173: Cut Your Losses—Even While Pivoting in Public—with Khe Hy

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Don't confuse traditional businesses with creator led businesses because the line gets blurry very quickly and you can quickly end up in a land of borrowed goals.

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Welcome back free timers. We are in for a treat today with our very first three peat guest for this podcast, my friend Kay. He of course I have to give a shout out and a thank you to Al Dia who put us in touch originally and K and I have kept in touch ever since. We've recorded a whole bunch of podcasts, three for this show, one for the Pivot podcast and we also connect randomly when I'm out walking Ryder. Today's episode is a special one because Kay is right smack in the middle of a major business pivot and he has the generosity to share his process out loud, even the ugly bits. He's posting an article that we'll link to in the show notes called the $645,000.99 probably said that wrong business pivot. We'll put the link in the show notes, but he's navigating a lot of changes and so I asked if he would be open to coming on the show and sharing mid process. Not the answers but the experience of going through such a big business roller coaster. So without further ado Kay, welcome back to the show.

Thank you Jenny and thank you to all your listeners for putting up with me for 34 episodes. I'm so honored. I really am.

You start this big reveal article by saying In January of 2023 our business got hit by a quadruple whammy. A mere 55 days after my proudest moment as an entrepreneur offering our employees healthcare, I did the unthinkable take us to this moment January 2023. Let's say before you do the unthinkable, we'll come back to what that actually was. But how did you know that something was wrong and you needed to make a big change? Ooh.

So there were two factors. There were the obvious factors and then there were the felt sense factors, the spidey sense factors. The obvious factors are always obvious. And we have a cohort based course, business cbcs, Teaching productivity and lifestyle design. And what happened was we kept lowering the forecast for January and for those of you who are in the world of personal development, of self improvement, January is the time. It's almost like Black Friday for a retailer. We make so many sales because New Year's resolutions, New year, turn page, new budgets, all of that stuff makes for the perfect Goldilocks environment in January. However, we had kept lowering our forecasts for January because our prior cohorts kept underperforming their revenue targets. And then January hit and it missed the lowered forecast by an additional 40%. And so right away, immediately. And because we're a launch based business, all of that revenue comes in in one week outside of payment plans. So right away you basically see what you're working with. Like you see the cash that you're working with and that cash could not coincide with the payroll liabilities that we were going to have over the next month, quarter or year. So in that week of poor sales, that's when it became my hand was forced, so to speak.

So because you had, at this point you had a team of six full time employees, is that right?

Including me. Five plus me.

Okay, five plus you. And you're so vulnerable in sharing this proud moment, this tweet of like, yes, and we're giving everyone healthcare and we're trying to work really sustainable ways. And you were doing so much with these team members and I know how much you value them and I know how much they value you. How did you know when this January launch didn't go as planned, that you would need to make some really tough choices and a major business pivot, rather than what I think most people would react by doing, or at least some of I better launch something else, you know, how did you just take the data from this launch or was it building up to that like you said, rather than think, well, how else can we generate this quick in a fire drill kind of emergency for the business?

Let me try to unpack. How did I know?

So I stated the obvious factors, the revenue, as I think back on it, I used a quote in that post. It's a Hemingway quote. I went broke very gradually. Then right away.

In hindsight, the very gradually had started to happen. And I think the biggest one, revenue, was trending down over the prior year. So that was kind of an obvious one. But we're kind of like, you know, some of it might be seasonal, like we might need to market a little bit more. That was. Revenue was trending down. But the thing that I subconsciously felt it, but I didn't explicitly see it, was that not only was revenue coming down, but we were working so much harder for every dollar, or said differently. Even though the team had grown, so our costs had gone up, our revenue was going down. Where you grow your team, you would expect your revenue to go up. That's why you grow it. And to use very simple economic language, our margins were getting crushed.

