Broken or Bored? How to Tell and What to Do Before You Break Your Business

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I am a tinkerer. Are you?

No.

Really?

No.

Sometimes, I mean, there's like, especially, like, motorcycle stuff. What happens when I click this? One more thing to give me some more compression or rebound.

Oh, no. I'm a reorganizer. I'm not a tinkerer. Really? Yeah. I will just rip everything apart and.

Put it back together just to see if it's better.

Yeah. I'm an arranger by nature.

I would put those in the same category.

Really?

Yeah, because it's. It's like, hey, or is like, let's make this better.

Yes.

But was it broken?

Oh, probably not.

Probably not. Yeah. There's many times where I'm like, hey, I'm gonna make a few clicks of suspension adjustment and I take it down the road and I'm like, am I riding a pogo stick? I try not to do that in my business. I know you try not to do that in your business, too.

It can be painful if I do.

Yeah. That's is what we're going to talk about this week. Stay tuned. She's the CEO.

He's the marketing and operations guy.

If it's broken, you need the business fix.

Yay. Let's break our businesses. That's because we're bored.

The fact that you even just said that. We have to start the podcast with that. We have to leave this in. I know. We're going to talk to Nika about editing. That is how we are starting the podcast with Chrissy just willy nilly saying, let's break our businesses because we're bored. Because that is. I mean, literally, it's what we have in mind when we're talking about this.

It is. It's exactly what we're talking about. And there's so many business owners. I just want to look at them and go, you're doing it wrong. Don't do that. I mean, it's one thing to be bored. It's another thing to break things because you're bored.

Okay, so just because we're skipping the banter here.

Okay.

But I don't. I still want to hit a personal note on this.

Yes.

I made the motorcycle reference. I'll make another reference here too. What's something in your personal life where you've been like, oh, let's try this. And you're like, oh, I just created a disaster.

Oh, I like home reorganization projects. Like, oh, I'm gonna reorganize this closet, which then turns into. I'm gonna reorganize this closet and every closet. And then I've pulled everything out of the house. And it looks like we're having, like, it looks like we're hoarders, but we're not. Cause I've cleaned out every closet. And then my husband comes home and goes, what is going on? That's also when, you know, I'm in high anxiety and I might be on the edge of burnout.

Does he just walk into the room, turn around, and walk right back out of the room?

Yes, that has happened occasionally. Yeah.

No, I. I cannot blame him.

Or. Yeah. Or if I have, like, I clean with trash bags, then that's. It's just like, oh, oh, my.

Oh, Kim does that. She's like. I mean, as soon as I see her, like, as soon as I see trash bags, I'm like, oh, she's. She's stressed out. Shit's getting cleaned.

Call Goodwill. We're getting the trailer. It's going.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah.

No, I. It's funny, like I said, there's. I. I like to adjust things. I like to tweak things. Let's do this a little differently. Yeah. There's been numerous times. One of my favorite ones is when I adjusted something on the lawnmower. Let's adjust this a little lower. And I didn't get the side to side right. Adjustment on it. This is years ago. My lawn had a bunch of steps cut into it, then completely scalped on the one side. And somehow I didn't realize this till I'm like 15 laps in.

It's a good thing you're not in an hoa.

Oh, yeah. No, definitely not. I. Do you think I could live in an hoa?

I don't know.

There's no way.

No, I could. My husband could not.

No. That we. Yeah, there's. There's no way I could live in an hoa. That being said, personal fatigue, structural failure, sales slow. There's cycles. Business feels heavy. The first reaction is, oh, my God. Yeah, we all have that reaction. We talked about being resilient last time.

We did.

And so you hopefully don't have the let's change everything reaction. Often cases, the business is fine, needs an owner who isn't like, hey, what happens when I turn this knob? What happens when I turn this knob? And the problem is it isn't the small adjustments. It's like the hey, we're going to take a big swing for this random thing that has nothing to do with what we currently do.

Yes.

You focus on long term vision mainly.

I do.

Because you can see down the road. Not my forte. I'm short term operational marketing stuff.

Okay.

I love that we're going to be able to like talk about this from those two angles. When do you see like there's longer term mission drift that needs corrected or when is it just the owner's like, eh, let's switch things up just because I'm, I'm, I'm bored with this. I've done this for 10 years, why the hell do I want to keep doing it?

Well, and I think sometimes business owners don't realize they're bored.

