MBA856 How To Know When It’s Time to Make a Change

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar NBA show, the business podcast we're getting better at Business is Our Business. I'm your host Omar Zenholm. I'm the co founder of the Hundred Dollar NBA and webinar Ninja, the best platform to run your webinars. And today is the first episode of A New Way we'll be delivering this podcast. Hence the title of today's episode and lesson. How to know when it's time to make a change. If you've been with us from the start, the $100 MBA show first launched on August 11, 2014. And every day since, we have delivered a short business lesson. 855 episodes. Wow. And. And today we make a change with the show. A change the show needs. A change we all need. You see, I always saw this podcast as a journey. Your journey. As an entrepreneur, a business builder, I wanted to help you on this journey with daily lessons. But 855 lessons later, it's time for you to learn some deeper lessons. Lessons that I've learned and am learning the hard way through experiences, successes and yes, some mistakes. Sharing these lessons is a lot harder for me. It's. It's a scary step for me because it forces me to be a bit more exposed and a bit more vulnerable. But I have to do this. The show has to evolve. I have to evolve. But why? That's what today's lesson's all about. How do you know it's time to make a change in your business? How did I come to this decision? But before we get into all that. Let's get a few things straight. The $100 NBA show is not going anywhere. I love you this amazing community of listeners too much. So what is changing? Well, the show's format will be a bit longer. There's more I need to cover in each lesson and these are deeper dives. So each episode will be about 25 minutes long. A new episode will be released every Monday. Yes, we're moving from daily to weekly and I'll explain why in today's episode. Hang with me today and I will give you all the details. Promise. We will have some bonus episodes from time to time with guest teachers where guests come and teach their area of expertise. Those, when released, will be released on Tuesdays. Now each weekly lesson will be based on a real challenge decision or something we're wrestling with in our own business, our software company, Webinar Ninja. This past year, Webinar Ninja has grown tremendously, going from 1500 users to 10,000 users. With that kind of growth, you're going to have some major challenges. The stakes are incredibly high. There is so much more to lose and the business has to change to make it to the next level. As Marshall Goldsmith's book says, what got you here won't get you there. The goal of our show hasn't changed real lessons from the real world so you can get better at business. Each deep dive lesson will give you the why and how of the topic to implement in your own business, starting from today's lesson. So to start off, our first in depth lesson is all about why did I make this change with the show? How did I come to this decision? When will you know it's time to make a change of your own. I know some of you are new to the podcast and my story, so I'm going to back up a bit and explain how we got to where we are today. And I'm pretty sure I haven't shared the full story on the podcast here before. At the start of 2012, Nicole and I independently decided to make a major shift in our lives. We resigned from our careers in education. Nicole, who's now my wife and business partner at the time, was just one of my colleagues at the university we worked for. But we soon became good friends as we learned we were both leaving our careers for the same reason. Growth. We wanted to grow. I was a head of department for about six years now and been teaching for nearly 13 years. Nicole had just as many years of teaching under her belt. We were great at our jobs, but we wanted something else for me, I was side hustling, building small businesses on the side. For 10 years. I was exploring to see if I can actually do this entrepreneurial thing. After a bunch of wins and a few unforgettable losses, I wanted to do this business thing full time. I knew at that point I needed to give it a shot. Nicole felt like she was just going through the motions day in and day out. Teaching was rewarding, but she was feeling unfulfilled. She wasn't creating. She wasn't pushing herself to be more. So weeks before she left her job as a teacher, she enrolled in the New York Film Academy to embark on a new challenge. We both left our jobs in the summer of 2012 and decided to embark on our new journeys together. In New York, we started a small marketing firm where we specialize in web design and documentary style sales videos for our clients. We were hustling in the Big Apple and boy was client work hard. But in September 2013, Nicole and I decided to team up and start an online business. An online training community alternative to a traditional MBA. MBAs are known to be ridiculously expensive, like $100,000 expensive. So we decided to make our alternative business education. $100. The $100 MBA was born. Well, the name was born, but we had a lot of work to do before we opened for business. Scripting, shooting and editing over 100 training videos, creating a website, a membership portal, and of course, marketing this thing so we can have actual customers on launch day. And then on December 3, 2013, the $100 MBA was launched and our new business was for real. Now, after the launch of the $100 MBA, we went through an almost painful slow growth. In early 2014, I was doing webinars for the $100 MBA community and trying to support our community as well as encourage new members to join. And I hated all the webinar software options out there. They