Stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime

You’ve probably heard the phrase “stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime”.

I love a good saying, and this one’s in the top 3 for me. It perfectly captures something I see all the time… Including in the mirror.

If you’re not familiar, the phrase means ignoring bigger opportunities for the sake of small gains.

And what’s crazy about it is that even when we know we’re doing it, we keep doing it.

Let me give you some examples…

I’ve had “hire a VA” on my goals list for the last three years. I spend 10+ hours every week doing low-value, repetitive tasks that someone (maybe anyone) could easily handle.

And the rest of the time, I spend complaining that I don’t have enough time to get to that marketing I’m behind on or take on a new opportunity.

The problem and the answer are clear as day. It’s 1 + 1, but I just pushing it off in the interest of “saving money” and doing all of it myself.

And it’s not just me… This week a YouTube viewer messaged me about a plugin problem. They bought a lifetime deal (LTD) for a knockoff version of a popular WordPress plugin and have spent weeks struggling to get it to work.

When I asked why they didn’t just buy the brand name option, they cited the $150 annual license fee.

Too expensive? How much money did they burn in the weeks of frustration? Chances are, they could have paid for 5 years of renewals by now.

What I’ve noticed is that one of the hardest habits to break when you start a business is the employee mindset.

We’ve spent our whole lives trying to stretch every dollar, and it goes against everything in our brain to flip the switch and start seeing money for what it is; a tool.

Whether that’s buying back your time so you can go make more money (like hiring a VA would do for me) or saving you wasted hours trying to get something to work (like our friend with the off-brand LTD), spending money isn’t a cost, it’s a lever.

The employee mindset asks “how much does it cost?”, but the owner mindset asks “what will it allow me to accomplish?”.

The difference between these two questions is the difference between scraping by and gaining traction.