Oh no, I, I wholeheartedly agree.

That's the problem. You don't have the self awareness. And I've had those moments of where it's like if there are moments where I am really frustrated because something isn't moving fast enough, that's usually when I have a coach that looks at me and goes, chrissy, you're bored. You need to find something else to do while this is working itself out. Because you've set the system in place. Don't break it because you're bored.

Don't get watched. Pot never boils.

Exactly.

Give it time to boil. Walk away.

Yes. So signs of mission drift. So like when the business itself is misaligned. So if your people don't believe in the mission anymore, you don't have a messaging problem, you have a direction problem. And so that's really, I think mission critical to anything is mission drift where the team doesn't understand it. So when the mission no longer resonates, so if it doesn't resonate internally or externally, you're going to hear employees say, why are we doing this again? Or worse, that's not who we are anymore. So if they say that's not who we are anymore, I think you've probably got some red flags there. And then I think this one probably goes along with you. In talking about some of the marketing stuff, you're losing relevance in the market. Sales are declining, referrals are slowing down, the value offer feels outdated or unclear. And that's really an indication that the company is drifting toward revenue at the expense of purpose. So saying yes to anything and losing your North Star, I think it's something that as business owners, especially early on in our entrepreneurial journey, when we say yes to everyone, it happens. And then we've got to kind of narrow things down so we can drift and be like, yes, we market to this and we can do your podcast and we can do your print media and we can do, no, no, don't do all the things. Do a couple things. Well, I think that's really important. Another one is when it becomes crappy wall art. So when your vision statements that used to inspire people and everybody understood, when they start to feel stale or disconnected, they've become the crappy wall art and you've gotta revise. And if your culture isn't energized by the work that you're doing, your vision needs a reset. And I will say, as a business owner, it's really easy to be like, I wanna change it, because it's lived in your head way longer and it lives in your head all the time. It doesn't live in your employees heads all the time. No, no. They're not sitting there going, we provide peace of mind by simplifying the complicated. We provide peace. They're not saying your purpose statement every day the way that you are. Does that resonate? Do I want to change it? Should I do something different? Do we want to sell shoes? Stop it.

So I want to go back to the vision statement because I feel like this is so important. This is why in the podcasting side of things, and this is basically analogous is what I'm going for with this, we talk about what is the purpose of your podcast and what is the specific thing you talk about.

Yes.

Because pod drift is the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like the podcast, we talk about culture and fixing business problems for business owners and things of that nature. We're not talking about. And we. Accounting is a piece of that. But we're not, we're not going to end up as an accounting podcast.

No.

Because we know what our lane is and we're staying in it. Because we, we have it written down and we have it stated clearly. So that way we can look and be like, oh, we're headed north. Yes, that's north.

And we've agreed that that is north.

Right. And it's okay to go north northeast and north northwest. Don't go south.

No.

Don't drill.

No. Do things the right way. Another thing that I think is really important in looking at, you know, staying. Are you. Are you bored or are you going to break? Your business is looking at owner burnout. So it's.

Burnout's been a thing.

It has. And I feel like.

I feel targeted.

You should feel targeted. It takes the average person 10 times to hear something before it aligns. So sorry, audience, you got seven more times. Seven more times. We're going to talk about this because I want Josh to learn it, so I want to learn it, too. Modeling what we want to see. But I will say, you know, burnout doesn't always look like collapse, so sometimes it also looks like disinterest, especially for a business owner. So when you're canceling your strategic meetings, big picture planning falls off the radar. Owner starts micromanaging, not because they're needed, but because they're bored and they need a dopamine hit. That's the other part of this is as a business owner, you've got to be able to monitor your own mental wellness. If you are addicted to the adrenaline of everything being in crisis, you are probably going to break your business so that you can save it. Don't do that. No, go find something else to do. Find something that challenges you on the growth side. I mean, a lot of times, two business owners get frustrated because there's no excitement for what's next. Like, they want to know what's the next thing that's going to break. What's the next thing that I can say when the business is stable, maybe even successful, sometimes a founder can get really restless or resentful, and that's where. Especially when you're hiring people and let's say they do the job better than you ever did. Just be thankful.

Oh, yes, it's okay.

