The Creative Brandpreneur, Meny Hoffman - CEO of PTEX Group

Hear the story of how Meny Hoffman stayed humble and learned from failure to become a respected business leader in the Jewish community. Meny’s dedication to his family and culture encouraged a healthy work-life balance that led to his multi-faceted success today. In this episode, you’ll learn the systems and principles Meny used to build a flourishing business. Listen to his story and choose which action will best serve you today.

Action Principles 

Pick one to do this week: 

1. Reframe your perspective on failure. Failure is a powerful opportunity to learn. Rather than internalizing it, look at it as an experiment. ACTION: Step back from a failure and ask yourself what you can do differently next time, then try again.
2. Analyze your work. Knowing what you enjoy doing in your job will help you determine your MVAs. ACTION: Determine what parts of your job you enjoy most and focus the majority of your time on it. Minimize the other activities as much as possible.
3. Identify your core principles. Core principles help you set boundaries and goals, which are vital to long-term success. ACTION: Choose one principle that you believe in and commit to living it more fully.
4. Improve your leadership skills. Being a strong leader will help you and your team grow and be more productive. ACTION: Take a course on improving your leadership skills.

Guest Resources

Follow Meny Hoffman on LinkedIn and listen to his podcast, Let’s Talk Business. You can also learn more about his business by visiting Ptex Group.

Suggested LinkedIn Learning Courses

Productive Leadership

Free Time Management Course

Thanks to Dave Crenshaw's partnership with Microsoft and LinkedIn Learning, you can get free access to his full course, Time Management Fundamentals, at DaveGift.com.

Dave Crenshaw develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities, and organizations of every size. He has appeared in Time magazine, USA Today, FastCompany, and the BBC News. His courses on LinkedIn Learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. His five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is The Myth of Multitasking—a time management bestseller. As an author, speaker, and online instructor, Dave has transformed the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands around the world. DaveCrenshaw.com

Transcript

Meny Hoffman: 0:00

Success doesn't cause happiness, happiness causes success. Beautiful. If you could be yourself and you could focus on gratitude of what you're able to accomplish, you're gonna become happier, you're gonna become happy, you're gonna become unstoppable. Everything is in your reach. In this episode, you'll get to know many Hoffman, the creative brand printer, and you'll hear the story of how he stayed humble and learn from failure to become a respected business leader in the Jewish community. I'm Dave Crenshaw, and this is my success Show.

Dave Crenshaw: 0:34

Welcome back friends to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show. This is where I speak to some of the most successful people I've met in my life's journey, so that I can teach my kids how to be successful, but you get to come along for the ride and learn along with them. If you're not familiar with who I am, I'm a best selling author. I speak around the world, the fortune 500 companies. And I've taught millions of people how to be successful through my online courses, in particular, my courses on LinkedIn learning. With this show, I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to create a legacy project to help my family and help anyone learn how to succeed by looking for universal principles of success. I tried to interview people who have multifaceted success in many areas of their life, not just financial, not just career. And my guest today is one of those people. He's someone that's remarkable. First, I met him when he invited me to speak at an event he was putting on and we've just sort of cultivated a friendship through the years even though I'm in Salt Lake and he's in New York, we've managed to stay in contact with each other. But before we get into that, I just want to encourage you to do one thing. As you listen to today's episode. Look for something you can do look for an action you can take today or this week to make my guests success story a part of your success story. Many Hoffman is the CEO of P Tex group, an award winning branding and marketing agency headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. Many is a lifelong entrepreneur who's passionate about creating winning strategies that help growing businesses flourish. He's been successfully helping brands grow and thrive since 2001. He's the host of the let's talk business podcast, the show that provides entrepreneurs with powerful tools needed to learn, grow and lead. Many is also a popular speaker, who shares his strategies at regional corporations and conferences. And he's a proud husband and father of eight children, many, it's wonderful to see your face and connect with you again, we've spent some time together first, you had me come to your LTV event, which was it's still one of my favorite events I've ever spoken to. For those who aren't familiar, just tell people a little bit about what what that was? Sure. So we have a platform called Let's talk business. And that's a platform where people come together to talk business, because every great relationship starts with a conversation. And we used to do those events on a regular basis. And one of those summits, you were a guest speaker, he spoke about productivity, which is a very important topic for leaders and your audience primarily are Jewish business leaders. Is that accurate? Yes. So obviously, it's close to home. It's also a audience that I felt I could bring in a lot of information that maybe they weren't exposed to on a regular basis. And then we also reconnected in Brooklyn several years ago. And you were so generous. You showed me around your office, the wonderful people you work with. And then you took me to honestly one of the best dinners I've ever had in my life. What What was that restaurant you took me to in Brooklyn? I think it was the loft, phenomenal restaurant run by one of my friends. You know, kosher food is always good. You know, that's that kosher food never disappoints? Well, I think that's what it was. It was amazing Steakhouse, and it redefined what kosher food meant to me. So thank you so much for that. So yeah, I've been excited to talk to you for quite a while. And what I like to do many when we do this, we're going to kind of go through your career journey, chronologically with it. So I always like to ask this question, the beginning and the question that every kid gets asked, which is when you were young, and let's talk about in your teenage years, in your teenage years, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Unknown: 4:26

