Episode #8 How to deal with ADHD and still be Productive ⧸ w Jordan Kalev Kalevtech.com
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Jordan to talk about how to deal with ADHD and how it can affect your business. We talk about the benefits and challenges of dealing with ADHD, how to manage it, and how to overcome it.
Transcript
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So that was a super fun conversation with Jordan. I think you're going to enjoy the, you know, the honesty about dealing with ADHD and how it applies to being an entrepreneur in your business.
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Also, the discussion around productivity and, you know, my thoughts on what does it actually mean to be productive because I think it's totally different than the way most people think about managing, creating, delegating to-do lists.
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that you're gonna adopt to make sure that you build,
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and I talk about this heavily, the gross margin.
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it's essentially the profit from doing the work
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And I think there's moments where Jordan wasn't really jiving with some of the advice I've given him,
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but I learned a long time ago I'd rather be straight with people so that they understood exactly what I mean
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than to back away because I just didn't feel like they were ready to hear what it is.
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And I think if you look between the conversations and the questions and the structure,
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you'll find some really important lessons to apply to your business.
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I actually know very little about why we're meeting today.
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I just happened to be in the day, had some open spots,
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and Stephanie, it was kind of fun because I was like,
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What would make our conversation a 10 out of 10?
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that sort of got my attention with your channel
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I have to take different amounts depending on what kind of work I'm doing.
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So that resonated and then what, so that's cool on the show, what can I help with?
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Well, first thing I was going to ask you about is strategies for productivity, motivation,
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systems, anything like that that helped you, especially in the earlier phases when you
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didn't have teams to delegate to to do all the hard stuff.
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Yeah, so the interesting part is that even though I have a team today, I still, and if you ask my team, they will probably cringe because I definitely have thoughts on things, process systems, et cetera.
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Why don't we deconstruct your day and try to put it back together?
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Well, I have almost an infinite number of different things that need attention, right?
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It means you take care of managed infrastructure.
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No, but there's a lot of this stuff gets done by other organizations.
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They're kind of, like, my business partner runs services for other managed service providers.
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So they're not, like, my full-time employees, but they're available as needed.
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You have the client relationship, they do the work.
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That's the, like, I'm doing a bunch of the work now.
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I mean, the difference is, are they doing work for you internally or are they doing work with clients?
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2018, what do you want to get done at the end of the year?
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I mean, there's lots of other stuff and that's the thing, right?
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there's almost an unlimited amount of urgent or semi-urgent problems to solve, things that could
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be better, and so on. Given that there's so much. It's interesting because urgent to me means no
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planning. So that's what I think that I find fascinating is when I deconstruct a company,
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you know, I coach a lot of really high-performing founders. Usually when they're in an urgency
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responsive mode, it's because there's a lot of stuff they haven't planned for and they don't
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have a system or they try to do too many things. So let's try to break that down. So it seems like
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you're smiling to the too many things. Yeah. So what does an average, and we're going to work
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back to how this applies to productivity, but what does an average client look like for you guys?
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How big of a deal is it? How many months is it? What's the kind of value of a client?
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Well, some of the newer clients that I've gotten are in that sort of 10 seat range.
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If I become a client of yours on average, how long are they going to stick with you?
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Okay, so your deals right now are on an annualized basis, about $6,000.
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Mostly referrals at this point, although I've done walk-ins, I'm starting to do something.
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It's, I'd say about a year in its current form.
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What do you want to see revenues end next year, 2018?
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say say 150k okay 150k total revenues for the business yeah but you're already three or four
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people yeah but those three or four people are are as needed and are much less expensive than
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than regular employees would be in Toronto got it so they're not Toronto they're not full-time
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right and then there's a there's another thing there's another way of outsourcing this stuff
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yeah to a company in Toronto same thing it's like it's it's it's proportional to the number
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of seats. Yeah. So it's not like I had a, I don't have any full-time employees that are helping me
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with like, I guess, I guess the challenge is just like even aiming for 150,000 top line revenue in
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a 12 month period is really hard. Like, and this, this gives me everything I need for context,
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right? Is step one, there's always a distribution curve of value on task, right? And if you look at
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like the 80-20 rule, Prado's law, there's essentially 20% of your activities attribute
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80% of the value that you create. Essentially, that's the argument is that you could work 80%,
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you could not work 80% of the year and make the same amount of money if you actually understood
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where the value is being created and only do those things. The challenge for most businesses
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is they don't have the time to stop and actually ask themselves, what things do I do on a daily
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basis that are the highest value returns, right? They think, well, I do client work. I got to do
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marketing. I got to get customers. I got to hire. I got to manage people. Yes, you do. And no, you
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don't. Right. So if we, if you just thought of like the highest value stuff that you do today
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on a daily basis, what would that stuff be? It's got to be sales. Like I need, I need more clients
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and quickly and it could be sales. A lot of the problems. Agreed. It's, I'm having a hard time
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trying to correlate sales and 150,000 top line revenue. Because anybody that does sales and
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manage IT, their quota is, I would say, half a million in quota just for a salesperson.