You want to hire people that are better at these things than you are. I want to hire sales and marketing people that are way better at sales than I am. I want to hire HR people who are way better at doing these things. Same thing with insurance people. When I have a prospect that is calling, they're like, we want to talk to Chrissy. I get on the phone and I go, you do not want to talk to me. I want to talk to you to tell you, hey, this is great. I appreciate that you're like, for the business, they're like, I have a question about what the stop loss should be for this carrier. And this. I'm like, timeout. I am dangerous. I know what I need to know. But there are people who are experts at this instead of me.

So I know just Enough to screw it up.

Exactly. Exactly. But I'm smart enough to put really good people in place that know how to take care of you. And my job is to take care of those people so that they can continue to take care of you. When you get to that point as a business owner, be thankful and excited about it. Don't screw it up because delegation sometimes stalls out because the owner either doesn't trust the team or hasn't redefined their role. And so that's the other part of this. So you get drift in owner burnout because they're going, well, I don't feel needed anymore, so now I'm just going to break it.

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I'll give you a few seconds to go to the website while we get ready to get get back to the show. It's funny you say that because to me, it's having the right mindset for it because na, our editor, who's listening to this now as she's editing this for us, when she does some of the intros and the animations and the intros, the first time she did one and it came back a thousand times better than what I would have done. I'm like, oh, I did this right?

Yes.

I did the hiring.

Right.

That's it. And that's what I needed to focus on. Not that, oh, she's better than I am. No, I was like, I did something else. Right.

Exactly. It's time for you to level up your skill set and the other things that you need to be good at. Delegation, making sure that your business can be stress tested and resilient.

Have we talked about that?

We have. I love talking about it. We do. So the other thing I will say is like that cure for being broken versus bored is really working at reconnecting, redefining, or releasing. So whether it's burnout or mission drift, the antidote's really the same. It's realignment with your why? So the step one is reconnection. So revisiting your original mission, does it still hold up? Do the things still excite you? I mean, if you're like, the thrill is gone, then okay, then you hopefully you have a saleable business. Because if you don't like it, don't break it. Build it so that you can sell it. Yep, that's the whole point. Then move on to the next thing. And if it's not, if you're not tied to your original mission, then it's probably time to either evolve the vision or to sell the business. And if the mission is intact but the owner's burnout, then the answer may be delegation development or redefining what that role looks like for you. Whether it is moving you from manager to truly CEO or moving you from integrator to visionary, you've got to kind of move up and down. You need to be, and I would say too broken versus bored is to create some of those times that you need for strategic thinking. And so this is why when people are like, you do a lot of professional development. Yeah, because I want to make sure that I fall to the level of my training and also because I don't want to break things. So if I go develop myself and build my skill sets, it enables me to continue to level up as the organization grows. So that's through. You know, if you do retreats, if you do coaching, I mean, or even simply like stepping out of day to day ops for a season, you want to see how your business works without you in it. Don't work on a Friday. Pick a random Tuesday and just say, hey, I'm not going to show up. Give yourself a pajama day in the middle of the week and don't bother anybody. Don't call them and say, is everything going everywhere? Don't get in your email. And when you're doing your strategic thinking, the other thing that I will tell you, and this was something that when I was young in my career, I was notorious for. Cause they would be like, oh my God, she's clearly somewhere thinking about all these things. Because I would just start sending everybody an email about a new project that we were going to do. And they hated me when I came back. And I would have hated me too, because it's like, oh, I've got time to think here. This is how we're going to reorganize everything. Not every idea needs to be presented to your team, especially if you are. If you have a really high quick start where you're constantly going to new things and you've got shiny object syndrome. I have trained people that I work with that do not have high quick start, but have very high follow through. If they're working with somebody that quick starts all the time, they have to say it three times before I will act on it. Because what would happen to me is I would have somebody say, it'd be really nice if we could do this. It's done. And like, oh, I didn't really mean that. I was just thinking out loud. You don't think out loud with me because I will execute. So that's really important.

That explains how the podcast got started because I was like, hey, do you want to do a podcast? You're like, yes. It's like, whoa, okay. Yeah, yeah.

And that happened.

I mean, that. Yeah, that happened faster than I could like, pull. Start a lawnmower. Yeah, no, that was the, the. It's funny when you say, like, when you go through some of that, because to me, the one thing that I see with the that is that quick start piece is rather than presenting it, go deeper into the planning.

Yeah.

Map that thing out before you send it to everyone.

