Episode #16: The Truth About Burn-Out, and How to Fix It.

Ever wondered how a fledgling business can skyrocket from a steady stream of leads to a roaring river? Well, buckle up, because that's exactly what we're unpacking today. Amidst apologies for less-than-stellar audio, this episode is a treasure trove of strategic insights that took us from 100K to a potential million a month in revenue. I let you in on the game-changing partnership that's catapulting our growth and dissect the bedrock of our success: nurturing relationships and partnerships. Drawing from my post-military journey and lessons learned while working at a premier water treatment company, I showcase how laying the groundwork through value creation and connection investment can set the stage for massive opportunities.

Hold tight as we then pivot to the intriguing concept of hedonic adaptation and its subtle yet profound impact on your hustle. It's a deep dive into the psychological patterns that can make even the most thrilling achievements feel ordinary over time and how this plays out in our professional endeavors. I share why pushing past the monotony is a crucial step in the route to remarkable success. Plus, with our company on the brink of substantial growth and scouting for new talent, I'm throwing open the doors for you to shape our future content. Your thoughts, your topics – let's make this journey together. So, plug in and prepare for an episode that might just redefine the path of your business trajectory.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:38

everybody. So quick disclaimer had a bit of a technical issue and turns out this episode did not record on my good microphone. Luckily the audio did get picked up by my computer. So a lot of good content in this episode. So I'm still gonna run it. But again I apologize for the shitty quality of the audio. I will make sure I double check that better next time. But enjoy, I'll do another episode of the harmony of hustle.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Definitely very excited to talk to you guys today. This is a pretty exciting time, especially for the business. I know I've been trying to put out an episode every single week but unfortunately, when the business has exponential growth opportunities, you gotta go and take care of it. So that's really what I've been doing the last two and a half weeks. We secured a massive, massive partnership. I don't want to give out the name, but I will tell you. It is a major, major big box retail store. I will tell you, if you own a home and you've ever went to a depot, to go ahead and get materials for that home. That was the partnership that we were able to lock down. So, with that being said, we essentially are going to be quadrupling our lead flow over night. We are going to be running in about six stores, with the potential of 10 along the way. When you do this the right way with these big box partners, you go from a 100K a month to 150K a month business to being a half a million dollar to a million dollar business a month, literally overnight. One store alone can feed you enough leads for the rest of your life. Even just having one store alone can feed you guys, because you have to imagine the amount of foot traffic that these stores get is immense. And nice thing is, when you get credentialed with these stores, you're actually able to go into the stores and you can get leads in the stores just by walking around, talking to people, giving them water tests, doing demos on the weekends. So having these partnerships is massive. With us being not even a full calendar year in business yet, I think this is a massive achievement.

Speaker 1: 2:55

And for those of you listening that might be in the water treatment industry or just in small business in general, I want to just talk about how this is possible and how you guys can utilize this in your own businesses to get these types of deals done. And I'll be honest, the trick behind it isn't the most sexiest thing in the world, but it's just having partnerships and relationships. So I'm very fortunate that when I got out of the military I went to go work for a massive, massive water treatment company before I ever went to go do anything else on my own, and what this allowed me to do was because I put all this effort in and really made sure I was the top producer in that business. I got really close with the higher executives in that company and, as it just so happens, one of those executives went off to do his own things, start his own business. They're in six states and they're doing multi, multi million dollars a month. I think they're probably a 60 to 70 million dollar year business probably more than that here soon.

Speaker 1: 3:55

And obviously this individual has been in the industry for over 23 years so long time. I think it's been 24 years, I'm not sure, but between 20 or 30 years. And what's crazy is, because of the relationship that we had, is he gave me these stores and he's put his name on the line and he's allowing me to build that own, my own relationship with these individuals and that has set my business up for success and I think a lot of times people just go into business too soon. Or they see people making a ton of money in an industry and they say, oh, I should start the company. I saw that a lot in solar back in the day when I was building up that solar company Everyone you know when they saw the amount of money that you could make being an owner there, they just all ran to start their own companies like it was the Gold Rush.