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Yeah. Well, I can sort of give you a bit of reasoning behind that. Because in my first,
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you know, I said there's iterations, you know, in the first iteration, I tried to do everything at
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once. Yeah. Fast with, you know, raise some money and try to do it all fast. And it was just too
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much for me. Right. So, so I'm, so I'm doing it at a pace, the fastest pace where I can handle it
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and feel in control of things. Yeah. Right. And so I don't, you know, that's not the, I want to get
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to a point where it's, where it's working and then attract essentially, this is, this is onto like
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one of my other questions, a business partner who can handle a lot of the administrative detail
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work overhead and so on, so I can start to focus on my strengths.
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And at that point, dealing with people, networking, I understand the tech stuff, so I'm like
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sort of the bridge between business and business people and the IT side of things, right?
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Okay, so if you're, okay, so let's just talk about sales.
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I agree sales could be high leverage, but honestly, like doing high value client work,
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Like, there could be some work that you're doing that's just worth a lot more, right?
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It could be the way you're presenting the solution.
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It could be, like, I don't know how much effort it takes to close a $6,000 contract,
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but I know that if you put a fully baked marketing and a sales in front of it,
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$6,000 is not going to allow you to scale the business, right?
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Now, if you just want to do $150,000 a year, then that's totally cool.
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I think that a business like this should be like in the $3 million range for it to be worthwhile enterprise.
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Okay, so do you want to build a $3 million-year business?
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Okay, then step one, next year cannot be a $150 goal.
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The forcing function of the top-line revenue being $150 is not great enough to force you to make the decisions you're going to need to make to build that kind of organization.
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I wouldn't want you to learn the habits of a 150 revenue business
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because they won't serve you to get to $3 million.
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So let's pretend we're going to set at least the goal for a quarter million.
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Because if you're, like, you're clearly talented and you could probably go making,
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if you were to go to the market and get paid in a company,
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how the side hustle creates another $150,000 in value.
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and took the revenue, most people are working minimum job, like minimum salary jobs, right?
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How does your week look in regards to where you spend your time and energy?
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It varies a lot because if I get a new client like I did a couple weeks ago, then that's
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my next week or two is a lot of setup there and getting it sorted out.
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But a lot of the stuff is automated or delegated after that.
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So then it's back to a whole bunch of administrative stuff and sales, right?
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And try to get out there and talk to people, go to a lot of it's networking, a lot of it's talking to people.
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So what is it about the onboarding a new client that requires you to do it?
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Mostly it's just a money thing at the moment, right?
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So essentially the economics of a new customer doesn't allow you to actually pay somebody else to do the work.
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Actually, lifetime value, maybe, but today it wouldn't.
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So right off the bat, that tells me that there could be something wrong with your business model.
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I don't have a lot of money to move around with, right?
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So I'm growing it, getting new clients, and then I'll have the money to-
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I had a full-time assistant for a while but I just couldn't sustain it.
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So I'll get to that point where they can do most of that onboarding stuff and I can delegate
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most of that so that I can spend more time building it.
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I know that it's slower than perhaps optimal but I'm prone to overwhelm and when I was
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trying to do everything fast, it ended up not being sustainable for me.
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I think the challenge is if you don't build the model right,
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or create enough value to justify 60 an hour or 75 an hour, right?
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on the low end, the admin work, these are like $10 tasks. And then the work of the work is $100
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task. If your business model doesn't support you to pay somebody to do your work, at some point,
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like there's some logical direction that says like, I can pay somebody enough to be able to
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charge the customer so that I can make enough gross margin to be able to reinvest in the business.
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I would reevaluate that, right? So I'm feeling like a lot of the, whatever you did before
00:15:02.640
Okay, so what did you learn and how is that not going to happen again?
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I learned a lot about the business model, like what works and who's doing what and
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who the players are in the city and so on and so forth.
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A lot of it was research, there's a great section of Reddit where it's actually owners
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of this sort of company all over the place, like all over North America mostly but also
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in Europe, who have a lot of conversations sort of there about every little aspect of
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There's some books that have been published that are by people who started and scaled
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When it was brought to me at the beginning by the person that I'm working with, or my
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partner, it seemed like he had it all figured out and it wasn't the case, so there was
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Because I just feel like a lot of the stuff I could...
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Well, I know, look, the biggest thing that needs to happen is I need to make it work
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so that it's proven, so that I can attract a business partner, get them on board who's
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like able to handle a lot of the workload that's like not in my strengths.
