Episode 50: What’s Better Than Starting Over?

Get ready, because everything is about to change. There's a new way of living life and doing business that will blow your mind. This is a podcast all about the timing of life and the timing of success. It's what we call the Right on Time Life. And you are listening to the Right on Time podcast with Amber McHugh. Hello. Hello. Welcome back. I'm Amber McHugh, your host in another episode of the Right on Time podcast where we come together and we share and we collaborate as modern CEOs and entrepreneurs who are doing things a little bit better. We see something different. We see something better out there. And I'm recording this on Casual Friday. So I'm hanging out, relaxing today and moving through my to do list in as easeful of a way as I can. This week has been a little bit wild. I wasn't feeling too hot earlier in the week, had a little bit of a cold. And then at the second half of the week, we celebrated my youngest daughter's seventh birthday. That was a lot of fun. I've got to tell you. We grabbed, we wanted to make a balloon garland, but I didn't place an order with someone local until it was too late. So I didn't have time to order it. But I walked through Target the day before her birthday and we were grabbing a few final things and they had a balloon garland kit and it was amazing. It was so easy to put together. It just totally set the stage for the party. That was all of our party decor. That was the extent of it. It was all that we need it. We try to keep it simple here. And we indeed did. And then she wanted sushi for her birthday dinner, so we ordered the sushi. We did learn how to make sushi when we were in Ethiopia, but I have actually, I did not. We my daughters did. They were over at a friend's house and learned how to make sushi. They haven't taught me yet, so I'm going to have to learn that. And so we had a great night. And it really her birthday. Us coming together with a small group of family members for the first time in a little while felt like a little bit of a fresh start. And I don't know about you, but I love a fresh start. I always have. There is something wonderful about coming back from a vacation. In fact, fresh starts for me begin when I am going on vacation, when I change habits. When I want to try something new, I try them on vacation. Because what a better place to try something new and step into a new experience than when you're not worrying about the typical things that we have going on in our day to day lives. You know, Mondays are a great fresh start. I like Fridays as a fresh start too, because we're rolling into the weekend. I'm reflecting on how the week went. So the point here is that there is something so healing about being able to start over and the excitement that it brings. I mentioned in our last episode we talk about chronic reinvention. And when I think about this desire to constantly improve, change things up, move toward something better, that vision that you hold that even if it is just this much better, I am wondering if you are too someone who is moving towards regular improvement, taking our game up a little bit, refocusing on what matters and what's going to help grow our business, what's going to make our lives that much better, what's going to allow us to make someone else's life that much better. And fresh starts, even when we don't need them, can be very tempting. Maybe you've had that burn it down feeling in the past. Burn it all down. Let me just start over. Let me redo this. Well, I don't want you to do that because you have built some things that we can continue to iterate on and improve upon and take to the next level. So don't do that. Don't burn it all down. Resist the urge. But the good news is that we can create a fresh start anytime we want without having to throw everything away and start completely from scratch. Because you've got some good stuff to work with. You've got some magic that we want to use as we take things to the next level. One of the reasons the completely start over approach doesn't work is because you don't actually need to start completely over. We're like going back to the starting line when you might be this close to the finish line. So I want to invite you to not go back to the starting line every single time we are thinking about making an improvement or a change in our business. And it might feel like it is the only way out of what feels like an overwhelming and an impossible situation. Right. We I shared with you a couple of episodes ago that we reached out to our community recently and asked, how is everybody doing? What do you need right now? And the overwhelming message that we received back, the overwhelming response was this feeling of overwhelm and that we are tired. So I understand that things can get overwhelming, especially if we're struggling with finances. Right. Like so many of us did in the last year as Business owners, as things changed and evolved and started, slowed down and sped up and, oh, my gosh, what's happening? There was just a season of change, and there is constant change when we are running businesses, right, there is constant change, and our ability to adapt is critical. But this last year, it was intensified in so many different ways, and it can feel like nothing is working. I have been trying all the things. It is just not working. But I urge you to step away from the lighter and choose a different path. Look at how, okay, we're a little closer potentially to the finish line than we thought. Look at your business and ask yourself, okay, what's working here? What do I really like? What's not working and why not? And what are some ways that we can look at the situation that we have right now and identify ways to fix it? For example, if we look at industries that have overhauled and have completely changed in the last, I don't know, 10 years. Let's take a look at the hotel industry. I love looking at how we can make changes to our business not simply by adding things, but looking at how we can completely redesign or looking at how we can not completely redesign, but just take away one thing and it gives us a completely fresh perspective. For example, let's take a look at the hotel industry and look at what if. What if instead of adding more, instead of