What Season Are You In? - Ep. 46

So much of a founder's frustration stems from a fundamental misalignment: expecting a harvest when you're in a planting season. In this debrief, Jarome unpacks the critical system of "seasons" in business and life, revealing that every period has a distinct purpose—be it building, learning, healing, or harvesting. He argues that the greatest mistake leaders make is using a single, static scorecard (like revenue) to measure success across wildly different contexts. This episode provides a new operational mindset for identifying the season you’re truly in, helping you trade unnecessary suffering for intentional action and long-term resilience.

✨ Why This Matters for You

This conversation provides a powerful framework for navigating the inevitable volatility of building a business and a life:

• Reframe "hard" quarters as "capacity-building" seasons, transforming your perspective on setbacks and challenges.
• Learn to diagnose what a season is asking of you, allowing you to respond with the right leadership style—whether that’s patience, discipline, or delegation.
• Escape the tyranny of the single metric (like revenue) and develop a dynamic scorecard that accurately reflects the progress you're making.

📝 Key Takeaways

• The Mismatched Scorecard: The most common source of frustration is judging a "building" or "healing" season by a "harvesting" season's metrics. Success in a building phase is measured by systems created, not revenue generated; success in a healing phase is measured by peace, not productivity.
• Capacity Over Calamity: Difficult seasons are not failures; they are opportunities to build capacity. The pressure of these moments is what shapes your leadership, sharpens decision-making, and forges the discipline required for the next stage of growth.
• Leadership is Seasonal Diagnosis: An effective leader’s core responsibility is to correctly identify the current season and understand its requirements. The goal isn't to force every season to look the same but to respond honestly to what is being asked of you and your team.

🚀 Put It Into Action

• Diagnose Your Current Season: Step back and honestly assess the last 90 days. Are you planting new seeds, building foundational systems, harvesting results, or in a necessary period of recovery and pruning? Name the season without judgment.
• Define This Season's Scorecard: Based on your diagnosis, what is the single most important metric for success right now? Write it down. It might be "systems documented," "clarity on Q4 strategy," or "personal energy restored."
• Align & Prune Your Actions: Review your calendar and priorities for the upcoming week. Do they serve the true goal of your current season? Aggressively say "no" to or delegate tasks that align with a past or future season, not the one you are in today.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the No Trade Secrets podcast so you never miss an episode.
• Connect with Jarome on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jarome-mckenzie-778177187
• Share this episode with a fellow founder who is building with intention.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hey and welcome back to another No Trade Secrets debrief session. These are episodes where I just talk about some of the lessons and discoveries and thoughts and ideas that have come to me over recent conversations or just inside of my day-to-day life. So today I want to talk about something I've been thinking about personally a lot recently, and that is the importance of knowing what season you're actually in. Because I think a lot of frustration in business and in life comes from expecting life to give you harvest when you're still planning. Expecting that you're going to have clarity when you're being stretched, or expecting things to be easy and just to flow and coast when the season that you're actually in is there to build capacity. So every season has a purpose. Some seasons are for building, some are for learning, some are for pruning or cutting, some are for recovering, and then some are for harvesting or cashing in. The mistake that I think a lot of entrepreneurs make, myself included, is assuming that every season should feel productive in the same way. So I see that founders will often mislabel hard season as bad seasons. And I think giving it that label is to the detriment of the lesson you're supposed to be learning. So in my the way I try to look at those, you know, quote unquote bad seasons is as a time where I'm building capacity or learning new lessons, or the pressure of whatever I'm facing might be shaping my leadership, my patience, discipline, my emotional regulation might be fine-tuning my decision making. And so because you're gonna always be in a different season, and they're not always gonna be the same, you can't use the same scorecard to measure season to season. One extreme uh around uh where I live is gonna be snowplow businesses. They're not unless they have different streams of revenue, a snowplow business is not getting any business in the summer months and the spring and fall months. They're just getting business during winter or when it snows. So the same works for the seasons of your business as a business in in general, not just for when you're generating revenue. But it kind of works the same way. In a growth season, the scorecard you might be looking at might be through the lens of revenue. In a building season, it might be systems. Maybe it's a family season, and how you need to score success is going to be through something like presence. Or you could be in some sort of refining season, which it might be just gaining clarity on something that you haven't had clarity on. Or you could be in some kind of healing or reset season where what you're keeping score and how you grade it might just be peace or how much you get to recharge in your energy. And so when you have the wrong expectations, that creates unnecessary suffering. Because if you expect every single month to be a breakthrough month, you will resent the months that are actually meant to build a foundation. If you're expecting constant momentum, then you're probably gonna misread necessary stillness as failing. Now, I'm gonna stand with everyone and say that yeah, it would be great if every single month and every season, all the right things from each type of season that you can go through are growing. But it's just not the case. And so, as a leader, I think leadership is knowing what the season requires. Sometimes it's going to require patience or discipline or delegation. Sometimes it's going to be saying no. Sometimes it's just getting through it and not quitting. And so, as an entrepreneur, if you can look at it through the lens of the goal is not to force every season to look the same, but instead to understand what season you're in and what is what is it asking of you, and respond honestly and trust that the work being done now may not reveal itself until later, then you're gonna have a lot less time spent in misery or thinking that because revenue didn't increase for a particular month, that then everything else is washed away, and you call that month of failure. Because in my business, we have had some months or quarters where we didn't exceed or hit our revenue goals that we had, which didn't at all factor into the equation of or the the outcome of me looking at that quarter as a huge success because of all of the things that we did grow in. And sometimes those were not seasons that I was able to identify until closer to the end of the season. But being able to identify it and change your perspective is going to give you a lot more peace and a lot less suffering.