What 5 Years in Business Taught Us
This podcast episode is like none other. We are about to turn five years old and I mean not Aaron and I are turning five, but the company Bit Branding is turning five years old. So we sort of have a few questions for each other about our successes or failures, things that maybe keeps us up at night and we try and dive deep into what has made us successful, where we are today and what we think it's going to take for the next five years to have another podcast episode, just like this one and look back into. There's
a lot of different ideas and concepts and things that we talk about in this podcast. So if you're a business, whether you have hit five years or 10 or 15 or 20 or 30, it doesn't matter. This has a lot of good information that will surely help you have a very successful business. Check it out. This is The Marketing Natives providing actionable ways to grow, improve and succeed in your business and now your hosts, Christian and Aaron.
Hey ya'll. So this is going to be a fun episode. I have some questions actually for Christian, but this is more so celebrating five years in business for us. And then, also probably some good tips and nuggets and pieces of advice to help you get to five years or if you're already there, just also some tips and advice that you can use to grow your business and not probably make the same mistakes as us or catapult or kind of use ours as a segue to take your growth to another level. You probably find out a little bit more about us.
But this should be a fun episode, like I said, regardless. That's not like an intro. Huh? That's not like the intro. No, because you're going to introduce the podcast episode. I just wanted to give the groundwork. You're going to tell them what we're going to talk about, because for those who do not know, we do the intro afterwards.
So Christian is probably going to say, we talk about this, this and this. I want to give some context to say, 'This is what we're doing in the episode, this is what the episode's about'. And then, halfway through this be on the lookout for either me or Christian to tell you guys about a contest. So that's going to come out a little bit later, about halfway through the episode on how you guys can get some really cool stuff from our contest. I was going to say that an intro too. Were you? I guess not.
You can tell them that too or Jack can cut that part of it out. So I had a couple of questions but this is just, again, natural conversation. I just wanted to prompt it. So I came up with some of them. Probably not going to
read all of them. It's like a lot and I have zero questions prepared for you. That's fine.
This is just. Actually I have one. OK, go ahead. Go first.
What's the purchase of one hundred dollars or less? It was Audible. Audible? Yeah, usually. Oh, speaking. It's kind of a tangent but I sent you the podcast, and it's now called 'A Business Made Simple' or it used to be 'Story Brand' or the interview Matthew McConaughey for Greenlights. It's his new book as of at least right now, January 2021.
But I'm going through Greenlights. It is probably like, I can't put it number one, but probably like one and a half best books I've ever read. Well, you're reading Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey? Yes, it is phenomenal.
Interesting. Phenomenal. Isn't it just like a bunch of different stories? Yeah, it's a memoir. It's more than a memoir. It's like,
I don't know. Like life lessons? Yeah. Life lessons, business, everything. Failures, successes. So it's super interesting and also very, I think, applicable to our five year stuff. But what he did,
which was smart, actually made me think to start doing that, too, is just and we've kind of done it. It's just journaling every single day, I think for thirty five years he journal and that's the complication or the amount of like what made this a book I guess, and he reads it, which is just really nice; good to listen to. Yeah.
So he's been on a lot of different podcasts and shows recently promoting his book. What was the podcast that you sent me? That was the Story Brand podcast or Business Made Simple one. Was that the one? Yeah. I thought it was a different one. Donald Miller. But yeah, I listened to him and it's very interesting, wasn't that? I don't think it was that one that I listened to, it was a different one.
No. I've sent you several. So you probably got confused. But yes, definitely. Well, I feel like I was listening to a different podcast. And then, I saw that Matthew McConaughey was interviewed there and I think I listened to that one.
OK. Because in my mind, I can hear Donald Miller asking him questions. OK. It was someone else.
That's weird. I don't think. He didn't ask.
I don't think he asked the questions. Well, I don't know. I think he may have brought somebody else for it. Either way, so he talks a lot about lessons. He talked a lot about his life and what he called like bad things, turning into good things, which is like a 'green light'. It's amazing.
It's probably like I said, it's up there but it's also an emotional rollercoaster too. He goes deep into and he's from Texas. So shout out to all the Texas people, which is even cooler. But, yeah, it's amazing. So if any book you read this year, I would highly suggest that one. There's a lot of things to pull out from it.