Yes, yes. If you're the person that you. You start it and then they have to do it or bring everybody in and have a dialogue. I think that's where it's really important as your team gets bigger to have team alignment around certain things. When there's only three of you, you saying, hey, I need you to do the thing is probably gonna be a lot easier.

Correct.

If you have 30 people, you're saying, hey, go do the thing, and five.

People have to be involved with, it's.

Gonna get a lot harder and you can move faster. When you develop a team that communicates, that can understand and can ask questions and can get clarity around what they need to do and then they can move.

Yep. Yeah, totally. Totally makes sense.

Yeah. So, Josh, you deal with shorter term, measurable outcomes. So I, I kind of want to know what metrics tell you whether the business is truly broken or leaking cash or just in a slow, boring rut that needs a tactical boost.

So many people don't keep track of their customer acquisition costs because it's fuzzy.

It is fuzzy.

This is not hard accounting. This is not $9.98 went to this.

No. Most of it's a feeling correct. It is.

But you still need to know some of it, that there are some ways with, like Google Meta, others where you are pouring money directly in and you can see if that goes to Your website. And that creates an appointment, creates a sale, whatever. So you need to see that. But if your marketing funnel is just leaking cash, what I would say is if you've got a funnel that has a couple of holes drilled in it, guess what? Not all that's going where you want it to be. Now, granted, no marketing funnel is a perfect funnel. Not everything you pour in the top is going to come out the bottom.

No, I wish it would.

No, I wholeheartedly agree with that. It would be nice if I just put $4 out into the world and somehow got back eight. Yes, that would be. That would be. That's marketing.

Just like my money tree. It's in my backyard.

Right, right, right. I have one of those also. I just. I guess the soil that it just hasn't produced yet. But with that, you have to look at that return on investment. The problem is when people look at that, so many people don't have a timeline for it. So they look at that customer acquisition cost. They're like, hey, I bought Facebook ads this month and I didn't get any. I didn't get any revenue from it.

Yeah.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What was your timeline for this? This is not. Once again, stick the money in and more money comes out. You have to realize that this has to go in there. The other thing to look at with that, too, is channel flatlining. To see, like, are you getting growth in areas if it is perfectly flat, we need to look at something else. Now, we talked about the last episode, how, like, platforms can shut down, algorithms can change, ad spend can change. Look, consider all those things when you're looking at this to wonder if it's broken or if you're just bored.

Yeah. I mean, I would think we've been doing a lot of research around AI SEO and what's the right type. Like, there's a lot of changes right now.

Oh, it's.

I think it's easy to say it's.

Kind of Wild West.

Yeah. You're probably not bored if you're looking at some of these things.

Correct. And you should be looking at and learning about these things.

Don't bury your head in the sand right now.

Right. In the same sense, you should not be taking wild swings at things.

No.

And to me, I would equate it to. My dad would occasionally buy some penny stocks and he would call them his lottery tickets because he's like, this is my throwaway money. If it hits big, awesome. If not, I realized I just spent 200 to have a little bit of Fun. If you have that and you're okay with that, then great, take the wild swing. But otherwise do not do that. The other thing, and this is the biggest one. How many clients are you getting compared with how many clients are you losing?

Oh, that's a good one.

I see it all the time where people get this stagnation. The other problem, excuse me, is we get, and I know everyone has this, things are a little slow, so you market like mad. You send out salesmen. You're laughing because you already know where this is going. Suddenly in three months you are busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

Can't do anything, turn it all off, right?

So you turn off all the sales and marketing. Three months later you're like, why am I only hearing crickets?

Peaks and valleys.

Yeah. You get this vacillation back and forth, small adjustments. I mean, once again, these.

We don't turn the faucet off, right? Don't, not all the way.

You make small adjustments here and there because like, like I said, whatever you do now, it's on a wave. So whatever you do here is amplified down the line. That's, that's the big issue with it. Excuse me. The operational side of this. I see it's, and I know you've seen this, ignoring the low hanging fruit, we've got simple problems that we just need to fix. We've got 15 tiny little things in our business that boy would make, I mean, super easy, super simple to fix. And instead someone's swinging for the fences. Fix the small little things, take care of those. The other one is too. Is it once again is people are doing the same as last year and hey, we're going to do the same exact thing. That is a little bit of that broken piece.

Yeah.

Because if you're doing the same as last year and it's, it was sort of effective.