Because our revenues were going down and our costs was going up. I actually for this post created the first margin line chart the history of rad reads. And I was like, okay, like I never actually looked, what are our margins? I just kind of like was doing that math in my head, kind of wasn't seeing it. So that was kind of something in hindsight that I should have probably scrutinized more closely. The other issue, which is almost like a separate conversation or separate thread that I know we'll get to, is that I had always had a sneaking suspicion that the product positioning was off. And that is like a more slower bleed type thing. And I think that the quadruple whammy, as I called it, was like, we're a zoom based course, so people stopped wanting zoom. We were a self improvement course. Like there's productivity course. Some people don't like the word productivity anymore. It has negative connotations to a certain group of people, which wasn't the case five years ago.

And then the last one was obviously the economy. We were a $2,000 course. We're definitely a nice to have product, not a need to have product. Those are the forces that came together. But we should talk about the product positioning at some point.

It's also built into the launch model in a certain sense. The margin decline that you're describing, I experienced that very early on in my business. In year one, I had launched, I had this course. It's so embarrassing now, but the first course I ever launched was called Makeshit Happen. And I built up to the first launch for six months and I felt so much pressure because if this launch didn't go well, was I going to fail as a solopreneur? And I consulted friends and I made a wait list and I wrote all this great copy and it sold out in 24 hours. And so of course, my spirits were boosted. And then I relaunched it maybe six months later, and it sold half as quickly with just as much work. And then the third time, it barely sold at all. So for me, very early on, I go, oh, this is not easy. Because as soon as your list, to put it in crude terms, gets tapped out, no matter how big your list is. I was joking about this yesterday with our BFF community. I've had it for eight years. Even under different names, at some point people are like, it's been eight years. No, I'm not going to join your effing community.

And so what people don't talk about launching a course can be this panacea for online businesses. But so few people talk about how challenging it really is because you have to keep feeding the list beast in order to maintain any semblance of the enrollment numbers that you've had previously. And from what I hear from a lot of people, what's getting really hard right now is just that obvious pipeline of running ads to grow the list. That there was also a golden era, I think, for a lot of businesses of Facebook ads, where you could just create a machine and it feeds the whole enrollment chain of actions. And that I've heard that that has gotten very challenging recently as well. So I feel like you were also up against that headwind.

And we never did paid ads. The cost of acquiring a new and I'm not a good cost per acquisition person because we don't do paid ads. So it's just the opportunity cost of our time. But it's just harder to grow our list. We are on so many more channels, we're creating so much more content, and the rate of growth of our list has slowed down.

And we should also add that you worked on Wall street for over a decade. So by the way, like, you're a guy that thinks in numbers. You know all about reading the profit and loss statement. And so even for you, it was not easy to see where the trends were going or what exactly to do about them, especially post pandemic.

Part of that, which I think you and other listeners will relate, is like, I left Wall street to leave that mindset and I like being a creative person, which means, like, I don't want to calculate my CLTVs. That drives me insane just thinking about that math. I don't want to do it. Part of this process has made me recognize that There's a big part of me that doesn't want to own an online business and wants to just create cool stuff and put it out in the world. Yes.

That was another thing that you told me before we hit record. You said one of the things is that you kind of got a little off track of building the life and business that you wanted. And there's a lot of I'm going to put an episode with Mike Michalowicz of Keeping up with the Entrepreneur Joneses. But you say that at one point when you had grown, it can feel so validating to grow because everyone else around you says how cool and awesome it is and you say in hindsight it's where you started drinking your own K is awesome Kool Aid. And people will encourage you, they'll say, wow, you're growing. Congratulations. And you feel fancy as an entrepreneur and you feel grateful to be able to pay people full time salary. And I should just say to our previous point about what you said, the getting hit by the quadruple whammy, you put the pelotons chart where it's like at first they could do no wrong and now they're in the bargain bin. And so we all are still are swimming in that same sea of chaos that even a company as funded and beloved as Peloton is struggling through. So tell me about the K is awesome Kool Aid and where you think you got off track in terms of what would help you thrive.