When I started growing up? I was the kid with the lemonade stand. Not necessarily had a lemonade stand, but just understanding like I was trying to see, whenever I was able to create stuff, I will be the person creating. So at one point it would be before a holiday creating a coloring book and then selling it to my neighbors for a quarter apiece and stuff like that. And believe it or not my first business card I created when I was 13 years old. That was my passion. My passion was creating stuff. And I could say that I had a thrill of creating stuff Something that maybe everlasting or has an impact that does something, it's not just a one off dumb, last a couple of hours and spent had some fun and moved on. And I my first business card and I remember two years later I said, you know, I have to upgrade the business card is not up to par with what I'm doing. And I upgraded so I have three versions of business cards that I've created. Before I had a business.

Dave Crenshaw: 5:23

Where did that inspiration to be entrepreneurial come from? Was there a family member? Was there someone that you saw that inspired you in the neighborhood? What was Where did that come from?

Unknown: 5:34

My father always had a business. And he was in a manufacturing. So I remember going with him. sometimes on the weekends opening the factory and other people came in and started sewing hats and knits and scarves. And he used to sell to the Kmart, JC Penney's, and I wouldn't say that I grew up in an entrepreneurial family that they were have, they were very hungry for new ventures and stuff like that. I think a lot of it came from my own curiosity. I think if you look at a lot of entrepreneurs, it could come from two places it come from a place where they saw family members being very aggressive. Or you could have people that just very curious, and I was very curious, in the in the entrepreneurial journey, I was very curious of what it takes to build a good, good company. And throughout my life, I could point back to a lot of those moments of curiosity that moved me into a next venture or an expansion in the venture or just even expansion in my knowledge.

Dave Crenshaw: 6:33

Typically, when someone is young, and they start businesses, like you're saying at the age of 13, you're in your teens, they don't go as planned, they don't quite work out, did you have a business that you were excited about, but but failed early on.

Unknown: 6:47

So funny fact is that P Tex was my first venture, we used to be called print x. And we because we started off on the printing side of things before we started going into more of the branding and marketing. But I wouldn't say that I had a venture that failed. I had definitely a bunch of components in my journey that failed. Or thinking that let me go that route. And then all of a sudden, that failed, let me go that route from leadership and it failed. But it did have a lot of, you know, we call it revenue streams in this business throughout the years, you know, we're now 23 and a half years old. So the our company, so there has many, many different failures. And I like to call them out and appreciate you mentioned failures, because we're living in a culture that a lot of people use, try to change it to learning experiences, which is good in concept, but it's not good in verbiage, because people need to know that it failed. And it's okay. versus using Yes, after it failed, use the learning moment in order to see what you could do different next time. So I appreciate phrasing it in the way of the failure. But I do want to mention something which is also very important. And it's something that's very passionate to myself. And I've shared this very many times with entrepreneurs, which is you have to differentiate between a venture failing, and you as a failure. A lot of entrepreneurs, the second their venture fails, they see themselves as a failure. And that's where the whole their whole potential goes. You need to be able to separate a venture that failed from an human element and you as a failure. And you have to be able to say, what did I learn from that? And then I'm not a failure, my venture failed? How could I revive something? And what can I do differently in the next time around?