So, here for Christian, just in general, what do you feel like is the biggest lesson that you personally, you, Christian, have learned in the last five years? Could be personal, could be for the business, I'm just thinking, like, what has the business taught you in the last five years? I mean, I think that what comes to mind immediately just jumped in my head, I was trying to think of something different, but I would say as if recently in the past two years, like time blocking our calendars. I think, like from the get go, that was something that people told us to do and we were just so new. We didn't have a lot to do and it just seemed counterintuitive or more work to time walk. But now with 30 different things going on, plus obviously personal life and all that, now I have two calendars, I have a work calendar and a personal calendar. I share both calendars with my fiance.
Nice. That's new as of recently. As recently and I mean it helps me stay focused and organized on what's coming up next because I think that my stress levels and anxiety will be through the roof if I would wake up every morning and not have any idea what my day would look like, just get to work and then try to figure out, OK, what's the most pressing thing right now? That's scary, just saying it out loud. So I think the biggest lesson is either managing time, time blocking and using calendars. I think I've told you the story in the past where I think I was in 10th grade back in Puerto Rico and one of our teachers, it was a history teacher. Out of, I don't know, out of the blue one day she decided to give us a time management lesson, like we didn't do any history that day. We just did time
management. She gave us this piece of paper that had a 7:00 a.m. and it would break out 7:00 am and 7:30, 8:00, all the way up to like 6 or 7 p.m., right? It was
very simple, just the time and then just a line through a sheet of paper. She was like, 'Just write down, you know, what you do in a day so you can time block and all this'. Right.
At the time I was like, this is the dumbest thing ever, like wake up, go to school, eat and I was like, this is so dumb. Back then I was like, this is so dumb. But now I mean, looking back at it's like, OK, she was like trying to put this idea, like the anchor to have it and put this idea, at least, you know, in our brains that you'll need to do this eventually, you know, and I think more so than ever, yeah, I used that every day. That's a good point. There's something I was thinking, I was like, how do you cope with it? Because as a business owner and even being in business for this long, there's so many changes. So I think there's regular business owners and then there's like marketing business owners, because regular business owners have changes in their industry as far as like what's going on in the baking industry, finance or whatever, or you know, if they're doctor: which is very slow, meaning like, there may be ten updates in the year. For us, there
could be ten updates in a day. So how do you cope with the stresses or changes of a constantly moving business? Not only for us, so I feel like there's a wheel. If you're able to see this video like a wheel going on in your left hand and you're trying to get control of the business side and then you have all the changes, do you have to keep up with everything else that allows you to work with the clients on the right hand side? So it's like two constant moving wheels that need to stay in sync the whole time. I mean, I think you agree with this, and we've talked about this since the beginning of our company, and I think it goes back to like education or continued education. From the very beginning of our business, we decided that we're going to spend some time educating ourselves and never stop learning because our industry required us to do that. Right? But
I think that also has sort of bled into other aspects of the business too, as not just us trying to educate ourselves in social media websites, branding and all the stuff, it's also educating ourselves and how to run our business, how to be a better leader, Right. How to be a better husband or how to be a better father. I think I mean, it started there, but it's sort of grown into more of an education; personal development. It's what really drives us to success. I was listening to a podcast by Hal Elrod where he was reading a book or going through a course from Jim Roanne.
Jim Roanne. That was one of the things that really stuck out to him, was that, 'Your success cannot exceed your personal development time' or something like that, you have to be constantly developing yourself, either, you know, knowledge, education, like whatever it may be in order to have the success that you want. You can't say that you want to be super successful, but then don't put in to work.
Right. Your habits on the line. It's the same thing as, I don't know who said it, so if you did say it, let me know, but there's basically like a quote out there, it's like, 'The night where you're at today is the exact sum of things that you were doing 90 days ago'. Meaning like if you're 10 pounds overweight, well, 90 days ago, you're probably not eating right. If you're in a fight with your wife or fiance constantly.
Well, 90 days ago, there's probably a little blip on the radar that you ignored and then just pushed down the road. If your business isn't going well right now, 90 days ago, something. So it's like you're a sum of your experiences to this point, which is kind of defeating for that purpose of things aren't going well, but also super exciting because it's like today could be the next in 90 days, could be the complete change. So if it's like your business isn't going well right now, whatever, in 90 days, you could literally flip it on its head. I know people who went from zero the whole day and nothing's happening like five or ten thousand dollars a month or $5,000 per month to wow, we made six figures in one month and that was over 90 days.