Speaker 1: 4:48

And the reality is it's just not that simple. So taking the time to actually produce and give to another business will set you up for long haul. It's kind of like any transaction. I think we overcomplitate this stuff a lot in life. But if you ever have friends that, or people in your circle that only ask stuff from you and they never give anything to the group, that's usually not someone that you would probably want to hang out with. In fact, I know for me I don't like hanging around people that are always just asking for stuff all the time. I only want to be around people who give value, and I know for a lot of us, the people that we follow the most are generally people that have given us a lot of value upfront, whether that is through education, free content, entertainment it doesn't matter. It's one of the reasons why Joe Rogan and Alex Formosi are so popular, or Gary Vee is so popular, is because they give out so much high quality, free content. Their value that they provide is massive, and so that builds inherent trust.

Speaker 1: 5:44

And when you're building your own business, it's the same way. You operate in a company help build that company. And if you have helped someone else build their business and made them a lot of money and then you decided to go do your own thing, listen, they will help you. They will try and make sure that you're also successful. If you're working for someone, that's legit. And the thing is, if you get the vibes of the person that you're working for, it isn't legit. They don't have these good core values that don't help them build their business in the first place. Right, only work for people that actually have shown you that they would want to have your best interest in heart as well, and you should really tell that while working with them. Right, even though you're building up someone else's company, during that process, they should also have your interest in heart. And by the way they treat you, the way they try to give you opportunities. The way they speak to you will be the key indicators on if that's somebody that will actually be able to help you long term and with any business that you go into it's really going to.

Speaker 1: 6:49

The success that you can get is really gonna depend on the quality of the relationships that you have. That's not to say you can't do it on your own. I mean there's plenty of people that have started from the beginning. But I definitely have seen, at least in my personal anecdotal experience, that by going in on your own we'll just put this on hard mode more than it already is right. You're adding another level of complexity into an endeavor that is already complex. And starting a business with so many roadblocks, with so many things that you have to get right, that's the easier you can make that, the better.

Speaker 1: 7:24

The other thing I've seen just in speaking to a lot of other companies is if you don't have a sales background, go into some sales. Go get at least a couple of years of, or at least one year of, sales skills under your belt, because I've seen a lot of owners and entrepreneurs who come into especially to work, trade, the space, but you know any home improvement or any sales environment and they really struggle to get leads and they really rely a lot on in-balance right, which means you have to pay for them most of the time, either through lists, home advisor, google, pay per click, all that stuff and when it's happening is when you start getting those leads in closer. Rates tend to be lower because your sales team isn't really up to snuff to close it, because in reality, you're not up to snuff to close it right. The one thing I can tell you that will grow your business the fastest is if you're able to close at above 80%. Okay, if you can become an 80% plus closer, or whatever industry that you're in, that's a good indicator that you can probably start a business with very limited skill sets and still succeed, because it's really hard for a business to go broke when there's money coming in all the time. And it's also going to dramatically increase your marketing budgets and your marketing delta. Because instead of you putting $100 out and then let's say you know, say you spend $100 on marketing and you get 10 appointments for it, which would be pretty good, and let's say you only close two of those appointments, you're going to be spending exponentially more money to acquire more customers, whereas if you spend that same $100, the same 10 customers, but you close eight of them, well now you've really increased the return on advertising spend right.

Speaker 1: 9:02

So being able to close at a high rate is important, but, being the business owner and wanting to scale, you can't be the only one selling. At a certain point. You're going to have to have a team do it for you and at the beginning you need to be able to lead them and you need to sell the vision number one. But you also have to teach them how to sell, because what ends up happening is, if you can't teach somebody how to sell effectively and you can't train them to become at least a 35 to 40% closer which is bad, by the way, that's our baseline Well then what's going to happen is they're not going to make any money and they're going to quit and they're going to be stuck in a business that has high churn and then you're just going to be banging your head against them and you're never able to make any progress.

