That’s not a tagline. It’s a diagnosis.
Spencer Combs — The Defiant Coach — recently joined Mike Nelson on The Leverage Podcast to break down the invisible patterns keeping entrepreneurs stuck, why most business owners are solving the wrong problem, and what actually produces the kind of change that sticks. What followed was one of the more honest conversations about business growth, leverage, and the real reason people stay below their potential.
Here’s what came out of it.
Two Patterns. Four Outcomes.
Spencer has been in the business of working with entrepreneurs and high performers since 1999 — starting in real estate, eventually expanding into insurance agencies, HVAC, military veterans making the transition to civilian business, and everyone in between. After two decades of watching people build — and watching them stall — a pattern became undeniable.
Most business owners fall into one of two categories.
The first is the Builder — momentum-minded, action-oriented, wired to move fast and start things. These are the people who take action and go do the thing. But here’s the ceiling that almost always appears: Builders struggle to create anything duplicatable or scalable. They’re excellent at generating momentum and terrible at building the structure that holds it. In a world obsessed with the word “scale” — scale your business, grow it, duplicate it — a pure Builder without operational infrastructure is going to hit a wall.
The second is the Operator — mastery-minded, systems-focused, wired to optimize and get things right. These are the people who want to engineer everything properly before they move. But the Operator pattern carries its own ceiling: the desire to over-engineer creates stagnation, and the refusal to move without perfect conditions produces a different kind of stuck.
These two patterns produce four predictable outcomes in business:
Frustration — you’re all mindset and action but missing the mechanics. You’re working hard and getting nowhere because the systems aren’t there to hold the momentum.
Burnout — you have the mechanics but the mindset is off. You’re the most technically capable person in the room and someone less qualified is making five times more money. You know exactly what to do and can’t figure out why it isn’t working.
Stagnation — both mindset and mechanics are underdeveloped. You can’t figure out how to get started or what to do next. Motion feels impossible.
Impatience — you’re close to the Qualified Champion state but something is still off. Results are coming but not fast enough. The gap between effort and output is maddening.
Everyone in business right now is in one of those four places. The question isn’t whether you’re in one — it’s which one, and what’s actually causing it.
The Real Diagnosis — Mindset, Mechanics, and Movement
Most coaches, as Spencer pointed out directly in the conversation, love to cram a solution down your throat before they understand the problem. Here’s the AI tool you need. Here’s the system. Here’s the framework. The issue is that prescribing a solution before diagnosing the cause is exactly how you keep people spinning in the same patterns with new tools wrapped around them.
The actual framework for diagnosing what’s missing comes down to three things: Mindset, Mechanics, and Movement. All three have to be present simultaneously to create consistent forward progress. Think of them as a Venn diagram — three overlapping circles where the center represents the Qualified Champion state.
Mindset is the belief system. How you think about yourself, your business, your potential, and what’s possible.
Mechanics is the how-to. The systems, processes, and practical structures that make the business function and scale.
Movement is the activation — the willingness to act, to generate momentum, to drive against the drift. This is what the Drift to Drive framework is built to produce.
When all three are present and aligned, you have a Qualified Champion — someone operating in purpose, with clear mechanics, and genuine momentum toward a well-defined outcome. When one or two are missing, you have one of the four patterns above.
The fastest diagnostic in the room: which two out of three do you currently have? Your answer tells you exactly which pattern is running you — and what the actual prescription is.
What Cultural Gravity Is Doing to Your Business
Here’s the concept that stops most people mid-conversation when they first hear it.
Cultural Gravity is the invisible force — made up of social norms, industry expectations, your environment, your history, and the opinions of the people around you — that pulls everything toward average without your permission. It doesn’t need you to fail. It just needs you to keep not choosing anything that would actually change things.
And it’s extraordinarily effective at weaponizing your strengths against you.
Think about it. You’re great at writing your emails, so naturally you should be the only one writing them. You’re great at sales, so of course you shouldn’t delegate that. You’re the best person for this task, so why would you hand it off? Cultural Gravity takes your genuine strengths and uses them to justify staying exactly where you are. Every legitimate reason to hold on becomes a reason to never let go.
The result is what Spencer calls the Drift Tax — the compounding cost of staying in your current role when your business needs you to step into a bigger one. Every hour you spend on $50-an-hour work when you’re worth $500 an hour is a drift tax. Every task you hold onto because nobody else does it quite like you do is a drift tax. The tax doesn’t announce itself. It just accumulates, quietly, one reasonable decision at a time.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth that most business owners won’t say out loud: the reason they’re not getting leverage isn’t systems or software or team. It’s that they have no compelling reason to let go. The emotional leverage to make the change isn’t there yet. And without that leverage, no tool, no virtual assistant, no process will produce lasting change.
You Don’t Need Motivation. You Need Emotional Leverage.
This is the distinction that separates a Spencer Combs coaching conversation from a motivational speech.
Motivation is a feeling. It shows up on Sunday night, fades by Tuesday, and leaves you in the same place you were before it arrived. You’ve felt motivated before. It didn’t change your behavior permanently.
Emotional leverage is different. Emotional leverage is what happens when the cost of staying where you are becomes more painful than the cost of changing. When the drift tax becomes undeniable. When the gap between where you are and where you’re capable of being stops being acceptable.