Just to go back to the peloton chart. I was at an entrepreneur's dinner yesterday and every entrepreneur, regardless like VC back creator, runs some giant business unit at Netflix or Amazon. Every single person is saying we got our forecasting wrong, everyone. So I want listeners to know that you're not alone if you're struggling because your forecasts have missed by 40% of everyone's has. I found that reassuring. So I hope your listeners find that reassuring as well. You're not particularly bad at being an entrepreneur. Everyone screwed up because of the circumstances. And so to go back to the question of drinking the Kool Aid, you know me, Jenny, like I'll always go deep into the existential side of things. And.

I've been thinking a lot. I like games, right? And.

I've always been extremely competitive. Even when I raced my daughter in Mario Kart, like she can beat me now. And so it's on like Donkey Kong. I am almost like googling on Reddit Mario Kart strategies that aren't discussed to beat my nine year old daughter. So, so I'm a very competitive person who is attracted to games and the game, higher education. Like, I really wanted to go to a good university. The game of Wall street, that's kind of the ultimate, the grand game. I use kind of satirical quotes around the phrase the grand game for Wall Street, Masters of the universe. Again, satirical quotes around those phrases. So I'm attracted to those games. And. And I always wonder, I was like, well, what is it about the game that you like? And common answer is winning. Right? What I've done in my life is I've kind of opted out of games like Wall street. But then you kind of subconsciously opt into other games, growing an audience or the ultimate game that I always. Another way to say it is like virtue signaling or humble bragging or conspicuous consumption. Like, these are all different games that people play. And I realized that I like to play those games because I like to win them. And even though they're my own games, I'm not like trying to beat someone, but I'm trying to prove to myself that I can beat someone. It's less to be like, ha, ha, I won, you lost. And more like, hey, you won that really hard game. You're so great. This is on my own head. And then it comes out in like the virtue signaling and the humble bragging and all that stuff. And so I think that what happened was like, we caught the wave. We caught the pandemic wave. We launched an online learning business in September of 2019. We caught the wave.

And we had the Midas touch. You'll see in the post. I would say I was like, entrepreneurship is so easy. Anything I launch goes up.

And one of our best cohorts, you know, it was like $120,000 and I just had a part time VA. It was like $115,000 of net margin to me in one week. I mean, obviously it was more than one week, but like the revenue came in in one week. So you start to drink the Kool Aid and people around you start to accelerate the Kool Aid. I had friends that would come, they're like, hey, can I invest in you? Then I'm like, well, how much is my company worth? Right? Is our company worth like 3 million or 2 million? And then I'm like, wait a minute, if I invest, if I have investors, then I need to think about how would I exit this company. And then if I exit a company, then I need to talk to my accountant and say, what's the most tax efficient way to structure? And so you could see, like, I was in the top of the first inning as an entrepreneur, to use a baseball analogy, and I'm already thinking about the end of the game. And I had made up this elaborate game which kind of, in hindsight, I got lost. Lost in the sauce of it all. Why is that so important to win the games? I think that for me, despite doing a lot of inner work, I still attribute a lot of my self worth to my achievements. There's this kind of constant internal monologue. K, you'll see yourself through a better lens if you are more successful. Because we had to kind of capture its success in a bottle. In that pandemic moment, I was feeling great about myself. But then came all of the challenges of growing. And that was in the good times and then figuring out what the f to do when the good times go away. Then you're like, I remember, I was like, entrepreneurship is so easy. Now I'm like, entrepreneurship is so fricking hard. Why would anyone want to do this?

We'll be right back just after this.

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You're a surfer. I call it when the financial tides recede. And for me too, because I do so much work with corporate clients. And when it was like in a blink, all my corporate speaking, my steadiest, most robust, abundant form of frequent cash flow gone in a snap in 2020. And then I kept thinking, all right, well, it'll turn around next year, next year, next year. And then even at the start of this year, 2023, all the tech companies are in the news for doing these massive layoffs. That's the least time that they're gonna be like throwing budget around to bring someone like me in. And so it's wild in this case how dramatically and quickly sometimes that financial tide recedes and you're just left there. You on your surfboard me on who knows what, doing yoga on the beach.