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So that I can just go out there and make deals and try and get bigger clients and so on and
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that's my thinking on it okay how can i help uh first of all i was asking about time management
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the other thing is uh is is getting a partner right a partner who's got opposite strengths
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let's talk about time management real quick because one if i was spending two weeks of my
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time onboarding clients yeah that would be the first thing i would get rid of and off my plate
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right off the bat it's kind of like if you look at a distribution of where you spend your time
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the thing you spend your most time on that doesn't actually like create a lot of value
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onboarding clients is the first thing you should get off your plate so that because it's like
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yeah i mean like that's that's a huge time suck yeah yeah right yeah so like it's kind of one
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of those things it's like how do you be more productive you evaluate where you spend your
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time and then say, how do I spend time doing more high value stuff?
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Onboarding clients to me is not high value, right?
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High value is marketing, sales, recruiting, creating a strategy, all that stuff.
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And then people are like, well, how do I do that if I can't afford to pay people to do
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And I guess one of the other things is approaching larger clients, like getting into that and
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if I got a 100-seat client or something like that,
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because the revenue and the gross margin is there.
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Right now, it sounds like your competitive advantage
00:18:13.100
Like those are the kind of clients I dealt with historically as a sort of freelancer.
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So I go into those and I know exactly what to do.
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And that's what's funny, and this is why I appreciate you asking that question, Jordan,
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is people want to talk about productivity, they want to talk about hustle,
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and the biggest opportunity is for them to actually question
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and as long as you don't force yourself out that comfort zone
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and don't set goals bigger than $150,000 a year,
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and the conversations I have with them is not around
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do I feel comfortable to go close the right deals?
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It's can you help me design the right business model
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and I feel like that's gonna be your ultimate challenge
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and it may be the thing that continues to hold you back, right?
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to maybe be the thing that's gonna unlock that thing for you
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I mean, geez, I can't tell you the amount of times
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why didn't you become the person that could do it?
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Yeah, if I do a whole bunch of the, that's, yeah,
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that's sort of what I've, what I, was my change in strategy
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was to instead of try to do everything fast and messy,
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But it's not about fast, and I don't understand this fast and messy language.
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I think that the first year where I was trying to,
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where, you know, I was like, okay, this is a good idea.
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When you can go and specialize in your strengths,
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things are no the beauty about me is that i've every company i've started i started from scratch
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yeah every company maritime vacation fuck i forget nb host flow town clarity what i'm doing now
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all the investments i made there were zero so i know what it looks like successfully when there
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are no resources when you don't have funding people think oh it's like dan it's easy that
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you have capital. I don't throw money at a problem. I just don't. I know too many people
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that made a lot of money and then gave it all back. One of the funny things about wealth is
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people create a lot of wealth and they give it all back. They make a ton of money and the next
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year they give it all back. Have you ever seen that in your life where you made money and then
00:21:41.560
the next year for some reason it seems like... Oh, you don't make money?
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Yeah, like you essentially give it all back. There's just this ebb and flow. So what I do is
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I always start my businesses the way I start every business. It's like the fundamental core
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the business you have to figure that out so how do i deal with adhd i don't do too many things
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i guess i'm just good at deciding what do i do today versus what do i do tomorrow you know what
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i mean like i know what to say no to the way to fast track that is get people that have been there
00:22:10.800
and done it before it sounds like you had a reddit thread but the whole section of reddit it's really
00:22:14.580
good i don't doubt it is but it's it's like the same thing as like trying to learn how to surf
00:22:18.720
reading a book right it's like how do you how so like i met people in town that run similar
00:22:25.980
companies like cool did you pattern match what they were doing versus how you were doing it
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yeah like it's easy for my for me to conceive how it looks when it's a little further along
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and and functioning but right now since i'm juggling a bunch of hats some of them which
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are i'm pretty bad at yeah like what are they what are the bad ones just administrative stuff
00:22:47.880
There's a lot of systems, integration, design, and setup to make something like this run smoothly, right?
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I know exactly how it should be, but doing it myself is tedious and difficult.
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Where do you think you're wasting a lot of your time?
00:23:04.200
Well, I know I wasted a lot of time trying to make everything more perfect than it needed to be.
00:23:17.880
Cool. And going after the wrong kind of clients. Like I actually went sort of went on a whole
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little tangent of trying to make a new kind of like a sort of new business model servicing
00:23:28.880
individual professionals like real estate agents and all that. And it was a mistake. It was like,
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yeah, it was like a comfort zone thing. I was like, I can do this. And it's a reasonably good
00:23:36.880
idea, but it was like, it wasn't the right thing to do. I should be going after bigger clients.
00:23:40.280
Bigger clients. So if anything you got out of this conversation is working on high value clients,
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High value means that they're going to have the income to support gross margin.