No, it, no, the world has changed dramatically weekly. If you can't keep up with velocity right now.

Yeah, no, if you, if you look at, I mean if you look at what social media platforms did two years ago compared with where they're at now.

Oh gosh.

It is a completely different ball game.

It is, it is totally different.

Paul, Gain that boredom. It leads to that predictable uninspired marketing. So go in and turn some knobs. But once again, turn knobs don't take wild swings. And I'm going to make it another mechanical example here. Let's say like you're in your car, you're going down the road, you're A little bit hot. So we're not going to adjust the temperature, but you're going to adjust the fans and you're going to adjust where it comes out of and you're going to change your seat.

Yes.

What fixed it? No idea.

Good point.

No idea. So adjust one thing at a time in small increments because that's what's going to tell you. Someone taught me this about once again, motorcycle example years ago. Carburetors don't go in, change the needle position, change the jetting and then change another screw. What fixed it? I don't know. No, go in small changes on one thing at a time to see what you've got.

Yeah.

The other thing that I like to tell people, like I said, if you want to buy the lottery ticket, I typically tell people to do this on the 90 day marketing experiment. It has to fit with your language. It has to fit within all of your stuff.

Yeah.

But try something new. Yeah. If you're willing to buy the lottery.

Ticket, I like it.

If you have, if you have that cash and things like that to work with. Those, those are the big things from the marketing aspect that I look for with broken or bored.

Yeah.

So many people, they once again, they want to do the same thing as last year and hope it's as effective as last year. You need to start making small tweaks.

Well, and I will tell you too, those of you who may be bored, if you're an extrovert or an ambivert and you're causing havoc in your office or you're trying to tweak everything and you're driving everybody crazy, it might be time for you to go to a networking event. Just might be time. Because that's one thing that, I mean out of all, all of the things that are changing, the one thing that still isn't changing is human interaction. So take, take thyself to a marketing event. Go learn something. Go talk to other business owners.

Now my only worry is when you say marketing event, networking event. Okay. So networking event, networking events I'm good with and I love going and learning about new marketing stuff. I mean there's always, at least every week I'm in a webinar talking about some of the new marketing stuff. No, additionally though, what I caution some is if you're in it, that's fine. Kind of. You have some, your BS filter is on.

I want you to go talk to other humans. That's all I want you to do.

The go talk to other humans about what's going on is a great, great, great thing to do because then you're going to get some filtered input.

Yes.

That isn't going to strike you with all the bells, whistles, lasers and pyrotechnics.

Correct.

That you're gonna get someplace else that's gonna amp you up. That is gonna have, you know, acting like the board business owner that is going to go in and break their business.

No, go find a networking event. Go meet other people. Go make some other friends. That's it.

I would start with a friend.

Okay, fine.

You have to have one to have others.

Go, go network. If you're real, if you're, if you want to change a whole bunch of things and you're, you're causing havoc, go network.

I totally agree with that. The other one is, to me too, is to say, is just to, once again, if you put more of the burden on yourself, suddenly that, that becomes less.

Yeah.

If you just are a stream of different ideas and you're like, oh, we're going to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And I mean, we talked about this before we recorded the thing about Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

Yes.

He said, he goes, if you put me in front of a whiteboard, I am going to come up with 150 ideas. And people told me like, you're going to break Amazon.

Yes, he almost did.

Right, right. Because there were so many ideas and no iteration, there was no execution. So if you feel that you have an idea that you need to do, you may need to take on the full execution of that to make sure that it goes slow enough that you can see things, you can pull a pack, you can do all those other things. What is something that, what's something like delegating?

Yeah.

How does that alleviate the boredom?

Because then you're training someone in how to do it. So you're, you're, you're training. So there's part of that. So delegating enables you to kind of, you've got the training piece. But then it also says as you're scaling, whether you're building an org chart, accountability chart, you're visioning for the next five years, where do we need to be? Delegating enables you to really do some of the heavier thinking. That's not just quick shot here. We're going to do this quick start, get it done and wreak havoc. It's really more intentional and focused and it gives you capacity to be able to work on yourself and then truly work on, on the business in the way that you need to because if you're going to, if you're going to take an engine apart, you need to really take the whole thing apart. Don't just like, stop halfway through. Like, oh, just. We'll just shove it all back together. Be fine.

You know what makes me think about this too, is this is a great distraction. Because in most cases, when we, most of us neglect a lot of the basics in our business, that when you.