completely saying, oh, we're not going to be in the hotel industry anymore, we're not going to be in the accommodations industry anymore, but what if we just turned it on its head a little bit and said, well, what if we were running a hotel business but we didn't own a hotel? What if we didn't own the buildings? What if we didn't have hotel buildings at all, but we had places where people could sleep? How could we have places where people could sleep without owning the buildings, without having multiple rooms in the buildings? Have you guessed where I'm headed with this? By asking, what. What are we doing? What can we take away? How can we remix this a little bit to give ourselves a fresh perspective? You may have been the creator of Airbnb, in this case of vrbo, which has been out there, or vrbo. Vrbo. I think they officially came out and said, we aren't vrbo. We are vrbo. Almost forgo. Forgot. But this came not because we said, let's scrap the industry altogether. Let's scrap everything. But somebody came in and said, what if. What if we had places for people to stay, but we didn't own it. We didn't own the buildings. So there may be things in your business that you have added right over time that you don't necessarily need to get traction and to get the momentum that you are so desperately looking for. And I'm not just speaking about you, I'm speaking about myself as well. So let me give an example from my own business. My photography business was just me and my business partner when we started and for a long time after that. Joanna, my business partner, would coach and direct the shoot and guide people through that experience. And I would take the photos and complete our wrap up and let people know what products were going to be available for them to take their photos home. It was just the two of us doing absolutely everything. I'd work with each client one on one, and frankly, I hit a point of burnout. I was doing the same thing over and over and over again, and I was at my wit's end. I realized if I was going to keep this up, if we were going to keep this business up, I wouldn't be able to do it. If it was me doing these shoots on repeat, I was completely at my wit's end and I knew the business would not survive at all if we kept doing it this way. I was just one person taking all the photos. Joanna was one person guiding people through those individual photo shoots. Did we need two people? Not necessarily. I could probably take all the photos and guide someone through the photo shoot, but we actually decide to have two people in every shoot to make sure every client that works with us gets incredible attention. Every strand, every strap is untwisted. Every piece of the shoot gets four sets of eyeballs on it. Four eyeballs, two pairs of eyes. And it was my burn it down moment. It was, I am done. Burn it down. Peace out. I didn't think that I could move forward if it was just me doing the photos all the time. But I didn't know how we'd make money if I stopped. We were in this together. We each had a role to play. We each had different experiences. If I quit, what are we going to do? So I took a step back and I looked at the business model differently. Just like we could look at industries differently, just like we can look at microcosms of our business differently. But we looked at the business model and we identified that how. And we asked the question, how can we make this business run if it is never just about one person? Okay, all right. And we asked questions and we explored and we leaned into this idea that, hey, it's okay to Ask questions. It's okay to want something different and we don't completely have to burn it down. We can make incremental changes that over time add up and have massive, massive, massive, I am telling you, massive impact. So making those changes and asking those questions led us to our fresh start and it gave us that new business feeling without having to completely tear it all down. Listen, you've put a lot of work into what you are building. You've put a lot of work into this. Incredible work, incredible insights, potentially financial investments. And there might still be a spark somewhere. We just need to shift our perspective a little to get things moving in the direction we want them to be moving the direction we have vision for what we see, this future. But how? But how? If you have this business and it feels like absolutely nothing's going right right now, maybe it's not absolutely nothing, but there's this one big thing. You're like, I just can't take it anymore. I just can't take it anymore. How do you change things without throwing everything in the trash? Where do you start? What aspects of your business should you even be looking at? Well, good news. I know exactly where every business should start to get that start over, fresh start, let's get this moving in the right direction feeling, which leads to more success, which leads to momentum, which leads to increased revenue and better cash flow, which leads to profitability, which leads to money in your pocket and your clients being blown away and satisfied, which is what I want for all of you. And you start by knowing your personal stage of business. Now why am I saying it's about your personal stage of business? Business isn't one size fits all. Business isn't cookie cutter templatize. Right? As much as I love a template and a system and a plug and play process, boy, do I love it when we can get things to that point where it's repeatable in our business. Plug and play, let's go. Let's go, let's go. But growing a business isn't plug and play. Your business strategy is unique. Your vision is unique. That is what is going to help you stand out in a crowded marketplace. So we've got to personalize this a little bit. And when you're looking for a fresh start, when you're looking to get momentum, the place I want you to think about first is your business stage, where you are in your business evolution. More specifically, what do I mean by business stage and why does it even matter? Knowing what stage you are in your business is going to help you figure out what you should be doing right now, where you should be focused right now to take your business to the next level. It's not about all the things. It's not about all the things