They were able to just turn that around and make it possible. So I think that kind of goes to what you're saying is you've got to constantly be developing yourself, because if you don't, there's going to be a lagging factor with that. Yeah and I think, if you don't keep up with any of that stuff or even just personal development you'll end up burnt out, stressed and with anxiety, etc. I just got this present but I thought I was like the coolest thing ever.
It's called the 'Intellectual devotional'. So, it goes over just seven topics of knowledge, like history, art and you just want to read every day, I don't know, Ernest Hemingway. And then, the next day you'll read about the Mind-Body problem and the next day you read about the Mona Lisa. So it's just like a kind of revive your mind, complete eradication and roam confidently with the culture class. Just think of it
like random Wikipedia articles I guess. Yeah. You know, of interesting things that you should have some knowledge about. Yeah.
I thought that was super interesting. It goes back to what we had agreed upon when we started our business, right? Like constantly educating yourself, constantly be learning and that's how we move forward with our business. That thing is very important. You probably already think this is just again, it kind of transcends like I said I have things to just kind of point out, but I think that transcends attribution of success, which is from the beginning; personal development, like really I mean we block out time until our employees or co-workers, How are going to describe it? Hey, you have education, spend at least 10 hours or so this quarter working on things. Now, we obviously, I think, do a lot more than that, but at least 10 hours and like an hour per week that we block out and we pay for and just say learn, just do it and learn. Now, I think we need to get better at something that I'm thinking of is just like making sure that everything else doesn't just move because it's easy to move the education which actually falters.
It makes a problem later. But the biggest success we could have is that we are constantly learning like if nothing else, I guess if people went to Bit Branding, they would say, OK, you guys are always either teaching other people or you're learning yourself. So we're just constantly in a succession, like moving forward as far as education, which I think attributes a lot of our success. But that being said, do you feel like there's something else that attributes to our success, outside of that? I'm just...
I mean, I don't know, I think another thing that comes to mind is just our drive and determination, and being relentless on, you know, not failing. Did you say that the other day? What? Oh, yeah, so we can't fail. Yeah. Yeah, we were talking to our coaches about that. Yeah, it's actually a podcast: Hal Elrod you should check him out. It's 'Achieve your goals' Podcast. It's amazing.
But he said you can only learn, grow and I can't think of the third one, but basically you can't fail. So you either learn from your premier quote unquote failure, grow from it, or if you actually, you know, quote unquote fail from it, there's something else: build upon or add something else to it, which is kind of what Matthew McConaughey is saying. Like he gave a story very early in the book, it was like, almost had me in tears. It was so sad. But he basically talks about his mom and dad and their relationship. It was actually
a really good, loving relationship. But he told stories about how they showed love, which was not really conventional, let's just say that. So it's kind of scary to see them like mom had a knife in her hand. Dad was yelling at her. They're kind of like dodging each other's knives and then, like, they just break down and, like, make love in the kitchen. It's just like with the kids, everybody kind of ran out or whatever.
But he goes into so much more detail to tell the story. But at the end of that, he was like Greenline because he's like, it's a red light. My parents are having a domestic problem. They look from the outside, look like they're about to get in a huge fight and hurt each other, go to the E.R., kill somebody, whatever. But what really happened is that brought them closer together and to the most, you know, highest level of intimacy.
So he's just talking about the greenlight thing. So for us or even failure, it's like there's only growth, learning or whatever else he's talking about. But the point is that like all those failures actually turn into something positive. So like I said, the book is amazing. Keep going back to
it. So you're saying like it's not necessarily that we can't fail. Is it that like every failure has a positive outcome? Yeah, and he talks about it in our lives too. So, I mean, everything even close to the business is not close to the business, for example. I mean, we were in business for five years, but probably there will be more stories about this, like as we progress.
But early on, I would have never reached out to Christian if I wouldn't have gotten in a car accident way back when they basically pushed me to not take a more successful job and get paid a lot more. I probably wouldn't have thought about, like, I want to get the heck out of this job. I want to do something different. I want to do something fun. If it wasn't for that car accident, which absolutely sucked, totaled my car, lost thousands of dollars, didn't have a way to go to work, like it was just really bad and I lost a huge, basically, amount of money because I couldn't take a really nice job.