Dave Crenshaw: 8:40

That's so important. It really is. Because one of the useful principles. In fact, I have it up on my wall, I have a little thing that says, I am just a scientist experimenting, I should not be surprised when my experiments fail, just pleasantly surprised when they succeed. Beautiful. Now a real scientists will say well, experiments actually never failed. But the point is, right, that we're experimenting, we're trying things out, and sometimes it doesn't work. And that's okay. We learn from it. We had a hypothesis, that's probably the better word. We had a hypothesis, we tested it, it doesn't work. What did we learn for it? And now we do it again. And I think having that sort of detached approach to business is very useful and keeps us with a healthy perspective.

Unknown: 9:29

I will just add a couple of points on that because I think it's a such an important point for entrepreneurs to learn is two things. One is that what ends up happening is if you could think this way, this is the way that we just discussed sometimes allows you to pause or let go of a venture that's failing. Because you're not emotional. You could disconnect emotionally. If that ventures failing and that means you are failing. You will do whatever it takes. Think about your You're swimming in the ocean and you need to get to the other side, you'll do whatever it takes to get to the other side of the ocean. But sometimes, the best thing you could do is let go of that venture. So you need to have that mindset to be able to separate the two in order to make proper decisions. On the flip side, I want to add just one more point, which is, let's not confuse a venture that failed, because you were reckless, versus a failure that happened because you did everything right. It just wasn't meant to be. It's just the market is not there, 100% or something like that. And we need to be a little bit more specific to say entrepreneurship is not recklessness, there is a distance of somebody that's reckless, versus somebody who's saying, I'm using this as an excuse. I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm allowed to make mistakes, I'm allowed to be reckless, I'm allowed to take somebody else's money and build a venture, which I didn't know, only had 50% chance of succeeding in the first place. But if you've done the basic research, and you've done the basic fundamentals of the business, and ends up not bringing in the money that you expected, or the market is not going where you want it to go, the venture failed. Now, what could you learn from it? And will maybe the second time around, you're going to be able to make a big, early

Dave Crenshaw: 12:16

on? Did you have a moment where you were reckless? Or did you see someone else be reckless, where you learned this lesson,

Unknown: 12:25

I would say that I was pretty naive. When I started my business in terms of understanding just even the legalities of business, I hired my first employee, I didn't know there's something called as workers comp. I remember, it was my thrill of my life, when I was able to offer a job for a family member, hey, you're gonna be my first employee, you get to work a couple of hours a week. And I proudly wrote those payroll checks. And then found out when my accountant told me the end of the year, wait a minute, you don't have workers comp, what's going on over here, you're writing payroll checks, and I made workers come only to get slapped with a six and a half$1,000 Fine. For all these days that I didn't have. That was a learning moment that I learned. And then I started growing my company and I wasn't equipped on a leadership skills. People think because you're an entrepreneur, you start a business, you automatically a leader, you're not. It's a different mindset. I remember those days when I went out and seek out help to understand now I have five team members, I have to lead them. They're expecting and I have to know when to delegate and have to know when to start giving people autonomy and step back. And that was a huge pivotal moment in my career where I started seeing, okay, I need to shape up, I need to learn those trades in that process.

Dave Crenshaw: 13:41

How long did it take you to learn that, that you needed to gain those skills?

Unknown: 13:46

So I think I was blessed that the my curiosity kicked in pretty early. So before I saw a huge Fallout happening from my lack of leadership skills, I remember going to an event, it was the first time I went to a three day event where I wanted to learn leadership. And at that event, it was day number two, at the end of the day, and they went around the room asking everybody for like the aha moment. And when it came to me, and they said they I said, coming in, I was all frustrated, my team has failed and everything that's going wrong. Walking out today, I'm totally at blame of everything that's happening in my company. And I remember the moderator asking me like many Why are you so harsh on yourself? I said, because what I learned the last few days is that if my people have the skills, and I'm just not giving it to them, or I'm not telling them what to do, it's my fault. If My people are ready for the job, why they're in your boats, why their bus, just let them go. So everything starts and stops by the leader. So that pivotal moment in my career said, all I'm going to do the next couple of years is focused on what a leader needs to focus on, which is strategy, there is a distance of working on the business versus in the business. And as soon as I started doing that, I started saying, Okay, I have to work on the business, what does it really mean? And I started looking at my plate that 8020 Like, beginning it was 80% in the business 20% on the business. And then I said, I want to get to a level where 80% is on the business and 20% is in the business. And I could say 20 years later, that's where my focus is 20% in the business 80% on the business, I

