In this candid monologue, Curt Janzen recounts a literal fire that broke out at one of his company’s shops, describing the immediate crisis and the swift, coordinated response from his team—including General Manager Ryan, the operations manager, and other staff. He reflects on how deeply personal business ownership feels when such events impact finances, team welfare, and personal emotions, emphasizing that the business’s financial health and team’s well‑being are intertwined with his own. Janzen discusses the challenge of maintaining his core value of "authentic optimism" amid stress and uncertainty, questioning how to genuinely stay positive when disaster strikes. He praises his team’s resilience, noting their rapid problem‑solving, effective communication with fire officials, and seamless continuation of operations, as well as the support from his business partner Kevin and the company’s insurance. Concluding, he shares the lesson that adversity can be a catalyst for growth, expressing gratitude and a cautious optimism about emerging stronger from the experience.
Chapters
How do I genuinely be optimistic when that is happening? This sucks. Sometimes as a business owner, it feels like you have to put out fires. About a week and a half ago, as you see behind me, we actually put out a literal fire. And it's hard, honestly. I actually took it pretty personal. And in thinking about it, I thought, there's a lot of stuff in business that is personal. Stuff like this is personal. Our finances are personal. Our team's finances are personal. Conversations we have with our team are super personal because it really, really is. So my business partner Kevin and I, we were actually in the States on a work event and we were actually standing at the desk to get our rental car when both of our phones blew up. My kids were trying to call me. Kevin's brother-in-law was trying to call him. It was crazy to see the support we got right away. Ryan, our general manager, jumped in his car and drove over here to help with the fire department, to, you know, give them any information about materials we had in trucks and what was stored, even the layout of the shop so that they could safely enter and exit, understanding kind of what was where. And like, it was pretty amazing how the team could just jump in, not skip a beat, solve problems, answer questions, We texted our operations manager, and the next morning she had a meeting with the key people. They figured out what to do, how to do it, how to move people around to make sure this didn't completely disrupt everything that was going on at Beyond. And they did like a top-notch job. It was—it's pretty crazy how good a job they did. To me, like I feel like can I say it happens? You can beep that out if you need to. Like I feel like stuff happens in. In business that you don't have control over. And one of our core values is actually how do you be authentically optimistic? And it is really easy to be optimistic when guys are busy, the team's all liking each other and cohesive, it's a well-oiled machine. I can go in there and rah-rah the troops and do all that stuff. But I've had to kind of really think about how do I genuinely be optimistic when that is happening literally behind me. And that's been a little bit difficult for me to say, like, how do I show up to our people in a time where there is a need, where there's struggle, where there's obvious stress, where there's things that are out of our control? And yeah, that's the lesson I've been learning in all of this is I want to show up as the best version of me for our team, even though I am stressed, even though I am fatigued, even though I am whatever else you are when this stuff happens. I'm going to probably explore some of those emotions, but I'm glad for a few things. One, I'm glad for an amazing team that when this happened, they didn't skip a beat. They just kept on plowing away. They got together, they figured out plans, they implemented those plans. I'm thankful that we have good insurance. I'm thankful that I have a great business partner that we can journey along together on something like this. And yeah, even though it's not easy, I'm trying to look at those positive things. I'm trying to look at what may come out of it that might make us better than when we got into it. That's my story. This sucks, but that's all I gotta say. Oh yeah, she definitely smells here, but our Beyond decals held up a little bit on the fire. Always sunshine. Yeah.
