Pushing the Boundaries: Mike O'Kelly's Revelation in Balancing Workloads and Business Resilience | SOS Ep. 354

Ever tried to take on more than you can handle, only to find it was a mistake? 

That's what happened to me. I tried to up my game from five podcast episodes a week to seven. I took a leap of faith, thinking that pushing my boundaries would enhance my work. Guess what? It didn't. It was an unsustainable pace that left me scrambling, but it was a valuable learning curve.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

The Surviving Outside Sales podcast, hosted by Mike O'Kelly, presented by Sales Builder Academy, the goal is to survive and thrive all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now on with the show. Welcome to the Surviving Outside Sales podcast. I'm your host, mike O'Kelly.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Sometimes in life you just have to admit that you tried something and it failed. So, full disclosure I can't keep up with this pace of having a podcast every day, so I'm going back to just five days a week, monday through Friday. I thought that more was better, but it wasn't. So this is just a lesson for you out there in the sales world More does not always mean better. And it's amazing how I thought well, it's just two more episodes per week, yes, but the amount of preparation, the amount of time that it took, that's eight episodes more per month. That was basically a third of my monthly output that I had to increase and, quite frankly, I just don't think that it was worth it. So I'm pivoting. It was only about excuse me, about five weeks, but I'm pivoting because it's not working.

Speaker 1: 1:25

And so a couple of lessons you can take from this. First of all, sometimes you have to experiment and you have to try new things in order to push yourself, and one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to push myself with the podcast and it didn't work, and what I realized was I can still push myself in different avenues. So one of the things that I thought was all right well, let's go to seven days, let's try to do every single day. It just didn't work. So it's going to be Monday through Friday, again with guests on Thursdays. So if you've been listening and you've been liking the seven days, I apologize. I mean, the download numbers are very strong, it's just I can't keep up. So, basically, as a solopreneur, it is just it's very time consuming, but I just wanted to kind of let you know what is happening. So, if you see any kind of change but it's also a lesson what can you learn from what I've gone through? And that's really the point. I tried something and it didn't work. It didn't, it didn't kill me, it didn't set me back. There's no harm, no foul. But what I learned was valuable. I learned that I couldn't do seven days a week. I learned that there were limitations on creation. There's limitations on what you can do, and I've had to take a couple of weeks off of LinkedIn because it was just too much.

Speaker 1: 2:50

I have so much going on right now, launching a course. We just signed our paperwork for the franchise we're going to be opening in the fall. So that's going on in the background and it is taking up some of my time and I knew it was going to take up some of my time. But I've got the courses that I'm building. I'm interviewing podcast guests, creating podcasts, building out more future products that are going to be released for the outside sales world or the sales world in general, and it's just too much.

Speaker 1: 3:20

So you kind of say to yourself okay, I'm starting to spread myself too thin. This is going to happen sometimes to you in your business. The first thing to do is to recognize that you're spreading yourself too thin, pull back and recalibrate. What you don't want to do is you don't want to say, well, I need to push more, I need to push more. I need to push more.

Speaker 1: 3:42

If you're starting to spread yourself too thin, if you're not having the time to do revenue generating activities, pull back, pull back, recalibrate and fix your process, because through the month of May, my process got really out of whack and you know how much I enjoy talking about processes. So you have to make sure that you're regulating and you're looking over your business. Don't spread yourself too thin, don't over commit, and if you have, just pull back and just realize that five weeks, I learned a lot about what I can accomplish and what I can't accomplish. The same thing is going to happen for you. You are going to understand what you can do and what you can achieve. But I feel as if, by pushing myself towards that, what it's done is now recalibrated. Whereas before I thought, oh man, five episodes is a lot per week, now I'm thinking, oh man, I've cut back from seven. Five is going to be a piece of cake. You see what just happened mentally, because I pushed myself, I now believe that doing five episodes a week is a piece of cake.

Speaker 1: 4:56

Imagine if you pushed yourself in your business and maybe it was to book 15 meetings a week, 20 meetings a week, and it was to make 50 calls and it was to send out X number of emails, and you push, and you push, and you push, and then you pull back. And every time you push and you pull back, you're going to get stronger, you're going to get mentally stronger, you're going to get physically stronger and emotionally stronger, and when that happens, that is where your growth and your progress will come. It's by pushing yourself. It's not by staying in your comfort zone. It's about trying new things.

Speaker 1: 5:31

I highly recommend that you try to push yourself and just realize it's not a failure unless you give up. So I didn't fail at doing seven days a week. It's just too much for me right now. If I had a team around me where all I have to do is just hit record and they take care of everything else, it's a completely different story. So I didn't fail. Seven days a week wasn't a failure. It was just too much for me right now. This is not the right time. It's not the right time for me in my business. It's not the right time for the audience. All right, it's okay. Just know that you can try things and it's not going to completely destroy your business and that's really how you figure out new ways to stay relevant and new ways to create. It's to try.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Thank you for listening. I appreciate it. Please subscribe. If you took any value out of this, please subscribe to the appropriate channels YouTube or Spotify, apple. I really do appreciate that, if you want to reach out to me, connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to me via email. All of my links are down in the show notes. I really do appreciate it and we'll see you next time Surviving Outside Sales. Bye-bye.