Welcome to the Main Street Business Podcast with your distinguished hosts, Mark J. Kohler and Matt Sorensen.

Both are bestselling authors and have over 25 years of industry experience with 10,000 client consultations,

making them the leading tax and legal experts in the nation. Together, they'll unpack the most

complex tax, legal, and financial strategies, crucial for saving more, stressing less,

and building generational wealth. Today, they're your personal advisors, ready to break it down

for you and make the tax and legal game easier than ever. Here is Mark and Matt.

I was in startup for five years. I was suffocating my business. Number two, optimization and systemizing.

You don't scale a business. You scale people. People scale your business. You're learning how to

duplicate yourself, not replace yourself. If you think you're the smartest person in your business,

you're staying in optimization. You will never scale. Now in the scaling phase, I'm making money. Do I put pedal to the metal? Is that always the best thing?

The best advice I had was from a very successful friend of mine who said, live three years behind

your needs. Don't wait for the exit phase to start saving. Now we get into the fourth phase.

This is where you replace yourself.

Welcome everybody to the Main Street Business Podcast.

My name is Mark Kohler here with the illustrious Matt Sorenson talking about business.

And this is, I'm really excited about today's topic because we get to be vulnerable and talk about all of the mistakes we've made in our life. How do you that, Phil? Yeah. Why don't, why not record it and put it out to everyone to hear and listen to? Yeah. Why not? I mean, you did it at the 360 event just last week, an incredible event, by the way. If you missed it, I'm sure you can, you know, maybe check it out. but people love this. So it was good. Dived into this. I think for any Main Street business owner, understanding these different phases as you broke them down is super helpful and illustrative to know what you should be doing and thinking about where you're at. Yeah. So let's lay these four out and we'll set the table and we'll talk about our life experience in these four.

And Matt and I doing 10,000 consultations with clients over the years, each of us, we've seen clients in every one of these phases.

And we're going to describe and how they blend. It's not a bright line. You're going to love this. So okay, here they are.

Number one is startup and structure.

Startup and structure.

I got an idea.

How do I structure it?

...