Delegate, you don't anymore.

That is going to give you that chance to go back and look and say, okay, what are some of these things that aren't necessarily broken?

Yes.

But maybe a little bit squeaky.

Well, it lets you overhaul the system.

Right.

How is our client. If I'm teaching someone how to deliver client services, we're looking at our service delivery model and going, okay, is all of this working? How do we optimize it? So when you're delegating and then you're having conversation with that person that you've delegated to of, like, let's have a conversation as to. This is what I've trained you to do. I want you to do it this way. But we're going to have dialogue in a week or a month and talk about, you know, are there other efficiencies? Do you think there is a better way to do this? And let's think about that. If you're a small business owner navigating the world of marketing or looking to establish yourself as an industry expert, you already know the power of a great podcast.

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Back to the show.

Yeah, no, that totally, totally makes sense. One thing that I always find is just so funny is when people don't audit their cash flow. Yeah, because that is that. That is that broken or bored thing. I mean, people think it's broken before they've ever looked at their cash flow, before they've ever looked at their Profit and loss before they've ever looked. They're like, oh, this isn't working, is it? Or isn't it?

Or isn't it? Can you be patient for 90 days? I mean, no, no. But here's the thing, especially with your. If your business runs in arrears, like, if you don't get paid. Paid until 90 days or 60 days after the work that you're doing, sometimes it's really hard for you. You've got to pay attention to where your numbers are.

Yeah.

Because it's like, oh, everything's great, but you didn't put anything in your pipeline and now it's not so great. So it's really. Or, oh, my gosh, we're going to be homeless tomorrow. And it's like, well, you have a $500,000 check coming from this client. They've already said they've mailed it. Your bank account is zero right now, but tomorrow it's going to be a half a million dollars like you. You've got to be able to understand where you are in your cash cycle.

Totally makes sense. And it's that thing that people don't. We all look at the numbers. Is there or isn't there money?

No, that's not how it works.

Right. I mean, we all look at that.

I do, too, but no, it's not how it works.

Looking at where that money came from is going to be far more educational in terms of if you're bored or if your business is broken when it comes to that sense.

Yeah. What are the revenue streams?

There's one. We're talking about actionable steps here.

Yeah.

A boredom buster experiment is what you have in here. I hear this and I'm like, I could have used this one a lot when I was like, 12.

Yeah.

What is the boredom buster experience?

It is one new thing, whether it's small marketing thing or, you know, a test, something that you're going to do something different with your training, you're going to do something small with service delivery. One thing, one, you commit to one new thing, and it's for the next 90 days. And then once those 90 days are over, you audit and say, did this work? Did this not work? And it's tiny enough that it's not impacting anybody on your team other than you. That is a boredom buster.

I like that. Yes, I like that. Don't make everyone else go through your health.

No. Do not make everybody else miserable because you're bored. And honestly, if you're really that bored business owner, I think you should get into some community engagement and go find a nonprofit to help. That will take up some time. If you have too much time on your hands, I can give you a lot of things to fill it with. Different types of professional development, different types of community service. You. You will be much better off doing those things. And then you'll build your resilience skills.

I agree. According to the. What was it two episodes ago when we talked about burnout? Excess time is not an issue for me. Neither is boredom. Now, that being said, the other one that, that we've got down here is Delegate the drag. I like that because you said, identify a routine task you hate doing and delegate it.

Yeah, it's the stop doing list.

The Stop Doing list.

So Michael Murray from Textbook Painting, he is like, he taught me this a couple years ago and he's like, I have a stop doing list. I'm like, what is a stop doing list? He's like, it's the things that I'm going to delegate or that I don't really want to do anymore in my business. So I'm in the process right now for this quarter, moving into 2026. What is my stop doing list for 2026? And what am I not going to do anymore? Because then I'm going to find people that can either do it, we're going to hire, we're going to outsource whatever we need to do so that I can focus on the things that I really love doing. Because another reason why you get. You think your business is broken or you're bored is because you're doing things that you don't like doing.

Sure. Oh, 100%.

Yeah.

One that I like too, is don't confuse motion with progress. Yes, I see. We talked about this in the burnout one. I'm working on stuff. I'm sitting in front of my computer, but I'm like, I'm surfing ebay. So I'm in the office, but I'm. I'm. And I'm clicking the mouse, but I'm not actually doing anything productive for the business. And that is something where I see in so many cases where people like, we're going to do things and do those things align with your mission statement? Do they accomplish goals that you're looking to. To. To do?