Warren Buffett says, when the tide goes out, we'll see who was swimming naked.

Oh, right. I want to go back to this thing real quick. And then we are also going to go way back to January of what you decided to do. But you said in the post this idea of borrowing other people's goals, and now some would say that thinking about an exit is motivating and it helps you build all the right structure and systems and process from the beginning. And there could be a lot of benefits of that. But part of what happens in that period. I love how you call it that, capturing success in a bottle or like capturing that magical time in a bottle. You were riding exactly the right wave at the right time, but it kind of hid things. What aspect of that growth do you think was borrowing other people's goals?

I mean, I think that there's, there's the classic one, which is.

Everyone wants to be that seven figure business.

You know, it's that arbitrary line in the sand, but it's like the ultimate flex.

I love Rachel Rogers going on her podcast shortly. Her promise is to make you a seven figure entrepreneur.

Right. Her book is titled We Should All Be Millionaires.

Exactly. And in American culture, being a millionaire is. It's a status thing. Right. So that percolates down in all these different ways. So I think the revenue side of things, it was an identity thing. I want to be known and my colleagues do. Like, they wanted to be part of a seven figure business. Right. And you've been around so many entrepreneurs that, like, that's kind of one of the magic, you know, there's all these kind of different breakpoints. And by the way, everyone says, like, once you get to one, it's like one to three is actually pretty easy. Breaking out of three is extremely difficult. And then breaking out of five is even harder. So it never stops.

And when I first started 12 years ago, it was six figures. That was the magical threshold. It was all the sexy headlines where it builds a six figure business. And that's what we were all drooling over. And then one day it just shifts. Oh, now it's seven figures inflation. Yeah, exactly like goal inflation. Because that's a 10x jump of where that bar where we get to pat ourselves on the back versus feeling that, oh, I'm always falling short. I haven't hit the magical seven figures. Not to mention the fact that now we make it look easy compared to that was the goal so long ago. It's wild of course there's actual inflation in the world, but there's also been a tremendous inflation.

Not that much inflation.

I know, right? So much inflation in terms of borrowing other people's goals of having. They all are arbitrary. It's like we could have just as easily hit like 500k is the magic number.

We probably don't need to go down this thread. But I'll say briefly, I think that in a world where attention is so hard to capture, if you call yourself a seven figure anything, it gives you instant credibility. It might be fake credibility because you might not have done it, but I still fall for it. Like when if I go to someone's Twitter bio and they're like, built a seven figure business by age 27, I'm like, ooh, like this person must know what they're talking about. Even though maybe it was like their dad's business or whatever. You don't know. By the way, everyone on Twitter has built seven figure businesses. It's a lie. Someone's lying. And so I think that there was definitely a part of that. And I think this is where you're going with this question is I got disconnected from what really matters in my life. And I know that in that phase, like before having a team, I was really good at like turning my phone off at 6. And once I had a team, to this day that's moved to 7:30, which is still really good considering the world that I came from. But it's not what I want. Those extra 90 minutes are very valuable to the things I purport to want, which is to like, be very calm at the dinner table and not be present and not be distracted, to not doom. Scroll before bed, to have like healthy wind down routine to spend some time chilling with my wife. And like now it's like the laptop's out till 7:30. And that started when I grew a team and it hasn't stopped. And I need to think about that. You're making me think about like, just close the laptop at 6, right? And it's like, no, I can't because I have to do this thing and this person needs me. And my Europe colleague is going to read this tomorrow morning and you create these monsters of your. And I say monsters. Thought monsters. I need to do this.

And we should say you have two young kids also. So it's not like, oh, it's just you and your wife, you have kids and they're young and I'm sure that you want to give them as much attention as you can too. Why do you think it was about growing the team that led you to break your 6pm habit?

