94. Why Running A Business Is Like Getting Punched In The Face Everyday

The other side with being an owner is you do everything, you work really hard, you get freedoms in inverted commas because you have to work insane hours and you're always thinking about the business. You're never truly free of it, but if you want to stop, you can. But you have to accept the consequences.

I had a mate of mine call me recently. He runs a pretty decent sized business. He's doing about $10 million of revenue. He's just going through so much shit. Co founder problems, legal issues, lawsuits, staff issues. Half his staff have left in the last two weeks. He's totally stressed out. He's away from his family. Things just keep breaking. Everything's just going against him. It's just brutal. Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me is Bergs, your favorite MBA and COO of Collective Shift, Australia's leading crypto portfolio insights company, providing professional analysis and portfolio strategies for crypto investors like you. We are a unique blend of the established and the self made. And we're here to break down crypto business and personal growth. But we're not here just to talk crap. We give you the insights you need to make better investments, build successful businesses and level up your life. And today we are talking about why running a business is like getting punched in the face every day. Now, that is a bit of a negative viewpoint on running a business, but it is the reality. And if you go to YouTube and you type in become an entrepreneur or running a business, it's all fairyland. It's everyone's making money, it's so easy to make money. It's all amazing, it's all great. But the reality is you are in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson and you've got no gloves, you've got no padding and you're just getting belted pretty much day in, day out. You get enough wins to keep you going. But especially the early stages of business, it is tired, it's tiring, it is difficult, it is resource strapped and no one really understands. And they just look at you and they go, what is wrong with you? Why are you, why, why do you look like you haven't slept in six months?

And today we'd have a bit of a conversation around, you know, the ins and outs of.

What it's actually like behind the scenes. How are you bugs?

I'm going well, Ben. And look, it's self evident. Just look at your face. You're beaten up, mate. People Wonder why you have a head like that. It's because you're a business. You're a business owner, mate. Get boxed around the ears every day and it is, mate, it's like being in a boxing ring and you're just trying not to get punched in the face. It is an incredible journey and you understand so much about what your previous bosses would have gone through, company owners would have gone through. All the stuff no one talks about. You see that 20 years down the track, you're on a beach somewhere, you've made all this money, you've got all this free time. Fantastic. You don't see all the late nights, the stress, the I don't know how I'm going to do this. And it is constant. You celebrate for 14 seconds, then something happens and it is just would not recommend. And the equivalent, honestly the equivalent of this is like having a kid is awesome. Parenting sucks. It is relentless and it is just go on and on and on. You are working 247 when you own a business.

Yeah, 100. And I had a mate of mine call me recently. He runs a pretty decent sized business. He's doing about $10 million of revenue and he's just going through so much at the moment. Co founder problems, legal issues, lawsuits, you know, staff issues. You know, half his staff have left in the last, you know, two weeks or the last few weeks. He's totally stressed out. He calls me up and it's just like, man, like this is what's going on. You know, he's away from his family, he's in a different state, trying to coordinate stuff. He's stressed out. You know, things just keep breaking, like everything's just going against him. It's just like, it's brutal. And I can just hear how defeated he is. You know, he's usually a really up, up, uplifting, you know, inspiring, happy guy. And he just sounds to just like poor bloke.

He's gone through it, mate.

Going through it. Like we've all been there. I mean, I've been there a number of times and you just know. And then the worst thing is when you're going through that is like you literally just need to stick it out and, and try and you know, I always think try and stay, stay healthy, you know, focus on things you can do, meditate, journal, go to the gym. But it's, it's easier said than done when you're going through that sort of stuff. And it's a very lonely road as well. And I think one of the most difficult things in business is how volatile it is. Right? One day, you know, you've got this amazing win, you sign this big client, and then it comes to payment day and they don't have any money, so they can't pay you. And then the deliverables fall through because something breaks. And then you need to tell the team that, you know, they haven't paid and all the hard work you've done, you know, didn't come to fruition. But then the next day, you sign another client or you have this new campaign that starts to kick off and you get another win. It's high fives. And then the next day, the guy that created it quits. And now you don't know how to build it, and now you need to go find someone else to create it. But then the next day, you know, you win an award and you get all this traffic and you get this new, you know, bonus. And then the next day, you know, the server goes down and no one can pay the subscriptions.