were confusing and ugly and there wasn't a single tool that did the whole job. So I decided to create our own so we didn't need to deal with the hassle of using an incomplete software. Now, when I was running webinars with it, our community asked, what are you using for this webinar? And I just said, it's just a simple software I put together. I'm not a developer, but I got some help from a developer along with some simple design that I created in Photoshop, and we put together a very, very simple webinar software. Now, the next question our community asked was one of the most pivotal. They asked, can we buy it Now? Let me be completely honest. At this point, the Hundred Dollar MBA community was doing okay, but it wasn't paying all the bills. It was a very slow growth. This podcast, $100 MBA show, has yet to be launched. That doesn't happen for another couple months. So we really didn't have a lot of traction. So I saw an opportunity. I saw, hey, some people want to buy something that I created. Maybe I can make a few bucks and pay a few bills. So we opened it up for beta. We thought, hey, let's see if people actually want to buy this. If they do, we'll clean it up and give it to them. So we did some pre sales, so we opened it up for 150 beta users and we sold out in 48 hours. That was a clear sign that, hey, there's some people out there that really like the software, really want to use something different. We cleaned it up and we gave it to our beta users. They gave us feedback. And then we opened it up for another 100 beta users a couple months later and sold out in 24 hours. At this point, Nicole and I started to realize, hey, maybe there's something here. Maybe this little software that we created might have some legs if we really invest in it. We called the software Webinar Ninja and decided, hey, let's do this right. Let's invest a little of our time and money into this and see if we can make it something bigger than we think it is. Now. At the same time, we launched the $100 MBA show. Now, this is August 2014, and launching a podcast like this takes a lot of work. Now, on a personal note, this was a very risky time for us. We weren't making a whole lot of money with the a Hundred Dollar mba. We still were doing client work, but we had to say no to a lot of clients because, hey, we're launching a new podcast. And it required a lot of our time to produce this podcast, especially a daily one where we really wanted to get ahead before we launched. And then we just started to do this webinar software. Now, I probably would say Webinar Ninja wouldn't have existed if the growth of the Hundred MBA wasn't so slow. But I wanted to give something a try and see if that had traction. Sometimes you just got to say yes to opportunities to see what works. But then the Hunter lmba Show podcast was launched and it was a huge success. And I thought, hey, maybe this is just for new and noteworthy the first eight weeks. But the show Just kept on growing and growing and growing. And In December of 2014, iTunes awarded us best of itunes. And that really took the show to the next level. Now, while this is all happening, we're scrambling to try to find the right talent, the right people to build Webinar Ninja for us to properly. Up to this point, it's a very simple, simple software that me and one developer created. If we wanted to make it what it needed to be, we needed a team of developers and designers. And over the course of the next two years, Webinar Ninja started to grow and grow and grow. And In September of 2016, webinar Ninja hit 10,000 users. Now, at this point, we had a team of developers, a server administrator, a designer, a team of customer service reps that we hired individually. And Webinar Ninja surpassed the growth of the $100 MBA in terms of website traffic and revenue. But even though we had that success and we had that growth, I really wanted to take Webinar Ninja to another level. I wanted Webinar Ninja to be the webinar software in the market. No questions about it. But I had to make a change. You see, I got to this point with a team that I hired really just haphazardly because I was juggling so much. The growth of Webinar Ninja, the growth of the $100 MBA show, running a daily podcast and maintaining our community. The $100 MBA. And that does include all the other obligations I had, like speaking engagements and sales calls and interviews and all the other things I was trying to do to help our business. It became very clear to me in September of 2016 that I had to make a choice. Gas, snacks, toast. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro. No activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxed data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile. Just bring your number. $30 first month at $25 after with autopay not available if with Metro or T Mobile. In the past 180 days, they put hot honey sauce on the snack wrap. McDonald's outdid themselves again. The classic snack wrap we all know and love paired with the sweet heat of hot honey sauce. Just what we needed to make it even more perfect. You know the drill. So go to McDonald's and try it today, guys. There's only 24 hours in a day. You have to make a decision all the time how you're going to spend that day. Every day. You only have 24 hours. And I looked at how much time was I spending on everything I do in my business, and you guessed it, the show was taking a huge amount of my time. And I loved the show. I thought the show was fantastic. And hey, let's be honest, it was a winner. We were making sponsorship money. We were growing. We get a lot of amazing listeners every single day. 50,000 daily listeners. So making the choice from daily to weekly wasn't easy. But I knew if I wanted