Our team, our current, our remaining employees and our former employees.

And so that's a lot to speak to too of what you decided to do in January because we haven't even shared yet. Maybe. Do you want to share first?

We had six people on December 20th and then by the middle of January we were down to three. Three including myself. We let go of one person earlier and we could talk about that because it was a separate business line that we had built. And then we let go of two of the people that were supporting the course business. I let go of half of the team in a 14 day period maybe, or 22 day period.

Did you feel sick when you realized that's what you needed to do?

What did I feel? I mean, I had just seen you.

I know. And I'm even putting words into your mouth, mostly projecting because I would feel sick to my stomach. Just have a stomach drop of disappointing people.

I think it was less sick. There was a lot of like shame and I let you down. Like I didn't hold my end of the deal. Right? Not like we were this. You weren't joining Google, you were joining Khe from Rad Reads. Right. Very different. People were taking risks on me and I felt that I hadn't upheld my end of the bargain of what I had promised them. And then there was an extra level of guilt that this was a time that was very hard for everyone in the economy.

Things had happened so quickly that my hand was quote, unquote forced, like we did not have enough cash to keep the team. There wasn't really a choice to be made in that regards. For better or for worse. I am good at emotionally detaching from certain things like that where it's like these are the facts and that's just it. And then the actual act of getting on the phone with someone on a zoom call and they think it's a regular one on one, you cut straight to the chase, hey, we're not going to have the regular meeting today. Our business is in trouble. And as a result of that, I have to terminate your position. I want to make sure that you know that it's not a performance issue, it's a business trouble issue. Here's the package that we're offering and here's how we want to support you. That's exactly the script that I did. And on the other end, you literally see people's faces go white. People holding back tears or outright crying. And what does one say in that moment, okay, or I'm sorry, or what's next? So that part, that human side of it is the hardest thing to do. And again, for better or for worse, Like, I can emotionally detach from, like, the business side of it, the business is this. But how do you preserve that human humanity side in showing people grace, showing people respect, showing them that you care where they might not think that you care because of what you're doing. That whole thing is just messy.

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. And again, just being so open about all of this, you're not alone in having to do that either. Because I remember even in 2020, all the business advisors who are jumping in to help small businesses stay afloat were saying, listen, if your business is going to collapse if you don't do a layoff, then you have to do a layoff. So it's true what you're saying. It's like the last thing you probably wanted to do, and yet you have no choice. The money wasn't there to pay them. So you either have no business at all, or you have to do this excruciating process, letting half the team go.

And I think that was the ultimate blessing that if it was down 15%, I think my instinct would have still said we need to make some drastic changes, but we could have punted the decision by two or three months. But knowing what I know now, punting would have been the wrong decision.

Yeah. That's why I admire how swift you've been, because it was almost like you had this big wake up call with the launch, then you looked backward, just like that Hemingway quote, and you saw, oh, this is a trend. This isn't an aberration. This is really what I'm up against. You made such decisive choices. Even though, as you said, you felt shame talking to your team, you felt like guilt, you felt you let them down. How is it for you at the time, time of this recording, you're about to release the article tomorrow, right? Like, yep, mere hours away. So we're recording this in a really raw moment where it's not that public yet, though people close to, you know, how do you feel kind of coming out with all of this, knowing that it's not one of these shiny success stories as we talked about, that's blasted all over the Internet. You're actually kind of walking back some of the things that you were so excited to share of how you were running your company. How does it feel?