Like it's like it is. Isn't it so crazy where there's always something going on and like, even the common ones that most businesses will feel. Where inflation's gone nuts, People are demanding more money. Great, I'll pay my people more. Where is that money coming from? Okay, we've got a bit of money. We've got some tolerances built in. I can pay them more. Great. Now, my. The people that owe me money, you know, the people I've done work for, instead of paying me two weeks, now it's two months. How am I going to manage my cash flow for that two months? Oh, and by the way, here's another lawsuit. Oh, and by the way, this person just quit and you have to go on a hire. Hire someone else. Oh, they're going to cost way more than the person you had. And it's going to take three months to find them and hire them. And you have to deliver this thing. It is the amount. And Ben, let's talk about. I want to talk about two things. Just some of the big events that have happened in collective shift and then also the context switching. So some of the big events, mate, things are going well. Yeah. Hit with a nonsense lawsuit. You know, it's nonsense. You know, it's absolute bullshit. But you still have to go to the lawyers. You have to pay attention to it. They ask you questions. You have to go through the motions. It costs you money. You may or may not recoup this money. It's absorbing all of your time and effort. It is so crazy. And then you got HR challenges where people aren't getting along or aren't communicating or want to leave or want more money or don't want to do the thing or haven't delivered the thing. Then you're not also like, not just infighting, but fighting the market as well. Now the market's tank now people don't have money now they're not interested in crypto. Oh, and by the way, you're also a startup. You're low on cash and after all of this, the market doesn't care what you have. Discretionary spending is down and you're remote as well. Good luck.

And, and, and you have to pay your, your team more now they, you know, high superannuation. Oh, and by the way, your contractors, you need to pay them super. And, and also all your team's rent's gone up, so they can't afford that anymore, so they need more salary. But yet, hey, the customers are not willing to pay more. Just figure it out. Thanks. Yep.

Figure out. Good. Good luck to you.

Or.

And everyone. So shows like this is the classic one, like signups on Twitter, they'll be like, ding, ding, ding. I've got all these signups and it looks amazing. And money's rolling in the door. You've got monthly recurring revenue. The reality behind that is every founder is worried about what is their experience, are they going to leave? Are the payments going through, are they hitting the checkout and leaving, you know, other emails going through, how long are they sticking around for? People are leaving my service, why are they leaving? How do I engage them further? It is a nightmare.

And then, and then you're doing all the activities to get the business going. You're working, getting up. You, you didn't sleep well because you're stressed about that thing. Then you get up and you've got calls from 7:30 right throughout the day. You get 20 minutes, like before this podcast, just to have a bit of a break in a meditation. You accidentally fall asleep. So then you late to the podcast, that's the middle of the afternoon, and then you piss someone else off and then you've got calls the rest of the night. And then you haven't gone grocery shopping and you haven't eaten for today and you haven't gone to the gym. So then you just go to bed because you can't be. And then you don't have a sleep and then you get up and you do all the same thing the next.

Day, mate, isn't that just the game? And it's Wild where I constantly ask myself, I'm like, why am I doing this? And the reality is like, yeah, you look at yourself, you're like, you're a fucking idiot. Even to a mates, I might just stay an employee, honestly. And I'm like, no, this is the path that I've chosen. I wanted to be in crypto, I wanted to be in a startup. I know it's going to be hard, but this is still the thing that I want to do and I want to continue on this path, as mad as it sounds.

Yeah, well, I mean, the other, the other side, you know, the upside is.