Dave Crenshaw: 15:28

just want to call something out here. Sure. Many give you a compliment with this. So I have a course about how to be coachable on LinkedIn learning. And one of the things that I talk about is we have to have both humility and confidence. The two are not mutually exclusive. And you are a good example of that. The humility is that you recognize the need to change. And in that story, I'm hearing someone who recognized Wait, I need to get better. But the confidence side of it is the confidence that I can get better. The call confidence that I can improve, I can learn the skills, I can go to the training, and then I will get better. And that's a powerful combination that I think many people don't grasp. And so I appreciate you illustrating that for us. Thank

Unknown: 16:14

you for that, you know, there's a quote from Dave Ramsey, which is a business will never outgrow its leader. If you don't work on your own personal development, how could you actually be at the stage where the company needs to be? And I always tell my team, so we're in the branding and marketing agency. So which means we help businesses create their next new brand journey. And I always tell my team, if you're not working your own personal development, how can you help grow other people's businesses. So if you have that mindset to where they could achieve what they could achieve, you got to start with yourself. First. You

Dave Crenshaw: 16:48

are a student, you are continually learning. And that's something that I've seen about you. And we're hearing that in your story. I want to step aside from the business for just a moment and talk about family. Because I know family is very important to you, you have a large family. So I'm assuming you started your family fairly young. Is that accurate? Yep,

Unknown: 17:10

I was 20 and a half when they got married.

Dave Crenshaw: 17:14

And so you were already running the business. So it wasn't running

Unknown: 17:18

the business itself. Like when I said before I was I had my business cards when it was young. It wasn't like an official business. It was more like a hobby. So I wasn't running a business. What were you doing for work prior to that I wasn't in school.

Dave Crenshaw: 17:30

So you went right from school into entrepreneurship? Correct? How did that work? In the beginning? Did it work? Well, that balancing of your marriage with the business? Or what didn't work? Well? And what did you need to improve with that balance?

Unknown: 17:47

So there's four pillars in your life, you know, everybody has their structure, the way I teach it, and the way I have been able to share it with hundreds of people is, it's like a car. Yeah, four tires, nobody could use one tire and say, You know what, I'm going to only take care of one of my tires. No, it's ultimately you're going to crash. So the four tires have lived, we have the spiritual side, we have the family side, we have the health, and we have the financials. And early on, I decided that that in order to have a healthy to be unhealthy entrepreneur, you shouldn't burn out. And you should be able to be passionate and have your moments in life, you have to have your focus on all those four pillars of life. So that's how we started. Typically, there are

Dave Crenshaw: 18:32

milestones that businesses reach, where it starts to mature. So in the beginning, there's a business that's highly dependent on the entrepreneur fact that maybe there's no employee, then you get one employee and it starts to grow. Then we get into like the area of five to 10 employees where there's much more delegation occurring. How did you get to that point where you had five or 10 employees and start to let go of things as the leader. So

Unknown: 19:04

we opened this company with have a partner. And we had a first for a conversation about bringing in a new employee. And then I said, what part of the process do I really like? Is it the art part of it? Is it the creative part of it, and then I said know, what I really like is the outcome the creative is doing for that other company. So I was less connected to actual being the designer. And this is my piece of art than rather the impact we could do from the work we do. So I immediately said, like, I want to set myself up bringing in a team of creatives. And I want to I don't have to be the smartest person in the room, I want to have creatives that are even more creative than I am better problem solvers than I am. But I want to stay the business person running our own company. And then sometimes when the clients have challenges and stuff like that, and they want us, they want me to be involved in overcoming that.