It forced me to take a lower paying job and forced me to say 'Dang! This is not what I want to do', which would have happened maybe five years after that. But it just basically forced me to do something and try new things. And then, because I tried new things, then it's like, oh, I had some success here and let's reach out to Christian. Let's ask him if he can help me do this stuff. And then, that ultimately we became Bit Branding.
So a car accident, which is the red light, became an absolute huge freaking green light and while we're having this podcast. Hey, I want to thank you for consuming our content, that really means a lot to us. This year, we actually turned five years old and that's a big deal for us. So in celebration of our five year anniversary, we are giving away over ten thousand dollars worth of freebies and our swipe file of different ads, Laynie pages, graphics that we've created over the years.
The contest is free to enter, we will draw in a name on February 11th. You can find out more information by going to contest.bitbranding.co for more information on how your business can benefit from all these great deals. Okay? Now back to your regularly scheduled content for.
So. We talked about education, we talked about not failing, is there something else that you think that attributes our success? I feel like, whenever you hear about people, I don't really run into this because in startup community or Facebook groups or anything like that I see, they're always constantly asking, hey, let me look for a co-founder, let me look for somebody to be the Yin and Yang person for me and I feel like I don't resonate, I'm not necessarily empathetic or understand that situation because we kind of found each other from the beginning, because that's the number one reason the people fail in business, is either they try to go solo, which there are successful solo business owners for sure. It's just a lot less likely. And then, when you do have a business partnership, like making sure that it sustains like a good relationship and goes through the ups and downs is also super hard.
So. I think the fact that we kind of complement each other allows our business to move forward. Now, we may butt heads about certain things, but we have a creative aspect. We have a marketing and sales aspect. So when we work together like that, I think it makes us even more successful versus, OK, we just have like you're really good at sales and marketing and I'm really good at sales and marketing.
And then, like, we're missing this whole component over here, which is like the creative side of our business, like super boring. We have some sales, but we can't grow because we don't have this area here or we're both just like, let's make the most amazing thing, coolest thing ever, but nobody wants to buy it. So I think that would be like if we were to put three prongs or if you're looking at it like a bicycle spoke, one of the spokes is definitely like you and I. The other one is like failures and then education is how I would like to continue it. Yeah, makes sense. How or I guess, what would be the best way if somebody was looking out, looking at us, how other businesses could mimic our successes and learn from our failures? So that being said, what would you say? I know we just talked about there's no such thing as failure.
You can't fail. But like, what's something that you would be like? OK, it's five years ago today and I know everything now. What would we not do? Because it just took too much time or it wasn't a good lesson or maybe we could have had a different lesson? What would you eliminate or what would you say as quote unquote, a failure? Again, I don't want to necessarily use it, but lack of a better term to use. I mean, I guess, again, things that are just jumping in my head right now are: early on, not documenting well enough, I guess, not knowing how to document. Although, you know, I guess we've talked about this before either in our podcast or in a different video where you don't necessarily have to know how to document it, but just do something, and I feel like we did some stuff.
Yeah. This is not very organized, I guess. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in our drive that it's like really, really old that. Yeah, it may not be in the organization or maybe we didn't write down the right things, especially when it comes to things like our process or how we do different things. I think those are definitely missing from our early years in our business. And then, I think another one would be.
I don't know, because I'm thinking like the mentor or coaches, but I feel like we had someone. There's always a person so very early we started out with like Tim Valentine and then Ben Reid. And then, there was like maybe a little bit of a gap. Your friend from Interstate? Yeah, Curt Ruby, and then we had like maybe a little gap like six to eight months, maybe a year or something. And then, we have
our coaches now. Yeah. So you're right. I don't think we were intentional about it and we were just like, this seems logical. So we just did it.
But yeah, I think that's probably something like we didn't have somebody. I mean, we called and asked questions about it, but it wasn't like intentional. So I think that's a good point.
Or at least for me to kind of piggyback off what you're saying is setting intentional coaching meetings, from the very beginning or maybe even after the first year or something like a little bit more strict what is the right where the were you actually, not necessarily structured. But, I guess you could say structured. Words like we're actually sitting down with them talking about specific stuff versus just like, hey, we have these things, let's just talk to them. Yeah, I think something that also comes to mind is back then I feel like we didn't know what type of coach or mentor we're looking for. Yeah.