Honestly, people always say on podcasts, if there's Something you don't want to share. I'm like, I pretty much share everything, and it's almost like it has to come out. What has made Rad Read so successful, at least, like the blogging and stuff side of it, is that I'm unable to hold back. My wife and I once had a conversation where we said, should we get a divorce? And I wrote about it. I don't think she was thrilled. I mean, I got her permission, but I feel that is the ethos of who we are is that, you know, as Emerson says, we contain multitudes, right? And there's parts of me that are really good at doing certain things, and then there's parts of me that I'm terrified of, and there's parts of me that are growing, and I owe it to myself to be honest about those. And I think for me, blogging has always been a form of accountability, which is, I'm going to call myself out on my own stuff. Like, obviously, I'm a decent writer, so I can fluff things up. And I. I know how to spin things, too. To answer your question, it's almost like there's no choice. It's gonna come out of me. So there's a freedom slash surrender element to it. There's definitely gonna be a little bracing for, like, I can't believe you did this. You know, like armchair quarterbacking from the Internet trolls. But, you know, I'm kind of used to that. And to be fair, I don't actually attract a lot of those people. Thankful. I don't know why I was gonna.

Say, I can't imagine who would say that to you, but they're out there. I'm sure they're out there.

They are definitely on TikTok. They are out there. The thing that I'm most uncomfortable about is that in the post, I don't actually know where we're going. I have some ideas.

And we have a much leaner team. So we have time on our side. Before, time was our enemy, and now we have time on our side. And I know that with time on our side, we are good at a lot of things and we know how to make money. The question is, like, do we know how to make money in alignment with what we stand for and in ways that are fun. One of my mantras as an entrepreneur is follow the fun. And I don't like to do things that I don't find fun. A quick example, you know, I've talked about this. People always like, hey, you love talking. You have a great network of People, you're a storyteller, you need to have a podcast. And I was like, I had a podcast for a year and I didn't find it fun. And right now I'm doing short form video and I have a tiny following. I literally have like 99 TikTok followers. But I find it so fun. And so I'm just gonna do more TikTok. Even though like a business coach would probably be like, you should start a podcast right now, I'm like, no, I want to be the 43 year old cringe guy on TikTok that's trying to work his way through understanding how this platform works for now. And so we have time on our side. Ultimately, we do have customers and prospects. I do worry a little bit that the prospects will be like, well, this person doesn't know what they're doing or I don't know what they sell, so I'm just going to forget about them or I'm going to stop paying attention. That's definitely a risk. But I think again, this business has been built on my transparency. And so I think the people that we would lose because they're like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about or he doesn't understand his business will be offset by the people that are attracted to like, finally, someone exposing what the creator economy really looks like. What I want to say is the creator economy is all the rage. I've been doing this for eight years. I started with pretty deep pockets because of my Wall street career, so I didn't have the pressure. I'm a relatively intelligent person and it's still very, very, very challenging. So someone out there is not telling the full story about the creator.

Yeah.

And all those seven figure entrepreneurs, I know what it takes. And I can see based on just their landing pages, I don't think this is a seven figure business. Someone's not telling the truth about how challenging this business is. And I'll take it even a step further. Someone's not telling the truth that, like, if you want to make like a creator business comparable to a Wall street business, comparable to a career as a lawyer, you are going to be working.

Just as hard as you were at a law firm. So many more layers of risk, so many more layers of complexity. The prize on that, if you're doing the right thing, it's your baby and it's the thing that you want to see in the world, but if it's not the thing you want to see in your. And even then it's very challenging. But if it's not, God forbid, it's not the thing you want to see in the world. And you know, you're just like, I see an opening in Paleo blogging, but I'm a vegan. Look, that's how traditional businesses start. But don't confuse traditional businesses with creator led businesses because the line gets blurry very quickly and you can quickly end up in a land of borrowed goals.