Dave Crenshaw: 20:01

Another milestone that a lot of small businesses need to clear is the sales aspect of things. It's very common that the business owner is the one making sales early on. And one of the turning points is when the business owner no longer has to make sales but brings in sales reps and executives to start making the sales on their behalf. Was that also a milestone that you needed to declare in your business?

Unknown: 20:29

So we're in the creative space, which means we need to really understand the client. We need to understand where the client is now, where they want to go. And is there any of our services that we will be the driving vehicle to get them to they're from point A to point B? I probably delegate it sales in beginning a little too early in the process. And what ended up happening, who did I delegate it to, to a hungry fresh salesperson? I found out the hard way sometimes you know in the earlier Part of our career of our business where we maybe oversold something that maybe the client didn't need that rebrand at the time. Or they could have done marketing on a way cheaper scale. And all of a sudden, we had upset customers in the beginning. So finding the balance, and up until today, I think what we have for the last couple of years is working pretty good, which is we have a dedicated business development team. But they know when they need to bring me in to sign off on the proposal or sign off on the challenge the client is facing to say, we're very comfortable undertaking that. I accomplish two things with that process. One is that if there's anything from my experience that I could fill out or see a red flag, or whatever it is, I could bring it to the table. B, I introduced myself as a CEO speaking to the client, so in any time in the relationship with the client feels that they need to bring something to my attention. They've spoken to me at least once so they know my contact info they already spoken to. So I could be there. As I mentioned before I work 80% on the business 20% in the business, the 20% in the business will be if a client would reach out for one time who for whatever reason, I'll take that call and speak to the client. And then it's not like I'm that much detached that you can speak to me.

Dave Crenshaw: 22:19

That gets me to another question. You mentioned, you're in a creative business. And yet you believe in systems. And one thing that I've seen a lot with creative businesses is people say, we can't systemize create creativity. You can't systemize art. Clearly you've unlocked the secret to that. So how do you reconcile creativity with systemization?

Unknown: 22:45

Welcome to my world.

Dave Crenshaw: 22:48

Okay, so you're still working on that? Exactly. Okay. However,

Unknown: 22:52

you could systemize the process, you cannot systemize the creativity. I'll give you an example. If we have a template that a brand development needs to look like this, these are the steps, we now systemize the process of what elements needs to be included in the document. So we're not up to if we hired our creative, a new creative designer, then I go I'm gonna on their own shopping spree. And they started to say, I like to have 100 Different markups, we'll do a mock up how it looks on a cup and a mock up how it looks on a bottle. So now they're spending an extra 1520 hours on on that process, the client doesn't need it didn't ask for it, it's not needed. Unnecessary. The same time, it isn't the creative process. So if you do a system that works 60% of the time, your hero, people use this as an excuse, and therefore they don't do any type of systems. Now 100% of the time, they're doing everything custom create a system deliberately, that could only work 60% of the time, you'll find out that 60% of your projects, have systems and processes, and you only have to deal with the 30 to 40% that's left out that some of it will fall into that same system. And some of it will be outside of the system, which is perfectly fine. We're not robots.

Dave Crenshaw: 24:04

I love that the 60% that you want to systemize. And the interesting thing that you're saying I want to call out is that you're leaving space, by using system for flexible creativity. But without that space that you're creating that that 40% Especially that that 20 That's completely unpredictable, you're creating a boundary and saying, look, it's going to happen, we're going to allow that have to happen. I love that approach. It's really smart.

Unknown: 24:32

And I'll just add in again, something that we keep on perfecting constantly is from a business model perspective also, like a lot of creatives are busy, how much we what's our hourly rate, what's our breakeven point, you don't realize how many hours go for go to waste. So we have perfected throughout the years a process that our business model has to work, when we're 75% capacity. If we could not account for 25% of our hours, who knows where it went, we still need to be profitable. Because if not, we're stretching ourselves so thin, that if something goes off, there goes a whole profit. You speak to entrepreneurs, you speak to business owners, and you ask them some very simple financial questions. You know, ask them, like, who knows this information like whatever, like who knows your cash flow projection? Who knows your you know, your operating costs, whatever it is, they right away, say, Well, I have a bookkeeper or have an accountant or I have a CFO or have a controller or whatever, depending on the size of the company. And that's not a good answer. You know why? Because there are certain set of metrics. Not a single business owner should be exempt of knowing in their sleep. If it's my company, I need to know how well are we forecasted? You know, or what's your hourly rate and how what's our capacity look like? You need to know that you'll know if your company is in the right place or not. And I think every business owners has to have a minimum of three min Trix that they know where to get in, if they get it, they know what the business what it means for their business. Okay,