I think we had this idea that a mentor or a coach, they were just going to feed us the answer or tell us how to run our business, and I think we were OK with that because we were like, oh, we've never done a marketing agency. We need someone who's worked in a marketing agency to tell us how to do these things. Yeah. That's just completely incorrect. Yeah. Right? The mentor coach is there to just pick out on the answers that you already have in your brain.
Yeah, you already know it, we were. Look, we thought we needed a consultant, we really needed a coach and we mix the two of them, or at least I did. Yeah.
To go back to again, this was like a greenlights podcast. But he talks about, and so Matthew McConaughey talks about how he got the role for Dazed and Confused. Have you seen that? Yeah, I think he talked about it in one of the podcast. Yeah, you should definitely watch Dazed and Confused if you haven't. It's a classic, but he talks about how he got the role. But then later, he's like, well, now that I've gotten this role, I should go be more sophisticated.
I'm going to go take acting classes. And then, it just caused analysis paralysis because he was like 'I got to do this and they're going to do this and get this', and he could never get into the role. And so he was like, I got to unlearn this stuff because I was good at what I was doing before.
So it's kind of like he thought he needed a coach or a consultant, but really he just needed somebody to kind of push him in the right direction. So I think that's kind of pretty much for every area of life, which is kind of helpful for us, too, is that. Yeah, they just take the ideas from your head, they already have and just ask the right questions, which I think you could sum up pretty much, the success of anything is asking the right question like going to Mars or anything like that, ask the right question, not how to get to Mars? Instead who's going to Mars? I don't know. But I'm just thinking everything can be solved by asking the right questions.
Yeah. I think like I said early on, I felt like they were supposed to tell us, this is how you run your books or this is how you should organize your Google Drive or this is how you should do X, Y and Z. I feel like that's what we're looking for, versus just guiding us into OK, maybe this is a resource that you can use to figure out what different way you can organize your Google Drive. So at the end of the day, we are the ones who need to be making the decisions, not some external third party source. Yeah, I was looking at something on LinkedIn and I said, like, if you're a business owner or a C level executive or whatever else, your number one skill that you need to learn is decision making, because business owners, their job is to make decisions and the quicker you can make them, typically, the more successful you'll be. So it's like quick decisions and you learn from those decisions. But
that's basically your job, you know, picking the stuff for the office, who to hire, who to fire, how to use the marketing, it's all decisions. That being said, I think that can be kind of a harder thing to do. But I put it here and I was just curious for myself and probably for other people, too, because they get caught in the rat race of like, all right, once I get to this level of my business, I'm good. When I get to this level in my business, I'm good or whatever else without being necessarily satisfied because there isn't anything that's tangible outside of, like, you know, societal norms to where your business should be. So the question is, what would you say is the most joyful moment for you? It could be like joyful moments or a joyful moment in the last five years.
I mean, I think of moments and I say moments because we have multiple employees, I think seeing them. Just go from, yeah, it's almost like watching a baby grow, you know, like seeing them go from deer in the headlights. I don't know what I'm doing on the first day, to you know, they're making some decisions by themselves. They're working with the team. They're doing all these things and then always go back to pandemic and the fact that we didn't fire anyone, we didn't, you know, it's like taking care of other people, I think for me, I mean, I enjoy that. I enjoy seeing
them progress. I enjoy them seeing what they can do and push the needle on videos or campaigns or the way they communicate. So, yeah. Nice. Yeah, so that's like a constant, joyous approach, I guess.
Right. Yeah, I wouldn't say because I was thinking like, oh, when we hired X, Y & Z but also I think it's the whole process of getting employees because for the longest time it was just you and I doing stuff. And then we had like an employee but not really. And then, we had interns but not really. But when we started actually getting employees and going through the whole process, I really enjoyed that.
Yeah. A couple of quick ones here. We haven't talked about this, we're actually about to meet, ironically, tomorrow for intensive, so we just got back from Colorado. That was awesome. Shout out to Estes
Park, actually. If you're watching this video, Christian's doing a huge shout out to Estes Park right now. So, super cool area. But we've spent a few days there just talking about, like our ideas and growth for 2021. But we're meeting again to kind of redefine, not redefine, but define them and get it clear on our vision for this year. So what does success in five years, maybe a little bit more, but it's more open ended.