What pushes you through and also the freedom, right? So the ability, you know, the ability to do things on your own time, you know, create the future that you want. Not having to work in an office, not having to listen to the man, you know, there's. There's a range of amazing benefits and then the upside opportunity of the, you know, whether it be freedom of time, freedom of money, so many amazing things, but takes a long time to get there. And also building something that is built to scale. If you think about the cash flow quadrant with Robert Kiyosaki, like, you know, the, the business model that makes money while you sleep is very, very difficult. Like, you can be a lawyer, you can be a doctor, but it's still time for money. You have to put in time and you get money from that. Where if you're trying to build a business that isn't. That is scalable without you and can make money while you sleep, that's the ultimate goal, but also the ultimate challenge. And you're competing in a market against everyone else. This is the other thing I've been, you know, thinking about a lot recently when, you know, we're doing a lot of marketing activities and Facebook ads and everything else, you know, how does Facebook algorithm figure out how much you pay per lead or per cost, cost of acquisition, whatever that might be? Well, it's a. It's a competition. Facebook will show to their users what is best. It's a competition. If your ads are better, if your products better, if your conversion rates better, it will show more of that to the Facebook user because it knows that the Facebook user will engage in it. If you've got shit ad, shit product, shit quality, it's going to cost you more. So the better you are, the, the better the results. And the least you pay, the worst you are like, the more shit you are, the even more battles that you're going to have to fight because you're going to have to be forced to pay more. You're not going to get any revenue, we're going to get less revenue. You got to be paying more. And you've got so many more challenges ahead of you. And that's why this economics of scale works so well. Why big businesses, once you have money, can make more money because they've got a down pat. But for the little guy, the David versus Goliath got its kind of thing. You've got so much against you when you're trying to figure it out. And that's the hardest, the hardest, hardest and most exciting thing.

Yeah, that's, that's it. And this is why, like, you know, 90% of businesses fail to get to a million dollars revenue and then 90% of that 10% don't get to 10 million revenue. And even those big businesses you're competing against, they were small once and they figured it out. And this takes heaps of money and heaps of time to pump it in and, and figure out how you are going to succeed as a business once you have, you've got your flywheel and you feed that machine. One mistake I see a lot of people making is taking established businesses or startups that have gone public, but again, they've been around for like a decade and applying the lessons from them. The reality is when those companies were started or when they were a certain size, they did not do any of those activities. And you need to do the activities that make sense for the size of your business and move at the pace that makes sense as well.

Yeah, I totally agree. I was listening to a TEDx talk the other day about what makes startups like, what's the common denominator that makes startups win? And there was this guy that did the TEDx talk that basically went through and evaluated all of some of the major, you know, winning companies. Airbnb, you know, Tesla, Amazon went through all these companies, right? And he, and he looked for the common denominator. Then he also looked at the common denominator of a bunch of failed companies that raised a bunch of money. And he compared the two winning companies and losing companies to try and find the common denominator. Like you went through, was it product market fit, Was it the team, was it capital, was it timing? Was it, was it their Runway? What, what was it that was the common denominator of, of successful businesses versus those that failed? And it was the one key clear denominator was timing.

You know, you can have the best product, you can have the best marketing, you can do whatever the hell you want, but if you're too early or too late, then you fail. You know, there was so many Netflix style businesses that were born and tried to go global, you know, years before Netflix did, but it was the wrong time. Consumers weren't ready for it, you know, and it wasn't until Netflix came along, the timing was right and everything else fell into place that Netflix was able to go blow up.

That's right. And when you talk to founders, owners, they'll call this luck and really what it is is market timing. The thing that they tried was good, it worked. But they had this massive wind that just filled their sails and they were able to take off into the sunset. And never underestimate that. It's a real challenge for us in crypto because crypto is incredibly seasonal. Right. You know, you have incredible highs in bull markets and then massive lows in bear markets. Hopefully we start to see that shorten. Hopefully the next bull market is going to be incredible. I think it will be. But you know, even things like if you're running like, I don't know, you're growing oranges or something, that's a seasonal business and you have to prepare and you have to hunker down for the winter and you have to manage your cash flow and it's just, mate, the other week you and I, I think we ran the full gamut of everything across our business and this is another taxing thing going through and context switching and like you're literally going from a call with an employee to an investor call, to a sales call, to an onboarding to talk about marketing, to talk about strategy. Then we go down into finance and we go into org structure. Like all in the one day to go through all of those, it just burns you out and then you have to wake up and do it the next day because you just don't have the people. We're incredibly small teams. Either you do it or it doesn't get done and the fire doesn't get put out.