Dave Crenshaw: 26:08

I want to shift gears for a moment. And if you're comfortable with it, talk about your faith and your culture. Because as I've started to get to know you, and I've, I've actually worked with a couple of Orthodox business owners, there are unique things that you navigate. As a business owner, could you share with us a few of those things that are a unique way of doing business when you practice Orthodox Judaism?

Unknown: 26:37

First of all, we have a lot of limitations as far as what we can or we cannot do. First of all, from a timing perspective, we're recording this early April, we're going into the Passover holiday, we're going to be off limits for close to a week. And that means like the week like this week, were scrambling to do everything we need to do in order to get preparation for the holiday. And guess what, even if you tell me like, you know, you can make a million dollars, where faith comes in to say, You know what, our faith is more much more worth much more than that. So we're not going to deviate from our belief system in our faith, in order to say, you know, I'll make a quick buck here. So those are the things that go as simple as from sunset on Friday. So the evening of Saturday night, we don't use any technology, zero, it's strictly family sitting at a family. And if I need to, if I want to share a book, I'm reading it from my phone, I'm reading a physical book to my kids, and stuff like that. So that's just a way of life, stuff like that, that are just cut out certain times of the week or a year, then there is also a lot of strict rules about sometimes in the business world, you can be called a savvy business owner, that you got some, you know, you learned something into a business deal that maybe you shouldn't have done or something like that. That's not allowed through our culture and stuff like that. So there's a lot of strict rules as far as how we operate and how we should operate in order to, to live by the means and be as an example, that brings, you know, when somebody deals with you to feel you know, what I appreciate, actually, this dealing with, with an Orthodox Jew, we believe that we're going to get rewarded for being able to showcase how dealing with Orthodox Jew is, you know, in a way to actually multiply that within community or even outside of our community. And then there's a lot of nuances as far as thinking about just as simple as kosher foods. You know, when I go to an event, I just was invited to a very high end mastermind. As soon as it got the dates, the dates, it's on a weekend. And I said, unfortunately, I cannot attend. So that was a bummer. But I'm doing it for the right reasons. Then we have something which is our belief system. And we believe very strongly, that the outcome of our action is all up to God, the one above,

Dave Crenshaw: 29:10

thank you for sharing that many. And, you know, I come from a standpoint of I'm looking for universal principles of success, things that anyone can apply no matter what their job is, and really, no matter what their belief is. And I think that there are, there's a lot of truth in having the belief that if I follow principles, if I follow the things that I believe I'll be rewarded for it in the future, and the principle of sacrifice, too, you've talked a lot about sacrifice. To me sacrifice is the idea of giving up something good for something better. Exactly. And I think that no matter what your faith is just like the concept of the Sabbath, whenever you do that, and even if you're not doing it as a matter of religious faith, but saying, You know what, there is a day in my week, I will not touch. And I'm going to protect that to spend time with my family to protect the things that I believe in. And I have seen time and time again, that when someone practices that principle of having sacred time, in their week, so to speak, that they're rewarded for that, in many ways.

Unknown: 30:13

I'll just add one more point, which is definitely a universal, something that anybody could adopt, which is part of our culture is gratitude. We pray three times a day. And for me personally, every single morning, if I could start with gratitude in, I actually take my five minutes and think what specifically happened the last 24 hours. And there's always something in your life that you could actually point to to say, You know what, yesterday was the first time this happened, or yesterday was the first time I got that, and so on and so forth. If you start learning with that, what ends up happening you become your happier person. There's a quote I put out on LinkedIn a couple of days ago and actually within our community went actually viral, which is, success doesn't cause happiness, happiness causes Success, beautiful. If you could be yourself, and you could focus on gratitude of what you're able to accomplish, you're going to become happier, you're gonna become happy, you're gonna become unstoppable. Everything is in your reach.