You can’t think your way into emotional leverage. You can’t motivate yourself into it. It has to be built — through honest self-assessment, through clarity on your actual end goal, through a specific accounting of what the drift is costing you that you haven’t been willing to say out loud.
The person who finally hires help for their lead generation isn’t the one who got more motivated. It’s the one who finally calculated how much revenue they lost in the last twelve months handling tasks that could have been delegated — and couldn’t un-see the number.
Leverage Defined — and How to Think About Your Time
When asked to define leverage during the conversation, Spencer kept it clean: leverage is anything that allows you to put in minimal effort and get maximum return.
The practical application of that for a business owner is the dollar-per-hour exercise. Take your revenue goal for the coming year — or your actual revenue from last year — and divide it by 2,000 working hours. That’s your hourly value. Now look at everything on your task list today and ask: is this activity worth that dollar amount per hour?
If you want to move from $1 million to $2 million in revenue, your current rate is roughly $500 an hour and your target rate is $1,000. The question for every task in front of you isn’t whether you can do it — it’s whether doing it yourself is worth $1,000 an hour of your time. Most of the things filling most entrepreneurs’ days are not. And the gap between what they’re doing and what they should be doing is exactly where leverage lives.
But — and this is the critical point that Dan Martell’s replacement ladder makes explicit — you don’t start by delegating the fun stuff or the scary stuff. You start by delegating the lowest-dollar-value activities first. Administrative tasks. Data entry. Scheduling. Email management. Not because those things aren’t important but because they consume hours that should be generating far more per hour than those tasks are worth.
Leverage yourself fully first. Document what you’re doing. Then duplicate what’s working with the right people in the right roles. That’s how you actually build a team rather than just hiring people and hoping they figure out what you already know.
The Purpose Problem — Why Revenue Goals Without Why’s Go Nowhere
One of the most practically useful moments in the conversation was Spencer’s breakdown of what happens when a client says they want to go from $1 million to $2 million in gross revenue.
The immediate response: okay — why?
For what? What are you doing with an extra million dollars? What does that actually give you? Until that question has a real, specific, personal answer — not a generic one — the goal has no root system underneath it to draw from when things get hard.
This is where the purpose block in the Mastery framework does its work. Purpose is the foundational building block — the starting point of the mastery sequence — and it answers two questions. What are we doing? And why are we doing it?
The price tag exercise Spencer uses in coaching makes it concrete. That million dollars is a price tag — but what is it a price tag for? Spending more time with your family? What does that look like specifically? Where are you, what are you doing, who’s there? The clearer the answer, the stronger the purpose. And a strong purpose is what makes the priorities below it obvious.
Which leads directly into the second building block: Priorities. If you don’t have a strong purpose — a committed, specific outcome — then everything feels like a priority. You’re doing all the things and nothing is moving. That’s not a systems problem. That’s a purpose problem. The priorities reveal themselves naturally once the purpose is real.
The One Thing You Should Never Delegate
In the lightning round portion of the conversation, Spencer was asked what one thing he would never delegate. His answer: the WRAP session.
WRAP stands for Weekly Results and Planning — a rhythm Spencer maintains that gives him a consistent view of where he is, what he’s doing, and what the focus is for the coming week, month, and year. He and his wife even do a dedicated annual planning retreat together.
The reason it’s non-delegable is simple: it’s the north star. It’s the practice that keeps purpose from drifting into generic aspiration. Strip away the rhythm of honest self-assessment and planning and everything else becomes reactive. The drift tax starts accumulating immediately.
This is the opposite of leverage by accident. It’s leverage by design — building the disciplines that keep the highest-level decisions in the right hands while everything else gets systematically handed off.
The Conversation Worth Having
What came out of this podcast conversation, underneath all of it, is something most business owners resist hearing directly.
The problem is almost never where the symptom is. The revenue isn’t moving because the purpose isn’t clear. The team isn’t performing because the systems were never documented. The leverage isn’t happening because the emotional cost of staying small hasn’t been felt clearly enough yet.
The symptom is the income. The cause is the drift. And between the two of them is a tax you’ve been paying — one comfortable, reasonable, justifiable decision at a time.
Watch the full conversation on The Leverage Podcast with Mike Nelson:
→ Watch on YouTube
Take the free Defiant Assessment at unshakeablesecrets.com — three to five minutes — to find out which of the four patterns is currently running your business and which of the five arenas is your biggest bottleneck right now.
Grab a free copy of Momentum and Mastery at momentumandmastery.com — free plus shipping. The full framework: Drift to Drive, the Mastery sequence, the four patterns, and the five building blocks.
Stay Defiant,
Spencer Combs | The Defiant Coach
About Spencer Combs
Spencer Combs is a business coach, speaker, and author of Momentum & Mastery — the business leader’s guide to building unshakeable profit, productivity, and purpose. Known as The Defiant Coach, Spencer has spent over twenty years coaching entrepreneurs and high performers to break through the ceilings keeping them from their full potential. He is the founder of Defiant Resources and the creator of the Unshakeable Framework — a methodology built around the 4 Power Patterns, the 5 Arenas of Business Mastery, and the Drift to Drive momentum process.
Connect with Spencer:
🌐 spencercombs.com
📋 Free Defiant Assessment: unshakeablesecrets.com
📘 Momentum & Mastery — Free + S&H: momentumandmastery.com