Hear, hear. So powerful to just hear you say it and to speak truth to this that for all the shiny promises and the good that can come, there are these shadow sides and I just really appreciate you being so honest about it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Even in free time, I ask, you might have a seven figure business, but how much time did you spend to get there? How much energy did you spend? There are other metrics beyond revenue that might matter to you and I know that matter to uk. That matter to me that we are optimizing not just for money but also joy, ease, fun, freedom, flow, creative output. Peace. Yes, peace. Oh my goodness. And you're describing this tension that I experience constantly. It's part of why I'm here podcasting and exploring these topics because I also think it's very different to run a business. You know, you mentioned, oh, you spot some arbitrage opportunity or gap in the market, but it's different when you're kind of trying to nurture your own creative expression as the CEO of the business. And unless you really install an operator or an integrator, that's really a dance. Because the bigger my team has grown, the less happy I've become. And some people experience the opposite. And I'm so thrilled for them that they love when the team grows and things feel really coordinated and somehow that frees them up. But it has never felt that freeing to me, although I feel that it's what people say is kind of the only way. And my friend Jonathan Fields wrote this great piece about the unfortunate middle that you're no longer in simple grace or sustainable complexity. You're in the unfortunate middle.

Oh, wow.

Isn't that good? I'll put it in the show notes. I'm like, I always think about that. I printed that article once and I handed it to my husband, Michael. This was even pre pandemic. And I was like, please read this. This is the story of my life. This explains why I've been so down lately. There's like a double whammy of being down. You're not just down because the business is in a dip. I get down because now I'm tired, now my creativity is suffering. Now I'm in a bad mood at home, even when I close my laptop and there's all these cascading effects that while any typical CEO would have pressure the creator economy. There's this special sauce you're trying to keep cultivated while running it's a business around it.

I cannot wait, because I want to talk about that tension between the simplicity and complexity. The other thing that people don't talk about is the. The creator ages, Right when I started, I was 35 years old, and I loved to talk about cold showers. And I was call spade a spade. I was a productivity bro. Now I like to write about midlife crises. So what happens to your product? And so you want your customers to grow with you. So, like, they found you when they were also 35. They used to take cold showers and now they have midlife crises. Or do you want to just attract people having midlife crises today and forget the bros? But it makes for this, like, really weird dynamic. Like, think about your favorite bands, like the Killers. I love the Killers. To me, the Killers is that one album with Mr. Brightside from, like, 20 years ago. I really don't want to hear their new music because, like, to me, that's the moment of the Killers. I don't actually know. Like, do they just play that album over and over and over again? Or have they evolved as a band to move past that phase of their lives? And I don't really answer that question, but I've been thinking about it. A lot. Because in eight years I'll be 51. I'll be right about becoming an empty nester.

Oh, my gosh. I know I'm turning 40 this year and I know that that's not old in the grand scheme of things, but 4,0. My first platform was called Life After College. Like, what has happened here? You're so right. We never talk about the fact that creators age.

Mm. And I think it's naive to say, like. Cause I know a lot of creators that do this and they're like, well, I'll get an integrator, right. To use traction terms. But that doesn't solve the problem that you are the creative energy of your business. What are you gonna tell you? Use my example. Tell the integrator to just keep writing cold shower articles. You don't wanna own that business. You might as well sell that business if that's what you're gonna.

That's true.

Why integrate it away? That goes back to your tension of simple grace versus sustainable complexity. Yeah.

These are big questions. Before I ask you the famous closing question, what did I forget to ask? Or what is still unsaid that you want to throw into this conversation at this moment in time.

We've kind of danced around it, but I've worked with a few business coaches in this transition and they'll give me all of these tactics and questions and things. But what the conversation ends up being is therapy. And the question that it ultimately always lands on, which is so funny because this is the question our course always lands on, is like, what is it that you truly want? And it's so funny, is like, I actually, like, think through that answer aloud because I'll be like, I want to be 80% creative and 20% product focused or business focused. I've been saying this a lot. And then people will be like, well, you should probably write a book. And I'm like, no, the book doesn't have enough of that. Figuring out the game of business side. So then they're like, well, you should probably like double down on the 10K framework, because that's like a real meme and you've created something there. And we're like, yeah, but that's more like 35 year old K. But I kind of like it and it's like valuable and people really like it. And then it's like, well, maybe I should start a YouTube channel because I love storytelling. And then I make like a bunch of YouTube videos and I'm like, this is really demanding. I don't know if this is for me. And so I keep circling the wagons, and I feel grateful for my team, who's probably listening to this, for supporting me on that. But I also empathize with them. That. That must be frustrating to look to someone who runs the show. Satirical air quotes, and they're like, I don't know what I'm doing, and it's because I don't know what I want. And so then from that downstream flows immediately. If you don't know what I want, how can I, as your employee, support you in the thing that you don't even know you want? Right. Which makes me, like, want to become a hermit and then go just sit in my cave and just make tiktoks under my desk.