Dave Crenshaw: 31:15

I had a leader who once said that gratitude is a way of having greater abundance without getting anything new, beautiful, you have everything that you still have. And yet you feel like you have more abundance simply by expressing gratitude for what you've received. Yep. We could talk forever. Many I know your time is valuable. So unfortunately, I'm gonna have to start wrapping things up. But I do want to ask you the question, what do you see five years from now? What is the future going to hold for you?

Unknown: 31:42

I spend a lot of time thinking of my legacy project, in terms of outside of business, I've been able to make a huge dent with my business. And I always say that, as much as P Tex is, you know, been around for a long time, we've been servicing hundreds of companies, we actually rebranded recently. But what I've able to do is meet a lot of people in my network, people like you and others that have been able to grow my own network. And I'm able to make a dent my personal mission statement, which is on my wall in my office, which is I believe every person should be given the opportunity to succeed in life. And if you have something that you could share, it's your duty and your calling to share it. And that could be a business owner, they're stuck. There could be a teenager that is the brink of thinking, where should I go right or left? That could be an entrepreneur, that maybe they they're stuck in a cubicle, and they know they could do more, and they just don't have the guidance. So my goal now is how could I educate the masses in a way that I can make a huge impact. I want to educate the masses, but I want to make an impact one person at a time. But at the end of the day, you know, you mentioned in the beginning that you know about my podcast, let's talk business. That's the reason why I have the podcast, it takes a lot of you know, that takes a lot of a lot of effort, a lot of time and money to do a podcast. However, every time I post an episode, in, I'll get that one email, I don't need to, I want to email. Sometimes the voices like me and Neil, those are the voices that people connect to. And then they take action, my job is not to solve everybody's problem. My job is anybody, everybody reaches out. Either I could solve it, or at least give them a referral to say, Go that person in that direction. And then make sure that person is not lost in this big world wide web.

Dave Crenshaw: 33:29

Yeah, well, and you're doing that right now you're sharing your perspective with the people who follow me. I think that's one of the reasons why we get along so well, I have a another thing on my wall. That's sort of my vision for every day, which is change one person's life today. If you if I can do that with one person every day, that's 365 people a year. That's a big impact. And that's what it's meaningful to me. Yeah,

Unknown: 33:53

it's beautiful. You know, that that event that you spoke at LTB. A year and a half later, somebody sent me a picture of that notebook that we gave away at that event. And he said he sent me a picture and says, If you want to hear the story, call me. I call the person he says I want to tell you a story. I had a business was growing business. And my my business was was failed miserably. A few weeks later, I saw an event happening in the community. I decided to go I didn't even know why. Because I don't have a business. I was sitting there and I had this black book. And every person every speaker that spoke, it came back to me like I'm not I'm not a failure. I could still do this. I have to just regroup, refocus and stuff like that. Now, he said that this book now it's a year later, we have regrouped. It's a multimillion dollar company today, I could say proudly at the company's probably 40 $50 million company. He says this became like the icon in my office. Everybody knows my black book. It's what that pivotal moment that happened while I was sitting in the crowd. I was able to listen to the speakers take notes and say, Yes, I could do it. If those people could say Believe in me, they say I could do it if I'm focused. Let me do it again. So those are moments that sometimes we have speakers and podcast hosts, and so on and so forth. We sometimes don't don't get those stories, but those stories happen every single day. And what I want to say is, maybe people listening to this say, Okay, I don't have a stage, I don't have a megaphone, I'm not speaking the podcast, you could do it in your community, you could do it to your friend, your family member you could do to your coworker, if you see a co worker coming to work, and they're not in the best mood and have the same mood that they were yesterday, go and go over to say something is not right. Is there anything there I could support you and all of a sudden comes out of gushing person with the whole story and then all of a sudden, because that person got it out. That person turned around and all of a sudden a year later that person is on a totally different perspective. So nobody's exempt or being able to make the world a better place. Now