Yeah.

That's why stuff. So much stuff. Stuff. And why we talk about those mission statements and the. The core values and things of that nature. Everything has to work backwards from those. Does it fit with those? Does it? If it doesn't, then why the Hell are you doing it?

Exactly. You.

You have to work backwards from that, though. And if those aren't solid.

Yeah.

Then that's just not going to work. I. I love the boredom buster. That, that is the. It's just, it's. It's got board.

That's alliteration.

The boredom buster, maybe experiment. The boredom buster.

That if it makes you do it. Great.

Right, right, right. If you need me to record that for you, Any. Anyone out there in the audience, let me know. We can, we can have that as your. What's the fastest owner? For a business owner to re. Engage with their vision when they're like, bleh. Trained.

Okay. When they're drained. See.

This shows you that sitting in the same room with me is so training.

It's not true.

Chrissy is just like, oh, God.

It's like what we're doing. It's okay. I would say the fastest way I know to reconnect with your vision, especially when you're drained, is the to get quiet and go back to your why. It's really. It's taking that. Why. Why are we doing this?

Shut up and think.

Yeah, it's really. I mean, it's. It's not hard. You just gotta do it.

So this, to me is a big part of our podcast too. You say, especially when you're drained, it's to get back. It's to get quiet and go back to your why. Yeah, you put that so nicely and so eloquently. And I'm like, shut up and think. This is our juxtaposition. This is why this works.

That's why Josh does marketing and I do HR training and development and insurance. All the things.

Yes, yes, yes.

So, Josh, what's the single most important marketing metric that every small business owner should check every week?

Qualified lead pipeline all day long. Are there leads coming in? If not, you done messed up. And it doesn't matter what business it is, it doesn't matter what your sales cycle is. There has to be something new in there for you to read every single week. If there's nothing new for you to read in there, you got a problem.

Generate some qualified leads, get going, you have a problem.

So, yeah, that is. I mean, one of the things that I. I've got in here. You do not need a vision if you do not have clients.

I love that.

Right? Right.

No, you do not.

Right. The mission statement, the vision state, none of that matters if you do not have people coming into your pipeline because your pipeline will get smaller, clients will leave, clients will Go to business, things will happen. Hopefully it happens at a very, very slow rate. You need new people coming and yeah, if you don't see that every week, fix it. Because it, it's, it's done. Busted.

Yeah.

That being said, boy, we, that's. I, I feel like we have covered a lot of different ways that people like throw. I mean, literally see a machine working and they're like, I'm going to stick a wrench in here.

Exactly. Self sabotage.

Yeah. Yeah. And without even thinking about doing it. Oh, this wrench will look good here.

No. Self sabotage. Without any self awareness.

Yeah. Turn this screw and oh, why is it smoking now? And that I. This. I'm gonna. Well, before we close out, we will use one of my favorite sayings. And I think this can apply to business.

Yeah.

Any machine can be a smoke machine. If you use it wrong enough, If you are trying to avoid turning your business into a smoke machine, unless you build smoke machines, then it's fine. But we really do appreciate you joining us. Go to the business or business vic.podcast.com. we've got resources. We've got past episodes. I know we mentioned burnout. We mentioned resiliency. We were mentioned. What was one of the other episodes that we really hammered on?

I mean, we really brought, I mean, Consistency. Consistency.

Yeah. We've really brought a lot of those things together in this. And I am, I mean, I'm truly here for it. Do us a favor, give us a review. If you're willing. We'd love to talk to more people and we want to hear what you have us. What you talk, what you want to hear us talk about. We would. We enjoy this.

I do.

Yeah. We have a ton of fun with this. I didn't fill in the topic for next week yet. No, no. And Chrissy, look, if you could see the camera. Chrissy looks nervous.

I do. What's it going to be?

I, I, you have my. Like, if I'm walking into a shitstorm, I want to know which way the wind's blowing. You have no idea which way the wind's blowing. And I think I have a couple of ideas.

Okay.

That we're going to talk about later.

Okay.

But we really need you from the audience. We really need your input for it because we really want to hear what you want to talk about. As always, do us a favor. Take care of yourself. You can take care of someone else too. We will see you very, very.

Sam.