to fix any issues and learn over time to not even try to fix it themselves.
The end result? Everything has to go through you, so you become the bottleneck.
The Ideas Guy – always the one with the best and brightest of ideas trains a team to let you do the thinking. So, when you do ask them something, you’re met with blank faces and blank minds.
The end result? A team that can’t think for themselves and are disengaged.
The Pacesetter who has always seen hard work as a virtue and the root of success (which it probably has been until this point) simply demonstrates that no one can ever work harder then them. So why even try to compete?
The end result? You burnout.
Your business keeps reproducing what your identity craves and rewards.
Your old identity got you here. It won’t get you there.
Conclusion
Most business owners don’t hit a strategy ceiling – they hit an identity ceiling.
The business you want requires a version of you that:
- Lets go (through delegation not abdication)
- Trusts more
- Designs instead of does
- Leads instead of rescues
Your business is not asking you to work harder.
It’s asking you to be someone different.
What’s next?
If this struck a nerve, it’s because your business is giving you feedback – and it’s trying to tell you something.
If you’d like to explore what needs to change to unlock the stage of development for you and your business, let’s talk.
I offer a no-cost, no-obligation business growth session where we will:
- Clarify what it is you do want for you and your business
- Identify where you are stuck
- Build a clear plan to move forward
👉 Book your session at: Contact Us – Tim Brown – ActionCOACH – Let’s Have A Chat
Or call me direct on 07825 589333.
Best regards,
Tim