Webinar Ninja to be what I want it to be, I can't do it if my plate is so full. There are other things I need to do with that company in order for it to grow. You see, most of us know we have to make a change. We just don't want to. And if I was going to be completely honest, I knew this was coming now. At the same time, I really didn't want to let go of the show. I wanted to still give value. I still wanted to share my journey as well as share lessons in business to help you, the listener of this podcast. And this is why I'm delivering weekly lessons. Building a software company is incredibly hard, and you'll learn a lot about that in the coming weeks. But the one thing I do want to share with you today when it comes to this topic change and making a change is you know it's time to make a change when you know you can't go any further, when things are just not going to get any better. If you're just staying the same status quo, you can't last long in business. You're not going to be competitive and you're not growing as a person. What's the point if it's just making money? You need to challenge yourself. You need to keep pushing forward. And that's what we got in September of 2016 with webinar Ninja. I had to make some tough decisions. Even with our team, our developers and designers on our team, they're a great bunch and they helped us build a software to this point. But I maxed out on them. I needed better talent, and that's not to insult them in any way. It's just the reality of business, the reality of building a great team. This is something that I learned by reading Elon Musk by Ashley Vance. Elon Musk invests incredible amounts of money in Getting great talent. And that's really what we invested our time and money in the last few months, building a new team. I'll be talking a little bit more about these new players that we hired, new developers, new designers. Because what we're building now and what we're going to be releasing in a number of weeks is the next version of Webinar Ninja, webinar ninja 5.0. And boy am I excited for this because this is really going to be an incredible, incredible software. I'm going to share more and more about what we're working on and the update, but it's re engineered from the ground up. And let's just say we're going to be making some serious waves when this comes out. So what am I going to do with my time now that I've gone from daily to weekly? Well, I'm going back to video. I'm going to be shooting a whole bunch of great training videos on how to be better on webinars. Recently, Nicole and I surveyed all of our community at Webinar Ninja to ask some questions like what makes you nervous about webinars? What are some of the challenges you have when doing webinars? And believe it or not, there's a lot of common answers and we'll be helping people with those issues, with those challenges through some really great free video training. And that's going to be part of our whole new website at Webinar Ninjas, soon to be released. So I'm going into the studio shooting videos now. Nicole is going to be shooting and editing like the old days using that New York Film Academy training. And it's a new mountain to climb. And this is where I kind of want to wrap today's lesson up. You know, it's time to move on. When you've climbed the mountain, when you've done everything you can in some stage in your business, in some stage of your life, maybe where you accomplished everything you wanted out of that situation. And for us, we were building Webinar Ninja on the side and we saw this mountain of wow, this is a huge, huge mountain we want to climb. And we saw that mountain from the peak of the Hundred Rmba mountain. And now we want to climb that mountain. We saw that mountain and said, hey, that's an incredible mountain. We want to get on the top of that one. So when you've reached your peak, it's time to climb another mountain. And not only for your own sake so you can grow and become a better entrepreneur, but for your audience's sake. It's time for you to give your best and give your best effort to a new challenge so they can benefit, so they can get the best out of you. So I'm really excited to be sharing this journey with you on the $100 MBA show. Every week I'm going to be giving you a new lesson, a new topic, a deep dive on something we're working on with our business or a challenge we're having. You're going to learn from my experiences, looking over my shoulder as we build our business together. I'm excited about the future and I'm excited about this show because it's evolved, it's changing and it's becoming something more significant. And I'm glad I made this change. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show, especially those who've been listening for a while. I really appreciate your listenership and I'm really excited for you to be coming along this new journey with us, learning new lessons. It's going to be a lot of fun. Now, in today's lesson, I talked about how to know when to make a change. Now that I knew that was time to make a change, I had to upgrade the talent that we had as at Webinar Ninja. But how do you do that? How do you find the right talent? How do you know they're right for the growth of the business? And how do you tell the people that you're letting go? How do you tell the people that are gonna be transitioning out? Not an easy task, but you got to do it. You get what you put into the business. So how do you upgrade your team's talent? Find out in the next episode of the $100 NBA show next week, same day, same time. I'll see you then guys. Take care. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile. Just bring your number. $31 monthly, $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.