Yeah, and I think that's a big difference between those who work in corporate and those in startup is like, you know, in corporate you have, you have your role, you have your duty, you're the customer success guy. You apply to messages, you're a startup, you fucking do everything. Yeah, I guess you were saying like you wake up, you got an investor call and then you've got a marketing call and then you've got an advisory call and then someone's quit and then you need to do a job application and Then you've got a PR interview and then you're into a content meeting and then you've got a business development lunch and then you've got to do a podcast and then you're back to doing website design. Then you've got another investor call, it's like. And then you got a slack message and then an email, then a phone call comes in and then like, yeah, everything's still fucked.

I did an entire like an insane day of work and fucking nothing's happened, mate.

At the end of the day and nothing's moved. Everything's still the same.

That's the thing. Like there are advantages to being an employee and that is you don't have to worry about the majority of all of this stuff. You can just go in, you can do your job, you have multiple teams to support you. You know, you can do hybrid work, you can work from home, you can go to the office, there's employee assistance programs, there's perks, on and on it goes. The downside of that is you don't have a lot of control, you don't have a lot of freedom. And you may have to go to an office every day. You have to continually show the work that you do and explain it because a lot of the time it's not self evident. So you really have to balance what you want to do. And then the other side with being an owner is you do everything, you work really hard, you get and then freedoms in inverted commas as well because you have to work insane hours and you're always thinking about the business. You never truly free of it, but if you want to stop, you can. But you have to accept the consequences of not working an insane amount. And then you get to build things your way. And because you own the business, every business sucks in some areas, but you get to choose the areas which your business sucks, which is a really freeing thing.

That's the freedom piece, isn't it? Absolutely right. You never truly free from your business, but you're free to make the decision that you want to do. You know, you're not, you know, you know, not taking directions from other people.

Exactly. And when your business is succeeding, there's a direct line to what you get. So if you get on target earnings or something at work, let's say you make a million bucks, you might get, if you're lucky, you'll get 10%. Like you won't get heaps of it. Right. Like 10, I think is quite a lot. And then if, yeah, it'll be like something like, you know, you raise, you know, you sell a million bucks worth of stuff, you get, I don't know, 10k bonus or something. Right. It's not huge. Whereas if we get a million bucks, that gets shared amongst the owners or it gets pumped back into the company, you get to grow it and you're an owner, so you directly get out. What you put in the challenge is you can control the effort and what you do, but you can't control the result that happens in the market.

Yep. All the timing, you may not be ready, you know, the market might not be ready. There's nothing you can do about that. Zero.

Absolutely crazy, mate. Why are we doing this?

Well, that's a great question, I think, like, you know, I, I, I love the, I love the learning aspect. You learn so much about business and people and like, you know, it's a real.

Thing that keeps me motivated to continue learning and, you know, challenging. And the wins, I mean, you can't match the wins. The wins are amazing. Although you only win for about 14 to 17 seconds usually. And then something else breaks. They're a pretty amazing 14 to 17 seconds. And doing it with a, with a team that you love, you know, working with. And then also just that dream, that vision, you know, that one day, like the what if, what if you actually pull off what you're trying to do, what that could really do for your life, the lives around you, the people that you're serving, like, that's a pretty cool idea.

The learning aspect is huge. I didn't even consider that. And I think the two kind of paths, well, the areas in my life where I learned heaps, learned hardly anything in high school, learned hardly anything in my undergrad. Doing computer science. Started working. Yeah, it was okay. Learnt stuff, but it was over like, you know, a decade plus when you get to that level. The big accelerator was doing an MBA for me and learning all those other skills and applying it. Being in a management position and then being with collective shift, almost being here 18 months. And you learn a lot, not just about business and practical things, but about yourself. What do I like? What do I don't like? What do I not like? How do I want to live my life? You know, how do I, how can I achieve my goals through the business you're constantly assessing and reassessing. And you and I do these quite regularly with each other, saying, you know, what do we want out of this? How do we want to live our lives? How can we structure that? And you learn so much about yourself. The communication style that you have when you're thrown in, you're constantly thrown in the deep end and you have to swim. So you start to get exposed to just crazy things and you can't avoid it. You can't be like, I'll do that next week or to go to another team. No, you have to get in there and you have to do it and you're shitting yourself. But you get in there and you do it and it starts to unlock, man. First of all, a lot of personal growth, like you learn so much from it, but also the experiences you have and you become really resilient where you're willing to tackle anything and that just compounds and compounds over time.