00:23:50.560
At the end of the day, if what you're getting paid from a client and what it costs you to do the work doesn't have a gross margin involved, it's a bad business to be in.
00:24:00.860
The margins are good because after you do the initial setup, then there's a few problems.
00:24:05.340
Yeah, if they're so good, then you shouldn't have to do the work.
00:24:13.960
but that's a decision today right so if anything like i've i mean there's so many recently a luxury
00:24:22.160
e-commerce conversion rate optimization client right called me they're like here's what i'm
00:24:27.120
doing how do i make this grow work with bigger clients because the small ones doesn't like a
00:24:32.260
five thousand dollar contract just the amount of time to set up you're probably experiencing
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the setup cost of doing those contracts doesn't allow you to make any profit if there's no profit
00:24:40.440
How are you supposed to reinvest in the business by building a team, hiring an assistant, delegating, implementing software?
00:24:47.480
You know, like, there's just no, I mean, at the end of the day.
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Like, maybe I shouldn't be doing it myself, but it's not like I'm losing money.
00:25:05.980
If you want to get to the revenue levels you want to, it has to not be you.
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So what that means is your offering needs to not, like it has to be, A, it has to be unique in the market,
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has to be high value, has to be, what else would I say, consistent.
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Because that's the other problem with a lot of consultants is everything they do is unique, right?
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And they can't pay or design a system to make it unique.
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If every time you do a project, every infrastructure is unique,
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and you're the only person that has that breadth of experience,
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then it's hard for you to hire and onboard clients because they all look different.
00:25:48.900
Yeah, they all look different, and then you kind of like,
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that's what the onboarding process is in this business, right?
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It's like taking a completely big mess and then putting it all into a system
00:25:57.860
where everything works and is documented properly.
00:26:00.580
So you're telling me there's no clients that all look the same?
00:26:03.320
Yeah, I'd say that if you go into bigger ones, then you're often taking a contract
00:26:12.280
So they're going to be set up a little bit more similar to each other, so yeah.
00:26:17.280
But there's still going to be a lot of that initial work.
00:26:21.200
It's not like you, you know, then once they're set up, it's recurring revenue for a long
00:26:27.160
I guess, unless I ask you for your P&L and look at your economics, it's going to be hard
00:26:32.320
And I feel like that's going to be your sticking point.
00:26:38.620
but the business today is not really a business.
00:26:40.920
It's essentially, if I took the amount of hours you're working
00:26:43.640
and the team that you've got and the clients you're making
00:26:46.840
and the revenue I can just estimate that you're doing
00:26:54.900
Yes, because it's at the beginning of a process.
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I think that's a belief somewhere that you assume that's not true.
00:27:00.820
yeah it doesn't have to be that way so i think if you if you believe it to be true then great
00:27:07.340
if you say no there's got to be a better way you'll go on the search for the solution
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in regards to productivity it's it's literally every week is looking at your previous week
00:27:16.620
asking yourself where did you make wins and tweaking your calendar and for me i put everything
00:27:21.740
in my calendar yeah like well i i got that part cool but then i i you know i i also have uh sort
00:27:30.000
of a, somewhat of a system for all the tasks that are pending, and it becomes a lot very
00:27:35.460
quickly, right? It's a lot. And then there's, there's like, it's very hard to decide where
00:27:41.640
to, where to put the energy when there's a lot of stuff to do, right?
00:27:50.980
Maybe, I don't know. I just, I think it's, I think you know that I, if I was starting
00:28:26.060
that could be 50 bucks an hour. I'm pretty sure I could sell
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because it is about selling, at least 100 an hour.
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meaning that I could probably pay somebody else 30 to do most of the work
00:28:40.640
and then have an admin to kind of take care of the operational infrastructure
00:28:44.080
like invoicing, billing, scheduling, et cetera,
00:29:02.980
It's just a decision on where you spend your time.
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And I think that, you know, it's, if, and look, if you want to do 150 next year, then great.
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Do it the way you're doing it, and you may hit that.
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But I also know that if you don't set big enough goals, it doesn't force you to make different decisions.
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So, my biggest suggestion to you is dream a little bigger.
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cool hopefully that was helpful yeah I've been watching the channel I I felt
00:29:34.820
like you might have some some understanding of the like sort of unique
00:29:38.620
difficulties and like my situation and and yeah it just came up I didn't think
00:29:43.660
very much about it when I saw the live stream I just I just sent the message
00:29:46.840
because I yeah I've been watching I've been paying attention to the channel it
00:29:49.540
seemed like a like a good idea if you're thinking about coming to get advice from
00:29:53.360
And then think through the questions and make sure that they're the ones that, you know,
00:29:58.240
and be prepared to hear answers that you may not want to hear.