Speaker 1: 9:45

It's significantly easier to hire someone on to do an operations role, because a lot of those skills are static skills, and when I say static skills, I mean if you know how to build a CRM and build operations and build SOPs and build all of the funnels and budgets and all that stuff. That's pretty much going to be the same industry wide. There's not a lot of stuff that's open to interpretation there, whereas with sales there's a lot of soft skills. There's a lot of different things that go into play, like, you've got to be able to lead, you've got to be able to inspire, you've got to get people bought into a vision and you've got to also be able to train them on communication, influence, all of these things that go into sales. And it's much more important that you're able to train that, because that's hard to keep in mind and, especially as a startup, odds are you won't have the leaf load to just hire someone on, unless you have a ton of money that has those skills where you pre-built into them. So you're going to have to basically build these salespeople from scratch. Now, the pros of that is that they'll be loyal to you because you'll give them a skill that's going to help them make money for the rest of their lives. So there's pros and cons, but if you don't have the sales skill yourself, you're in for some trouble.

Speaker 1: 10:58

And with that being said, I want to talk about something that we all have experienced or maybe your reps are experiencing this and that's burnout. And I wanted to mystify some things about burnout what burnout really is because I feel like a lot of times, companies and sales reps combined they always give up right at the point where they're about to hit critical mass. And the reality is, in business, especially as you get better at things, your feedback loops get a lot. You know you get a lot less positive feedback loops from doing the same action, so you definitely get into this feeling that you're not making any progress and that's actually not the truth. So there's this thing that I want to talk about and once I've learned about this, it really helped me kind of conceptualize what was going on in my own business and it's allowed me to stick into what I'm doing and continue my forward progress and not give up and not lose any momentum that I have.

Speaker 1: 11:54

And there's this thing called hedonic adoption. Ok, and every person in the world will experience this. It's just human nature. Essentially, what hedonic adoption is is humans get used to whatever their environment is, so perfect example of this is like, let's say, you go out and you buy your dream car, or you buy your dream house, or you buy like your PlayStation, or you buy something that you really wanted, ok. Or you achieve some, some, some big goal, like starting a business, perfect example. Well, what ends up happening is In your mind you really want this thing. So when you get it, you have this amazing feeling of euphoria and excitement. But after a while you just get used to it and it just becomes another thing. So that really nice car that you have been wanting for years, after you've driven it for a few months now, it's just a car again, just like the car you had before. When you buy that nice house, it's all exciting at first, but after a year or two it's just your house. Okay, so you had, you know. You start a business. It's super exciting to see your business owner and it's always exciting about the money that you make, but after a couple of years it's just like working a job again. Okay, this is a natural occurrence.

Speaker 1: 13:12

We just get used to things, and what I've also found is when you're brand new to things, you tend to have really fast growth because you're learning new skills all the time. You're getting positive feedback loops all the time, so every time you learn a new skill or you learn something. It's exciting because you feel this movement in business. You know you'll probably grow a lot faster in that first year because you're doing a lot more activities as far as meeting new people, making business connections, and you start connecting to all these different industries and different groups and different people that help you propel the business forward. And at the beginning that happens a lot quicker. But fortunately, as you go for bigger and loftier goals, the feedback loops that you get take longer and longer to basically return to you. So for business, at a certain point you will do the same task every single day and you won't get that same jolt of excitement. And that'll be due to one of two things. One, you get very good at what you're doing, so it becomes mundane. Or the thing that you're trying to accomplish is just going to take a lot more work, like doing a big box retail partnership. That takes a lot of time For sales.

Speaker 1: 14:44

I know for me when I was selling. I remember when I made my first $20,000 paycheck I thought that was a lot of money, but after a while I got a lot of money. You just keep going into homes and it keeps selling deals, it becomes another day in the office. I mean, I remember when every time I sold a deal I was on cloud nine. It was the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life. Now I could. It means nothing to me. If I close a $4,000 deal, if I close a $10,000 deal, if I close a $20,000 deal, if I close a $100,000 deal, they've lost all their lustre to me. They've all basically become the same thing, which sounds crazy, but it's true.