So like, what does success look like for you in the next five years? I think more hands off? What's the word? He's quitting the company. No, like, yeah, just being able to be a little bit more hands off on the day to day things. I think we both agree on, focusing on the bigger ideas and ways to grow the business instead of just being more like the minutia. Micro stuff versus macro.
Yeah. So I think if in five years we're at a point where we have some kind of maybe a CEO who's running the company and we're like, basically just idea machines. I mean, obviously we will be in the business, but it's just not as or the same fashion that we're doing right now. Yeah.
Just looking at that, being on the 10,000 view of the company or companies. I don't know. Yeah. It's just we're the decision makers essentially, you know.
Yeah. I was going to say I think that that's definitely like in five years. It's crazy to think that's definitely possible. I think it's even possible in three years. But like five years. Yeah, absolutely.
I want to, I mean, if there's like, I can't remember what they are, the five sections, but I'm definitely the first section of, OK, cool. I've done this for a period of time. I want to move to something else, I've always been interested in, real estate. Well how can BitBranding buy real estate for marketing agencies? Well that's something we could be thinking about or something else, you know, other business ventures that are related to what we're doing now, or how could we have a complete, like hire, we couldn't do it necessarily, but we could have the ideas for, like, OK, the newest thing or the best thing that's going to be going on is app development. So how could we have a division of BitBranding? That's not the marketing, but it's the development. It's just literally building apps. I don't know.
I haven't really explored that part of it because, I mean, we need to be in the day to day. But to me, that would be fun to be part of, like a conglomeration of Bit Branding that has multiple, like, umbrellas underneath of it that has the marketing and it just expands from all the different areas. You could work with people. Who knows, maybe we even buy the stuff to be a printing company.
I don't know. But maybe we're the next Shopify. There you go. Exactly. I mean, yeah, we need to hire the right people for it. I don't know, like we have the ideas to make it happen, I think.
But we probably, like to your point, could be the implementer. It's more so, I guess for me if we look at it in two or three years it's like a 10,000 full view. In five years, I would want it to be like a 30,000 full views. So it's just like here's the pieces of the puzzle and how they kind of work together. I think that that will be laid out.
But I think that's kind of like success to me anyway. In the five years, just more going for the personal life, what has five years in business taught you about your personal life? Whether it's with friends or family. I mean, I think that the theme that comes to mind is communication and even thinking, I think in the past year there has been something that we've talked to our coaches and our employees, co-workers, etc. about is communicating better. I think it started with our coaches saying your problem is communication.
Yeah that was like a year ago right? Yeah and then just using some of those same things with friends, relationships and, you know, X, Y and Z. So I think that has been something, I don't think I'm there yet, but it's definitely top of mind every time that I speak or send a text message or I'm on a phone call with someone. The things that you say and how you say them, and you know, the way you're communicating with this type of personality, with that type of personality matters. So I think, yeah, I think communication, as a whole, is something that has affected my personal life and business as well. Yeah, there's a book, I think I was like 20? Not even, maybe 19 or 20, but I have it in the house. I can't remember. But it's a
good book. You should get it or steal it from my bookshelf. It's called 'Say this, not that'. So it just talks about like, all right, you could say all these different things, it pertains to business, but it's also personal life.
It's like, hey, why don't you move your car? Versus, Hey, I actually need to get over here, is there any way you could move your car so I could put mine here? Like that is just a different approach to how you could say it. His whole point is talking about sales, but he's saying like, Hey, would you like to buy it today? Versus like, are you ready to make this purchase or are you ready to change your life? Like those types of things are just small changes said the exact same thing, but they just change the way that you're doing it. So I think that's a really good way to do it, and the communication I think is at least in my understanding of communication is like, yeah, we're at level one right now and then you don't really ever finish the game.
It's just like building. Yeah. What do you think has been the biggest roadblock that you had to sort of overcome to be where we are today? Biggest roadblock, I would say I mean, for me, I want to be like personally 10 streets down.
