Overcoming Business Highs & Lows: Leading Through Setbacks #125

Business owners and business builders. What do you do when the highs are high, but then the lows are low? You're on top of the world one day and then the ground shifts beneath you the next. How do you lead through those peaks and valleys? Let's talk about finding real strength in the wins, finding grit in the setbacks, and keeping a mindset that keeps you moving forward no matter what the circumstances. Welcome back to on the Home Front. I'm Jeff Duden. If you're listening today, you're likely no stranger to the roller coaster of business ownership. The highs are exhilarating, but the lows can test everything you built and everything you stand for. Here's the reality. Success alone doesn't make a business strong. It's how you handle both sides of the journey, the wins and the setbacks, how you keep going, that will define your path forward. Nothing is fatal. One of the things that I have learned in business is when things get tough and someday you walk into the office and five or six things that are unrelated went wrong at the same time. You had a playbook for the day and you had your plan, but now you got punched in the face, everything's reorganized and you have to deal with the urgent versus the important. Well, what do you do? You sit in awareness for a minute, you become thankful. You become thankful for the opportunity to do hard things. Look, not everybody is willing to step up to the plate and take swings at the fastballs that are 95 or 100 miles an hour. Some people are afraid. They're afraid to lose. They're afraid of the risk, they're afraid of the embarrassment. Sometimes they have limiting beliefs that think that they can't do it. I have always been thankful for the opportunity. I always want the football. I want the football when I'm on the five yard line. But here's the question. Am I on the five yard line going in to the end zone or am I on my own five yard line and I've got 95 yards of bullshit to go through until to score, it doesn't matter because progress is made every day. You show up, you don't blow up and you get things done. And if you will do that over time, sometimes you're going to win and you can celebrate success and other times you're going to lose. And you can sit in awareness and give yourself the time to really think about what happened. Get with your team, lead assertively, realistically assess what happened, what are the new risks? What are the new opportunities and move forward. Look, the music is Made between the notes. The things that you do when your business is going well, you don't sit back and get lazy. You don't sit back and just say, the business is going well, I've got nothing to do. That's when I always took the time to work on the next project. When I was building my business and I was in my 20s, for some reason, I adopted this habit. When things were going well, I had a list of four or five or six things that I knew would move the business forward. They were outside of the normal process. It wasn't closing a job, it wasn't doing an estimate, it wasn't collecting money. It wasn't those things. But it was things that we needed to do to move the business not from where we were and what we were doing to what we aspired to be and the vision that we had for the business to grow it. So when things were going well, I would step out of the business and I would work on those types of things so that when we had a lull, sometimes it was around a holiday, sometimes there was some seasonality, sometimes there was weather. I would have a list of things that we could work on as a team and put those things in progress because we didn't want to waste time. Oh, look, it's raining today. We got rained out. There's nothing to do. No, there are things to do. And those are the times that you do the material things that move the business forward. The music is made between the notes. And if you sit in awareness and you absorb what the universe is telling you, the swirl in your head of all the 10 or 15 things that are important, the will organize themselves and the universe will become clear to you. If you only give yourself the headspace to think through these things with intention and then take action on the most important things. Look, when the lows get low, business owners face these things all the time. We're responsible to make payroll. But you just found out that the money you were counting on to make that payroll is not going to come in next week, it's going to come in next month. You've got a real problem on your hands. There's job problems, there's legal problems, there's cash flow problems. All of these are problems that you need to solve as a business owner that get dropped right back in your lap. And you're the one that has to lead the solutions in those things. Look, when I'm in my lows, what I learned too late in my career, but maybe you can learn it earlier in years. Is that when I'm in my lows, I need my bros. I need people that have done what I'm trying to do before. I need people that have built a business, that have sold the business, that have struggled with business because they have the road rash, they have the scabs. And they will be able to share with you and give you perspective that this will not be fatal. These are the things that will make you stronger. You'll probably develop new processes, new systems, new thinking. You know, sometimes in businesses, when you're in Lowe's and things aren't going well, one of the exercises is the 8020 rule with your customers. Go through and rank your customers, and when you get down to the level of customers where you become unprofitable, fire all the rest of those customers. I can't tell you how many times I've done that with different businesses. Because you realize that you're spending 80% of your time, energy, on money, on the people that are bringing 20% of your results. And sometimes you've got to weed the garden, but, like, if you're in it, sometimes you can't see it. You know, you're building, you're collecting business and you're selling business, but it's all business is not good business. So things like that is what you get forced to do when things go wrong. So don't take things that go wrong as some sort of an indictment on your abilities, but more a signal from the universe that you might not have your model right, you might not have your people right, or you might not be thinking and leading right. These are things that will help you. Never let the highs get too high. Because when the highs are high, you're going to get back into today and figure out what are the things that I can be working on today to move the business forward. And when the lows are low, you're not going to let it get too close to your heart. You're going to realize that it's not an indictment on you, but there is always a solution for every problem, and you can fix it. And you will have the resolve to get to work on it logically. Not with fear, not with emotion, but with the wisdom and with the discernment that you have learned by being a business owner. And also the discernment and the wisdom from the people that you have around you. So get out there. Get a bigger table. Take risks, take chances. Build something great for you, the family and people that you care about today. This is Jeff Duden. We've been on the home front. Thanks for listening.