Yeah, a resilience is a big one. You have to. Because you get punched in the face, you'll get beautiful back up again. And it's nearly a game of survival. Like if you can last the distance, know usually the rewards will come through and that fly will, you know, goes. But I want to bring it back to a point that you mentioned there. It's just like, you know, if you don't, if you don't do it, who does it? And, and I always love the, the comment that, you know, just goes around because we're kind of looking after each other. But you know, if you think about it a little bit more closely, it's like, you know, I'll just, you know, the one that's like, I'll just take it easy, mate. Like you look knackered, like, yeah, just, you know, don't worry about it, mate. You know, come back to it later. And then you go, okay, well, well then what? You know, okay, I take it easy and then who's going to do it? And then you go, wow, I don't.

Know, you know, it'll be waiting for you when you come back.

And then I have more stuff as well.

Yeah, so like it's. And yeah, it's one of those things. It's. You do need to look after yourself because you can, you know, get yourself into, you know, burnout and you know, all those sorts of things. But then it's also like, yeah, you're competing against every other startup and every other business that's just trying to compete for the customers and it's a race and it's made the best man win.

Something you said that was really interesting about just surviving. So there's almost an anti fragility aspect there where the longer you survive, the longer you're likely to survive, like the Lindy effect. And you see that in Your local cafe strip where businesses come in, they survive three months, six months a year and they go. But then you've got those institutions that are there year after year after year and they've figured something out. They figured out how to run their business, have figured out their customers, and eventually you get to a point where you could either scale your business or cash flow your business. And the longer you stick at it, the more you learn, the more you put into it. And this is another key thing, like you can bring people in, you can bring expertise in, but you have to continually grow. The business can't outpace you. And I know you spent a lot of time on this, Ben.

Yeah, yeah, you can't. Especially.

You know, if the, if the business outpaces you, whether that be through growth or growth or strategy or talent, well then who's leading the business at the end of the day? Like, you know, I've personally switched around a lot internally in the business. You know, you'll learn about content, you're going to learn about marketing, you got to learn about strategy. You know, you have to, as the business owner, know pretty much every area in the business to some degree. Because I've learned if you outsource areas that you don't understand, you don't have any ability to know if they're doing a good job or not. And this has been a big lesson for me where I've outsourced areas of the business before that I haven't quite understood and I've lost a shitload of money by doing it. Because you, you trust in other people. And the reality is most people don't really know what they're doing, you know, or, or they promise that they know what they're doing and then can't deliver on that.

Yeah, or they tell you they're doing a good job. They know you don't even know how to discern that you're not going to pull it up on them, pull them up so they'll take advantage of you. They'll just do a half ass job and this. And again I bring it back. Like doing the MBA allowed me to do that. So it's like you do, you know, accounting, managerial finance, a little bit of legal strategy, organizational behavior, marketing. So you actually what it teaches you is like the fundamental principles, but the key thing is it teaches you how to speak to those people and when they give you work to discern whether it's good or not. Yeah. So you get the top level stuff and it basically teaches you how to run a massive Company. Right. But at the same token, that's very different to, hey, I've got this very specific thing I need you to do in ads over here in this way. And you might know the strategy, you don't know how to execute. And they come back and they're telling you a story and you're like, I've never done that before. How do I know this is true? How do I know the model is learning? How do I know that they're actually spending all this not burning through my cash? It is, it is a nightmare. And you are constantly, constantly have to be updated and learn more and more and more.