I just say we're driving a car like I want to be in the next town over and I have to realize that to get there effectively, meaning like we're using the car analogy, I may have a car that's kind of like popping and the ignition may not turn over when you get there, but I could get the car there. But it's going to be a lot less of a vehicle or like a good vehicle to get there. And then, what I've realized with that roadblock or with that car is that I have to have the right people with the car to help me get there. So like you, but also our employees like, hey, OK, I have to treat them differently than what I would want to do for myself because I'm a different person. Again, communication, but they're needed to drive the car there. And then, I didn't realize this, but it's like, OK, I have a third row here, which is also like Brina and Aspen could be future kids, who knows. But like
Brina and Aspen are part of this as well, which is OK. How does my decisions at work affect their lives or how their lives now affect the business? That's just the kind of personality I am. I'm like, OK, well, you can't figure this out.
We'll find a solution, but to somebody else and may not be so obvious to say, I don't know what to do. I'm just going to sit here because I don't want to go search for a solution. So I think the biggest roadblock to kind of bring that all together, if it makes sense anyway, is that just going to meet people where they're at. So the roadblock has been myself in the way that I think, and it's not necessarily to change the way that I'm thinking, but to meet people where they're at and just show them how to get in the car, because I think I'm supposed to be the one that's like pushing the car.
But not everybody has found the car yet or they're not getting in it yet. They're just like waiting at the side of the road to be picked up. Does it make sense? Yeah. This is an interesting question, I just thought of this like last minute, but I was like, huh? I think this would be a cool question to ask, because I think that the answer is different for everybody in business. It could also be related to that in life, which is like who do you think pushed you the hardest to keep pursuing and owning a business or like, I don't know, if it's necessarily quote unquote your dream.
I feel like a lot of people who do start a business that is their dream to go out on their own and to have their own thing. So I put that as, what I was thinking, was a dream. But like, who pushed you the hardest to keep pursuing business ownership, entrepreneurship in general? 1596 00:38:23,710 --> 00:38:24,639 I don't know, I mean, I don't think there's one person or one thing that has been. Number one, I feel like it's always been a blend of myself, you, Megan and my parents, and I think in different situations or different places within the past five years where it's been different people, right? I don't think there's ever been like.
I'm the only one who's keeping me afloat. Right. You know? I think there's been times where, yeah, I've been, like, burnt out, but I don't know, Megan's there for me, right? Yeah, like, I have way too much work or whatever and you were there for me with solutions or you're there for me to, you know, just keep the north star, of like, this is where we need to go and this is what, you know, we're doing these things right now, And this is why we're not making any money right now, right? At the very beginning that was very hard. Yeah. And then, I feel like my parents too just making sure that, it's like in the back of my head, there's always this, I think of, you know, in the future when I'm a parent, all I would ever want is for my kids to succeed, right? Be successful and not be in a ditch or whatever.
So I think it's important for me to, sort of keep this going and keep striving for more to kind of let my parents know like, hey, you can relax now, you know, it's kind of like, I'm good. Right. Because I mean for the longest time, I don't know what I want to do, even sort of a high school. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had some ideas and my parents, I think, were pushing me to do business and marketing. I
was more pushing, no, I want to do more to design stuff. There was never really like a thing where I was like, yeah, I'm going to be an orthopedic surgeon. I was never that kid. So I think having my parents see that I'm successful. I think it's important for me, too and it kind of drives me to keep going.
That's all. Right. They can see from aside and like, hey, it's good.
I just got back from my brother's wedding shout out to you brother. Congrats! Congrats! And Jenelise too! But yeah, it's like you just got back to them and they're like, hey, like it's good. You got decent clothes on, you know, you aren't missing a ring or whatever. Right. So it's like just to know that yeah, I'm taken care of or whatever. But I can tell you right now, because you're not in this position, which is like as a parent, they're just never going to stop.
Right. It's like one of those things where you just keep trying. But they keep pushing the care, pulling the care a little bit farther.
OK, I mean, so they may be okay in a certain area, but it's just they'll never stop worrying or whatever. Right. May damp in and I guess right now it's like, all right, with Aspen, OK, make sure that you don't run out into traffic. But it could also be like, oh, now you're hanging out with different friends or now you're driving or now you're going off to college like there's just different levels of stress. Yeah. But yeah, I feel like for this anyway, for the five years it would be fun to look back at this podcast and just really see, OK, what did we do well? What did we learn from? And then, where were we at? So, what was our type of thinking? So we were like, oh, education, education! In five years from now, we're like, no, super cut education out, which I doubt that's the case.