Speaker 1: 15:18

And when you're at the long-eared sales, the more that happens, and especially for salespeople that can become a problem because you can get to a point to where your skill level is so high. It literally just becomes so easy. And when it becomes that easy, it becomes super boring because then it just feels like a repetitive chore that you're just doing over and over and over again. And ironically, that's where you'll get the outsized returns Right. Usually at that point is when you're at 70 to 80% close rates and that's when you need to go harder. And that's unfortunately where most people stop, because they get bored and they feel like. They feel like having that excitement is something that they should be feeling. They feel like that dopamine hit, that serotonin rush is something that is part of the process of success. The reality is it's not.

Speaker 1: 16:05

And same thing for the business, right? You know, when you start the first time, you hit a 100k month. I know, for me that was massive. I was like holy crap, this is huge. But then you do it over and over and over again and it just becomes the standard. So you got to push for more. But when you push for more deals, that usually means you have to do more with marketing, do more with outreach, do more with process procedures, and it usually takes a longer feedback loop time to get back to you. Maybe that means more real estate agent connections. Maybe that means more big box retail stores, right, all these things and those always take time. Same thing for this. Right now, it's exciting because we're about to go into six stores. That is going to wear off, right, I've been five months from now. I guarantee you it's just going to become another thing that we do. You know this will probably put us between 400 to 500k a month and eventually that will become mundane again.

Speaker 1: 16:55

And the people that can really grow and really become something special, or the people that are able to recognize that while it's mundane. That is the moment that it's like, okay, I'm doing something right. I've seen you keep pushing at this level as hard as I can and eventually you will break through that little cycle of boredom or that cycle of monotony. And once you break through that cycle you'll basically go exponential again. And I always like to think of it like a stair-stepper of exponential growth plateau, exponential growth plateau, exponential growth plateau. And that plateau is honestly, in my mind, just the time it takes for the business to catch up and be able to decompress and handle it. And handle whatever lead gen source you got, whatever the expansion method was. So if you feel burnt out, that's really what's happening.

Speaker 1: 17:49

Okay, and the other thing that I've also noticed as well that ties into this, is when you start off with something new, a lot of the time your standards are a lot lower. So when you're learning a new skill or a new ability, you get better feedback loops, because you don't know what great is yet you don't know what a really good product is yet you don't know how it is to sell at a higher level, you don't know how it is to make an amazing piece of music. You don't know any of that stuff right. If you do landing pages, you don't know what an amazing landing page is yet. But as you get better, your standards go up as well, and so then, what used to get you excited, you now see as not adequate, and that's okay as well. And sometimes what's going to happen is your standards will raise far above your abilities.

Speaker 1: 18:37

That's something that has happened to me probably more often than not in life is I will learn a skill, I'll know what talk tier looks like, yet I won't yet be at the abilities to reach that level in music. I've been there more times that I can count in business. I've seen it numerous times, and that's okay. If you just keep pushing and you don't let that get you down, you'll be fine, and actually you'll probably get further than if you just quit. So when you're feeling burnt out, look at it through a different lens. The odds are you're not burnt out. The truth is, you're probably just in that moment of compression in the business, and if you can just keep plugging along, you're going to be prepared for extra natural growth. And if you're wondering well, how long does that last? Honestly, it could be five months, six months, one year, two years.

Speaker 1: 19:37

The best way that I have found to get through these times is if I feel like things are monotonous or boring and I do feel that quote unquote burnt out feeling I will not stop the actions. Instead, of, all I'll actually do is I'll try to double the actions. I'll say, okay, what am I doing now is boring me. Let me do twice as much, and that will build a callus in my brain. I'll actually improve my capacity of work. So I'll do that first. But then I'll also do is say, okay, I'm going to do something. Okay, let me go learn a new skill, or let me try to figure out something that I can do and prove the process I'm doing now. And what ends up happening is I will continue to get outpaced returns because I've doubled my inputs, because I recognize that what I'm doing at that moment is probably for the best. But then I'll learn some new skill that will trigger something in my brain to say, oh, if I could implement this, I could probably make this process better and get more leads from the same thing I'm doing, or get more closes from the thing I'm doing, or get more eyeballs on the thing I'm doing, and then that will reset my hedonic adaptation and I'll get that rush again.

