MBA1484 3 Tough Lessons I’ve Learned in The Past 12 Months

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show where we always got your back every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn three tough lessons I've learned in the past 12 months. This is going to be a difficult episode to do because these are three things I learned the hard way and these are not insignificant lessons. These are things that really affected my business, affected my morale, my stress levels. And yes, I'm happy that I've learned these lessons and I'm able to course correct. But these three things were a cause of a lot of pain in my business and in my life. But in the interest in helping as many people as possible, I want to share them with you. I want to make sure that you don't learn these the hard way either. Now a quick disclaimer. No matter what you do, there's going to be lessons and that you're going to learn the hard way. In business. You just can't try to always avoid it, but you should try to avoid them as much as possible. And that's why I'm sharing today's lessons, avoiding them means you're going to be saving your sanity, time, and, of course, money. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The first tough, hard lesson I learned in the past 12 months might sound obvious, but when you're in the midst of trying to grow your business, when you're trying to really take things to the next level and the next level and the next level, month over month, sometimes you get blinded. So here's tough lesson number one. Sometimes we focus too much on what's not working instead of what is working. Sometimes we try to fix the problems in our business, try to fix the issues, you fix the complaints, and this is good. And all times, we pour in a hundred percent of our efforts on trying to fix things, trying to improve what's not working. The problem with that is that you start dropping the ball and stop doing the things that are working, things that your customers do, like things that are actually bringing in new business. For example, I was really focused on our flaws. What are some things we can improve? What are some things that are causing customers maybe to cancel? And that's great and all, but all my focus was on that. It's just as important for you to take a look at your business and ask yourself what. What is working? What is bringing in customers? Now? What do customers actually like? Because you need to double, triple, and quadruple down on those things. You gotta keep on putting fuel to that fire. And I wasn't doing that. I was really just focused on what's not working. And it reminded me of a speech I saw about four years ago from Gary Vaynerchuk. I haven't watched a Gary Vaynerchuk video recently, but this one really stands out. We all have flaws. None of us is perfect. We all have weaknesses. And many of us, we try to shore up those weaknesses to. To a level of being, like, mediocre, right? Being okay, being good enough. Gary advises against that. In the speech, he talks about how you should just double, triple, quadruple down on your strengths. What are you good at? What are you doing well? What is happening in your business that's really making people smile? Keep doing more of that. And he says, don't worry about the weaknesses. Now, I'm not in that camp where I say, just ignore all your problems and ignore all the flaws in your business. I do believe there is merit in trying to fix problems. In fact, what happened in our business, which kind of triggered me looking into this and what went wrong is that, you know, our churn Was going down, meaning people were not leaving our company, Webinar Ninja, or leaving our software Webinar Ninja. Like before. People were staying on, but our growth was slowing down because I was focused so much on trying to, you know, shore up any things that people would complain about or maybe features that they requested or things like that. Right. And I didn't double down on the things that got me to that growth. I kind of dropped the ball there. And I only realized that when I took the time to look at the numbers and understand what actually makes a customer a customer in our business. Let's keep doing more of that. So that was tough. Lesson number one, focusing too much on what's not working versus what is working. Tough. Lesson number two, stress is a killer. This last 12 months has been quite stressful for me and Nicole in our business because of how hard we were working to try to achieve our goals. Everything basically took a backseat. Our personal life, our downtime, our personal activities. You know, Nicole actually stopped going to flamenco, which was one of our passions, to make more time for the business. I was working long hours. I was, you know, going from meeting to meeting to call to call. And at first we felt fine, and we're okay. But eventually, month over month, the stress started to pile up. And because we're not relieving ourself of the stress by taking breaks or maybe, you know, enjoying a weekend or shutting off when it's not time for work, it really affected our business. So when I say stress is a killer, you know, of course it's, you know, a human killer, but it's also a business killer. You know, it's hard to make the right decision all the time when you're stressed. It's really hard for you to think creatively, to come up with creative solutions when you're stressed. So when you do try to do that, when you're stressed, you come up with bad solutions. You come up with rushed decisions, and that affects the trajectory of your business. When you make a bad decision, it can really cascade and really domino and have a domino effect on a lot of the aspects of your business. It's really hard to square because out there in the Internet, in social media, all you hear is hustle harder, and, you know, whoever works the hardest wins. And the tough lesson I learned is that, no, your body has a right over you. You have to give yourself time to rest. You can't get stressed out. What's the point of all this if you're not enjoying your life? If you are stressed, if you're not enjoying your business because you're stressed. So we decided to make it a priority to lower our stress levels. What can we do every day to lower the stress? Whether it's cut down on meetings, whether it's cut down in the hours, whether it's, you know, to lower expenses so there's no financial stress. This is really important because it creeps up on you and we're lucky enough to not have any kind of major health issues right now because of the stress, but it's definitely something that can happen. I'm all for going after, you know, success and your goals, but there's nothing wrong with having a long term vision, understanding that, hey, I gotta be a little bit more patient and, and therefore I'm gonna continue to make, you know, leaps and make progress towards my goals, but maybe not as fast as I want to because I want to prioritize my health and lower my stress levels. All right, tough lesson number three. Keeping your head down and working at your business isn't always the best thing for your business. About two years ago, Nicole and I really committed to, you know, let's just put our heads down and really build a great business and say no to all bunch of things and don't go to events and don't go to conferences, speak on stages. Let's say no to those things and really just spend as much time as possible building a great team and a great product. Sounds good, right? A year later we decided, hey, let's dip our toes back into the conference space. Let's dip our toes back on stage and accept some more speaking engagements. And we saw there is a direct correlation with the number of conferences we go to. Soon as we go to a conference, we'll see an uptick in growth in sales, in traffic and quality. Customers are coming through, customers that stay for a long time, customers that have a high value, meaning they spend money because you've built some trust and some rapport with them at these conferences or even just off stage, like being on stage, I mean, and communicating with the crowd and giving them value. I said, wow, I was really neglecting being part of the community. And I thought putting my head down and just focusing on things would be better for my business. What I realized is that I wasn't empowering my team. I didn't have the right people in place. Luckily we do now, but at the time we didn't. So that I can go to these conferences and represent the company and give speeches and grow the business that way. I was overwhelmed with all the tasks I had to do that. I thought, hey, I'm better useful or more useful to be heads down working on these tasks rather than going to conferences, which is time consuming, you know, the travel and the days to prepare and all that kind of stuff. But they work, they help your business and somebody's got to do it. So you either got to send somebody or you got to go yourself and get somebody to do the work that you think you have to do. So heads down not always a great solution.