But just good to see. Maybe kind of an Easter egg of like. We were doing the right things now we just never knew how much they were going to compound. That's my prediction, I guess I would say that for the next five years, we're going to look back at these previous five years and say, wow, we actually did a lot of stuff correct. We had the right building blocks. We just were at the iceberg stage.
We never really were out of it yet. Yeah. I think there's always that component of we don't know what it's like until we get there.
Yeah. And so, that's where there's always going to be new challenges and new things come in. It's like you think, like you said this a million times, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, right? You can't even fathom what the millionaire is, but a millionaire can't even fathom what a billionaire really is, you know, and their struggles, their worries and all that stuff. So, yeah, until we get there, that's when we actually realize, oh, we need to have these. So, but I think having the growing pains that we have right now and dealing with them and doing them in a way that we know we can be flexible in changing in the future, I think what helps us stay successful is finding solutions, but also not being afraid to change those solutions, because we're at a different level where I think a lot of businesses maybe, have that mentality of like the way that we've been doing it and there's a way that we're going to do it. But they don't realize that what worked then is not going to work now.
So I think that's also a very important mindset to have what we're going through this whole journey. Yeah, the status quo is not something that we want to stay at. Right. As a fun fact, because you brought up the millionaires and billionaires, I was reading about that the other day, again, because it's just it's mind boggling to me, but there's twenty three hundred actually, I was going to give you the other one. There's 86 or like 200+ million millionaires in the world, like millions upon millions of them. Billionaires? There's roughly twenty three hundred.
So, 2,300 billionaires roughly, and hundreds of millions of millionaires. So it's like they're not even close at all. I don't know how that necessarily relates, as far as like the five year anniversary for our business, but I think that it will be, to your point, related in the sense that the conversations that we have now aren't even like our biggest dreams, hopefully, if we continue to dream bigger, are not even close to what we fathom, they could be in the next five years.
So, yeah, we can't imagine what's possible. But I'm looking forward to the biggest setback or what we perceived as the biggest setback to be the largest launching pad forward. So. All right. I don't know if you had any final remarks, those are all my ideas or questions or things that I was thinking of.
Never have anything else. Nothing else? Actually, we had a podcast a long time ago. We did? Well, it's episode 100.
It was a long time ago. That was almost two years ago. I think, who started the question? I was trying to look through the transcripts.
Oh. But I think the first question that we asked was, are hotdogs sandwiches? Has that changed? Hotdogs are not sandwiches. That's what I said. What did you say they were? I don't remember. I can't. I think it's a running joke, but you can ask it now.
I don't think they're sandwiches. Okay. I think we both agreed. So far, our theory of changes is the next five years we know that we've gotten to a renaissance philosophical level to where...
Our thinking is definitely changing. Yeah, exactly. But as of right now, two years later, which is crazy. Yeah. It's literally coming up on almost two years now because this episode is pretty close to like 190 or episode 200.
I don't know what episode it will be, but yeah, if that was episode 100 then we're pretty close to 200, which we should do something fun for that. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. Hope you got a lot out of it. Hope you learned a little bit more about Christian and I. Hopefully you learn a little bit more about you and businesses as you were going through this and how you could relate to this, whether you've been in business for five years, whether you've been in business for 20 or it's your first five months.
I think there's a lot of different things that you could take out of this episode that could help you and your business move forward. But also let you know that, hey, it's possible and really, the biggest benefit factor here is just persistence and doing 20 to 30 percent of the things correctly, because we did a lot of things that were not correct and hopefully you can learn from those as well. So thank you so much. This is not a normal style episode, but if you are a business owner who wants to generate more leads online or more sales online, make sure to go to bitbranding.co and we have our signature services there that will help you grow your business online.
Have you been listening for a while? Please make sure to leave an honest rating and review on Apple podcast or any type of review, depending on where you are listening to this at. If you're new, whether you're watching on YouTube or Facebook or anything like that, just make sure that you subscribe so that you don't miss out on any of the content we put out every single week. The Marketing Natives comes out every Monday and we've been doing that now for almost, that'll be going on almost five years this year, right? 2016 or 2017? I have to count in my head. Going on almost four years, and just a fun tidbit, only one to three percent of podcast episodes ever make it to 200 episodes. We're about to have 200. So, you know, if you subscribe, you know that every Monday you're going to get a new piece of content to help you grow your business.
So, thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you guys next time. The Marketing Native's podcast is a production of BitBranding.
2021-02-07 19:19