And then you go viral from being the hermit in the cave.

But then I did that. And I remember part of the reason why I wanted to hire a team was we had this amazing community, this amazing vision, this amazing mission, and it felt so lonely that no one else cared about it but me. And there were other people and, like, wanting to put it out into the world. So there's all these competing tensions. And, you know, again, if I distill it down, it's like one of the first questions that you ask. The thing I really need to come to grips with is what part of that is driven by my ego, and what part of it is driven by a pure.

Genuine losing yourself in the sauce, in the magic of it. People spend their entire lives loosening the grip of their ego and still don't succeed. People on their deathbed say, I'm not dying. Well, there's a guilt that they're not dying. Well, like, what a crazy thought. But that's the grip of the ego that, like, we hold ourselves to the standard of who we are, who our identity is. Is my long winded way of saying thank you to my employees, my colleagues who are listening to this, that their game to figure this out. The flip side is we have 40,000 raving fans. That's the flip side of that. And they love what we do, and we love them. We're gonna figure it out. We're all good.

And I love seeing the smile on your face as you say that. It's like all of a sudden, it just completely reanimates you. Just thinking about that 40,000 core, I'm picturing the earth's magnetic core, you know, like they're your people and it's going to grow and contract and grow and contract, but it is growing over time. And you like this conversation. This is what we're all so compelled by is your openness and your honesty. And you're also putting words. And you have a gift for this. You do this in your newsletter too. Putting words to things like how hard it is to be a manager sometimes when you're having a bad day or bad week, month, year. That's a tension I experience all the time as well, of what do I do when I want to crawl into a hole? But I have people who want things or need things from me because I've put them there.

Because I know that if I'm completely alone in the business, it will break. And I will break even more than I might be kind of breaking and feeling tension when I need to retreat. It's just is very hard. And I think as creatives in some proportion of our business, I've had to be really open with my team as well. Sometimes I go radio silent and I can't. I don't even have the energy to tell you that I'm about to go radio silent.

Yeah.

Just going to happen. And don't take it personally.

Yeah.

Be really honest about our own flow and shortcomings.

Yeah.

Wow. So, Kay, if you could give fellow business owners permission today, knowing that this is one of many of your permission slips for us, permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

You have permission to feel this role of the CEO. The role of the founder is the archetype is like impregnable. Won't cry, won't be sad. And like, sometimes you just need a good cry. And that's okay. Your humanity in the situation is not at odds with what you want to be as a CEO, as a founder, they are perfectly intertwined. Whatever human need you have, whatever emotional need you have, you have permission to feel it, to experience it, to talk about it. Because we all know that keeping it bottled in is not gonna work.

Yeah. It will come spilling out in really strange ways. Thank you so much, Kay. This is such a gift to me. I know. To your rad reads, community and hopefully to many more. To free timers. Thank you for being you. Thank you for sharing your process mid pivot while you're still in it, while you can't see through the fog. And you're definitely not alone in that either. Join the Cansy through the Fog club.

It's a big club out there. Yes. Thank you, Jenny. Your questions are amazing. Your friendship is a true delight, both, you know, on a personal level and a professional level. And thank you to all of the listeners who have put up with me three or four times by the time this comes out. So I send you my love and my admiration because you're gracious for your time and attention.

Thanks so much, Kay. Thanks everybody for listening.

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