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To wrap up today's lesson. From the three tough lessons that I share today. You might notice that there's a common theme and this is very common in entrepreneurship because we have this gene in us, we have this trait, right? And it's very common in human nature in general. And that is extremes. You have to beware of extremes in every single case. Whether it's me focusing on what's not working and not what's working or my stress levels or heads down. I was taking things to the extreme. I was doing all or nothing. And that really isn't healthy. And it's not really useful letting go of what works to take care of something else. No, don't let go completely split it. Give it a percentage, 50, 50, 40, 60 something. But we are inclined to go to extremes because we're kind of an all in gung ho kind of personality as entrepreneurs as but we got to be careful because many times we're letting go of assets that are really helping our business in pursuit of something else. Thinking we graduated from the stage we got to do something else now. No, you got to watch yourself. You got to be careful and make sure you don't take things to extremes. You check in yourself, make sure that you're moderate with your workload, you're moderate with the new things you take on. And this is a reminder first and foremost for myself. And I'm just kind of sharing what I learned before. It's a reminder to you. So I hope that by me sharing these three tough lessons, it's helped you to kind of be on the lookout. I encourage you also to explore what three things were like huge lessons in your life and your business the last 12 months. Write them down, think about them. It's going to take you about 20 minutes, but it's going to be well worth it. It's going to allow you to reflect and make sure you course correct. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 LMBA Show. You'll love that you're here. Hit subscribe right now. Do that right now. Hit that subscribe button. By hitting subscribe, you get access to over 1400 of our business lessons in the archives. It's absolutely free to hit subscribe and you can hit subscribe on any podcast app you use. Whether it's Apple Podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Overcast or Himalaya. We're on them all. Hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Tough lessons are tough. They're not fun. They're not pretty. But you can't turn a blind eye. You can't pretend you don't make mistakes. You can't turn your back away from progress because you just don't want to look at the things that you messed up on. It's okay. We're going to fail. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to make bad decisions. But what's not okay is that we continue to do something that is hurting our business or hurting ourselves because we're in denial or we're just too proud. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Okay.

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