Speaker 1: 20:41

One example of this was QR code marketing. I had been doing yard signs and Home Depot bottom drops and all these different wire testing things for a while mailers, doorknocks, all this stuff, door hangers, everything you think of and a buddy of mine was asking about QR code marketing for a different business and I was like, oh, I should look into that. And then, after talking to my COO, I quickly realized that we can implement QR marketing to track where all our leads come from with the yard signs and with these bottom drops and with these door hangers. And suddenly I was like, oh, this is data that can really help us grow, and it does. Now we get data in every single month and we can actually see where the hotspots are for this type of marketing, because sometimes different areas in your location may require different types of marketing and you might find that yard signs work better in certain areas than others. So what does that mean? Well then, instead of you just putting yard signs for every deal you sell, you can just flood that one area with a lot more yard signs, which means you'll get outpaced returns Right.

Speaker 1: 21:48

Everything that I do in the business, I always try to look for what can get me to grow exponentially, because I want to grow as fast as possible. I don't want to be stuck at the same level for any outpaced period of time. I've seen how fast these businesses can go. I've helped build these businesses quickly, even when I wasn't the owner, so I've seen what's possible. And the trick is you've got to find those little pieces of opportunity that will give you exponential returns, and having data is the best way to figure that out. I try not to base anything off of my own, just blind intuition. If I have no data and I need to make a decision, then that's what I'll rely on. But when it comes to marketing dollars or trying to figure out where to employ actual money, I really want to look at the data. So having QR codes that people can scan to book appointments that we can link to yard signs in what areas they're in, is a massive win, and you can apply that to any of the marketing that you're doing okay and really hone in on where are the hotbeds. And the nice thing is with business, things change quickly, so you may notice that a different area starts becoming hot. This will allow you to move into that area a lot quicker than your competition because you're tracking that data so religiously. So that's it for today, guys. I hope that was helpful.

Speaker 1: 23:12

I'm super excited. I'm going to be super busy for the next month. Like I said, this partnership is huge. This is going to 20X my business literally in the manner of a week. This is the biggest goal that I have been fighting for since I started the business. It's been my singular focus and it's going to be my singular focus moving forward for the next year, because if I can build this relationship and I can really become a leader in this little section of stuff that we got going on, by the end of the year we will be a 10 to 20 million dollar business easily, and then going into next year, which would tend to be our second or third or guess. This is our second year, so that would be our third year of business. Next year, I would be primed to expand into multiple states and not just expand as a small dealer. I can expand and really take over different markets. So I'm really excited.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Like I said, guys, I started this podcast at $0.00. And so far you've been able to watch me and document the journey from $0 to $100k a month and I want to keep growing that and I'm really excited to when, hopefully one day, I can show you what it's like to operate this business at a million a month. Thank you, guys for all the support. A lot of you guys have been giving me some feedback on things you'd like to hear on the show. So please, if you can do this on the show, let me know what you'd like to hear. I hope this is helpful. I do want to try and document more of this. I will try to get better, trying to just kind of touch base every week on what's been going on. But, like I said, I am in that I still consider myself in startup mode and I know a lot of you guys out there who are in a similar boat know what that's like.

Speaker 1: 24:48

And these next two weeks I'm going to be completely focused on building up the outstores. I got to basically build. We have these custom more testing kits, so I have to go in there, put them in the stores. I have to train their sales teams on how to sell these to customers, how to get people to want to book them, and then I got to get my sales guys trained on how to close those type of leads. And then we're actually getting ready to move people up there so we can just have my guys in these stores, you know, 24 seven just generating leads.

Speaker 1: 25:16

So very exciting stuff, and one of this is probably me. I'm going to have to hire more people, which is exciting as well. So you know, naturally the company is going to boom a little bit and as long as we can keep up with it and deliver a high standard, I think this will be the point where, the next time I come in, I can start showing you guys more impressive numbers than a hundred K a month like, start showing you 200, 300, 400, and eventually a million a month. So have a good one, guys. Let me know that I can ever do to provide value to you, and if there's a topic you want me to talk about, please just let me know and I will make sure I cover it for you. Have a blessed day, guys. Peace.