we see in our feed. It's not about what we see our BFFs and our colleagues doing, that successful entrepreneur over here or over there, or that you're listening to right now. It's about what you need to be doing in your business. So as you step into this modern CEO role and you grow your business and you move along in your entrepreneurial endeavors, it's going to become more and more and more personalized. And it might feel like your business isn't working right now because you're at the wrong stage. You're operating and you're implementing activities for a different stage of business. For example, when you're in the startup phase, we may not want to be looking to make things automated right away, right? We may not want to look at automated sales funnels right away. We may not want to look at the advanced strategies that may be coming into your Facebook feed right now. Right? Or your Instagram feed. In fact, when we skip too far ahead, it's the quickest way to make you feel like your business will never work, right? We're tripping over ourselves. We're getting ahead of ourselves and we've got to bring it back, right? It's not that it's not working. It's not that it won't work. It's not that we aren't this close to getting some momentum. It's just that we're focused on the wrong thing for the stage of business we are in right now. We're fixing problems we don't even have yet. We're future tripping. And I want to bring us back. I want to bring us off and away from that future tripping experience and bring us back into present day. What do you need now for your business? What's happening now in your business that we need to focus on to get that traction and get that momentum? So taking a step back and looking at what's appropriate for the stages of our business right now and addressing those specific things is a great way to get that feeling of starting over, that fresh start, capturing that momentum again without doing the damage it can cause, without taking us all the way back to the starting line when we are this close to reaching our next goal and our next milestone, and this is applicable for every stage of business, sometimes I find myself, right, operating at that CEO level and operating at that gross level for our business and I take myself back to startup like, oh, I don't, I don't need to do that right now. I need to elevate. And then there are others times when we're like working the stairs. Right. I do need to step back down the stairs to my startup mindset because we're thinking about a new product line because we need to think about our offers differently or our marketing differently. Right. So we work the stairs from time to time. Yes. But do not light the match. Do not light the match. So how do you know what stage your business is in? Well, good news. I'm going to take you through the different business stages in our Modern CEO Must do list and tell you exactly how to figure out what stage you are in right now. You're going to know the exact steps you should be doing for your business and what you actually don't need to worry about right now. I'm going to help you identify danger zones. What may we be doing? Depending on the stage of business we are at, that could be a risk to the business growth that we want and can achieve. But there are some danger signs sometimes like, oh, we're getting off track. Bring it back. Don't do that. There's also some things we should think about. How should we be showing up as leaders? We're going to walk you through that too in our Modern CEO Must Do List guide. And you will be shocked and floored how knowing this information can change what you'll be doing day to day. This is a completely free download. I'm so excited to get it into your hands so you can identify what your stage of business is. Right? You may already know this. You already know I'm firmly in startup or I am firmly in scale up, ramp up or CEO up level. But I just want to make sure we're in sync in our definitions when you download this document and then we'll walk you through what your focus should be and how you know when it's time to move to the next stage. This will give your business that fresh start without throwing it all away. So I want to invite you to go get this guide@themodernceowey.com in addition, when you go grab this download atthemodern ceoway.com we're going to invite you to be on our wait list for something that is coming in summer 2021 that is all about helping you as an entrepreneur and a modern CEO take your business to the next level and ground in knowing what you need to do as a business owner. And not just as a business owner, but someone who has vision. Someone who is looking to the future and looking to create something a little bit better. A little bit better. Whether that's something better in your life, something better in the business landscape. This is what the modern CEO experience is all about. And it's coming summer 2021. We are working on something for you and I'm so excited to share it with you. But for now, hop on over to themodernceoway.com to grab this guide. It's going to help you identify what you need to be focused on right now. And then we will be sure to let you know when the new Modern CEO Experience is ready for you. With that whatever day of the week it is for you when you are listening. I hope it is a good day and I cannot wait to hear all about your fresh start. In fact, if you got a nugget, if you had a revelation, if you had an aha as you listened to this episode, if you would let me know by leaving a review or if you would message me on Instagram, I'm Amber McHugh. I would flippin love to hear from you. In the recent episodes that we released, I've heard from some of you and it is such a gift to connect. That is what it is all about for me. It is about you getting success, getting ahead, moving the needle forward in your business. Because even just a little bit of change can have big impact with that. It has been a gift being here with you. Remember, you are always right on time to listen to that nudge, that calling, that instinct that you have to take the next step in your business. We don't want to sit in in action. If you've got something good that is brewing, let's do it. Let's take it to the next level. Let's bring it to life. You're right on time.