Yep. Yeah. And that and that you got to get very micro. And I think that's where like consuming content and learning, like, you know, whether it be, you know, I do a lot of courses, watch a shitload of YouTube videos, read as much as I can, you know, but I, I tend to direct my learning. This is the best thing about running a business because you're not just learning the theory, you're actually learning to then instantly put into practice. So whether that be YouTube ads, whether that be Facebook ads, whether it be creating content, how to create Instagram reels, how to hook people, how to create a funnel, how to lower churn, how to build that product, is that product even right for the customer, how to do surveys the customer, how to understand if it's product market fit. Can you afford that? Do you do it? A forecast is a cash flow, Is it across? Is it zero? Do you need accruals? Like, like all this stuff, you're like, holy.

But that's what's most exciting about it because you're learning so much at once.

Even finance is the one area they teach us in EO where the majority of people fail and like 80 to 90% of people come in with no idea they're working on accruals. They're like, everything's looking great. Then someone who knows what they're doing looks over their books and goes, you're going to run out of cash in three months. You're. You need to restructure everything. It is the amount of stuff you have to be across. And then it's not just having like the knowledge on that, right. It's then, how do I transcend that knowledge? But also how often do I review it? So it's like in the meetings you run, do you have weekly exec meeting, strategy meetings? What are the touch points? What areas of the business do you really need to have your finger on? Because it's gone Wrong before and have that huge oversight. How often do I check in? You know, what are the triggers here? What are the scenarios that play out?

Oh, mate.

One of my favorites is I've heard from some MEO friends of mine is like, that they'll get in a CFO and they'll have financial problems, and the C5 will look at the numbers and they go, yeah, you need to. You need to increase revenue.

Yeah, thanks, mate. Great, Great.

Thanks, mate. I'll pay you $300 an hour bill later. Appreciate it. Like, you know, it's. It's. Business is all about context and just understanding. Like, there's never, you know, it's just never as easy as just doing that one thing. Like, you know, and I think Jim Collins talks about that really well in the book, you know, good to Great. And also turning the flywheel. It's never just that one thing. It's never that. That Facebook ad campaign or that. That product you build or that person you hire. It's a combination of everything continuing to compound and grow over time that pushes the flywheel, that gains that momentum.

That's it, mate. And we're here, we're working hard, and we're figuring it out.

And we love it.

We love the. We love the grind that. We love the punching bag.

I do, man. I reckon we can crack this. It's going to be awesome.

Yeah, let's go. We'll come back to this video.

Yeah, that's it. We'll review this episode.

Right?

I'll hand him a resignation in two weeks, mate.

All right. Good episode, man. I enjoyed that. It was a good little. Little. I really did.

It was good to talk through it. There was a bit of therapy in there as well, mate, which I always enjoy.

I actually feel better now.

Yeah. Yeah. So, folks out there, all the stuff that we're talking about is the lived experience and what it is like to run your own business and make sure it's something you want to do, because once you commit, you're in there and it's part of your life. It's like having a child.

You're in. Can't get rid of it, but you can, but it's not. It's not pretty.

Yeah, that's it. Like, yeah, you can. And that's the thing as well. Like, businesses close all the time. Sometimes you didn't figure it out and you haven't failed. It's like the soldier that goes to war and comes back, you still went to war. Right. Like, you did the thing and I look at myself and I was working in health and I had an opportunity with you, Ben. And I looked at this from so many angles and I was fearful, I was scared of the unknown. And I looked at it from the angle of if I'm 80 years old and I look back and I stayed in health versus I gave it a go in a startup that could blow up in three months. But it was in crypto in an area I like with people that I really enjoy working with. What choice should I make? And I made the choice and it has been transformational for my life and I still make that choice every day.

Yeah. And that's beauty of it, honestly. Like, it comes, it comes with a lot of difficult, more stressful probably times. But the upside is also amazing. Really?

Absolutely. Man, what a cracking episode.

Good episode. Thank you everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you have someone in your network that you think would find it valuable, maybe they're running their own business, maybe they're thinking about running their own business. We'd love for you to share it with them. It's how we grow the podcast. And yeah, just keep sharing it and talking about Ben and Bergs. We love those. We'd love those nice messages that roll in and we'll keep creating awesome content for you. So thanks everyone. You can follow us bensimpsonau on Twitter babybackburg and also Ben and Bergs on Twitter. And we'll see you next episode.

Thanks. Listen, champions.