Dave Crenshaw: 36:01

think Thank you for sharing that man who that's, that's beautiful. That was fantastic. All right. So here's the point in every interview that I do, where I like to summarize some actions, my perspective, as a teacher, as a coach is that it's great to learn things. It's great to be inspired. But what are you going to do? What's the action you're going to take? And I know you appreciate that because you're a man of action as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to summarize three actions that I gained from your story. And then I'd like you to wrap up with one action of your own. And we're looking for something that someone can do today, this week, so they can make your success story, a part of their success story. Sounds good. I'm ready. The first one from the beginning of your story was that concept of separating yourself from being a failure versus having a failure with the venture. So if you're someone listening to this, and perhaps you had a recent failure, I'd invite you to think about it and reframe it as that was an experiment that didn't work. That was a hypothesis that I tested. That was not accurate. But it doesn't mean that I am a failure. I'm going to learn from it. And I'm going to do more in the future. And I think anyone can relate to that concept. Another one that stood out to me was the idea of considering of the work that you do, what part do you really like, many shared that and realize that in his business, it was the growing the business aspect of things that he enjoyed the most. And he started to focus more on that. Even if you're not an entrepreneur, you can consider the work that you do and say, what do I really like? How can I do more of that? How can I maximize my career so that I'm doing more and more of the things that I like, and less of the things you don't like, doesn't mean you can get rid of all of those things. But you can do things to minimize it. And then the last one, is to ask what's a principle that you believe in what's one principle that you believe in, that you're going to stand behind, no matter what, you're not going to work on a certain day of the week, you're not going to participate in a certain type of business activity, whatever it is, pick one principle, and make a commitment to it and live that, and then maybe later on, you do it with another one. And that grounding of a true principle that you count on will give you strength and give you the ability to be more successful in your career. Those are mine many, what's one that you would add to this beautiful,

Unknown: 38:33

so I'll split up the one. Because if you're a business owner, I would say that if you could work on your leadership, that will be something you could start tomorrow. Now, if you're a great leader, or you're just starting out as a leader, a great way of doing it is maybe you have one or two people in the team that you trust, and say, you have a meeting with them and say, I want to work on my leadership, what will be one or two things you would want to see different from me in the next six to eight months, or whatever it is. And then they will give, they'll be honest with you. And they might say communication, they might say, you know, focus, they might say, giving compliments, whatever it is. And that becomes your to do list so to speak, because you got it from your team, and they're there to support you in your your mission. If you're a solo entrepreneur, I would say where it could focus is, is the focus I mentioned before the four tires, how do you make sure that you have goals for your business, and you also have separate goals for your family, financial and health. Because it's very easy to blur the line and find yourself that you've put yourself put in so much effort and one one of those tires, finding out that you missed out on living your real life.

Dave Crenshaw: 39:46

Thank you so much great actions that someone can take and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. I know there will be many people, many who have heard this and they say, Man, I want to get to know him more. I want to follow him. What's the best place for them to go to continue learning from you. I'm

Unknown: 40:05

pretty active on LinkedIn. Many with an E. So it's pretty easy to because it's not going to be a lot of menace. So it's many as me and YHO FFM n so I'm pretty active there. And actually yes, I would love love to hear if you listen to this episode, drop me a DM and our company website is P TECH scoop.com. That's P Tex gr o u p.com. And of course you can listen to my podcasts which is the let's talk business podcast, which is you could find it anywhere podcasts are being found. Yeah,

Dave Crenshaw: 40:35

immediately. Go there and subscribe to let's talk business with many, many thank you so much for your time. Thank you for being here. It's wonderful to reconnect with you, my friend. It's my pleasure. Thank you. And thank you everyone for listening. Remember, it's not so much about what you heard, or what you felt. It's about what you do. So please do one action this week. And you'll make many success story a part of your six This story. Thank you for listening.

Darci Crenshaw: 41:06

You've been listening to the Dave Crenshaw success show hosted by my dad, Dave Crenshaw, and produced by invaluable incorporated research and assistant production by Victoria Bidez Sound Editing by Nick rights. Voiceover by me Darci Crenshaw, and the music is by Ryan Brady via pond five licensing. Please subscribe to the Dave Crenshaw success show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to get your podcasts. If you have a suggestion for someone my dad might like to interview, please send it to guests at Dave crenshaw.com. And please don't forget to leave us a five star review. See you next time.