I’ve recently reached a place where everything feels super busy. Even though we’re still in a pandemic and I’m not traveling like I used to because of that, there is a ton going on.

Business has grown substantially in the last year, and so we need to hire.

My daughter is a toddler and almost 2, so she needs more energy and attention that before.

My wife and I are at the tail end of having a new house designed and we’re preparing to break ground on that early summer once the snow melts off the property.

Things are busy, and that’s not a badge of honor for me anymore.

In this episode I talk about how things feel busy, why they’re busy for me right now, and then how I’m getting some sanity back in my life. I introduce the idea of a Time Audit, which is something an old coach of mine had me do and I’ve kept doing quarterly to every 6 months when I inevitably get to this “busy” phase.

I hope you enjoy, and subscribe.

Transcript

John:

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Credo podcast. I’m John Doherty, the founder of getcredo.com. On this show, I interview smart marketers and entrepreneurs who can help you grow and scale your business through great digital marketing. Every now and then I do a shorter, me only episode, teaching you something that is on my mind specifically. This episode is, of course, sponsored by getcredo.com, my company, where we have a highly curated network of vetted digital marketing professionals who are best in class at what they do. We’ve interviewed them, we’ve seen their client metrics and we’ve accepted them into the network only after they’ve checked the necessary boxes. At Credo, we specialize in helping companies find and hire the best digital marketing firm or consultant for their specific needs. So, if that’s you, get in touch with us at getcredo.com. That’s G-E-T-C-R-E-D-O.com and click the Find a Marketer button in the top, right navigation.

John:

Yo, yo, yo, what is going on everybody? This is John Doherty. I’m back here in your ears. I’m actually recording this in my car. I’m driving my truck up to Breckenridge right now, couple hours, hour and a half, hour 45 outside of Denver. We have a ski lease up there, so heading up for the weekend. I’m driving by myself with the dog, of course, the wife and kiddo are coming separately.

John:

So, I wanted to hop on and record this for you and it’ll be released a couple of weeks after I record it, but I wanted to get this out while it’s fresh, because it might be something that you need to hear. I wanted to record it while it’s fresh, because it might be something that you need to hear that might help you unblock some things in your business.

John:

So, Credo’s been going for my business, if you’re not familiar, getcredo.com, has been going since early 2013 and I’ve been working on it since September 2015, the end of September 2015. And we’re five and a half years in, and it’s been a journey, as any entrepreneur will tell you with any business, it’s been a journey. You learn a ton, good times, interesting times. And you get the school of hard knocks, that’s what entrepreneurship is. And this is, obviously, no different for me. I’ve hired people, I’ve fired people, I’ve kept people around and people have quit. We’ve driven incredible results for a bunch of agencies. Other agencies didn’t see those results. It’s just been a thing. And I’m all about value. I’m all about the value that people are getting from it. But at the end of the day, I’m running a business, I’m not running a charity. It’s a for-profit business. And I’ll just come out and say that, it’s a for-profit business.

John:

The reality is that when I first started working on it, we went from basically no revenue, I think we did $80 in revenue the month before I started working on it. I think the month of September 2015, if I’m recalling it correctly, we did $80 in revenue. And we pretty quickly went to that December, we did $5,000 in revenue. I was doing some SEO consulting at this point, but pay myself out of that, but we’re not taking anything out of the business. But we did $5,000 in revenue, leads are increasing, and it wasn’t even that many leads per month coming in, 10, 12, 15, something like that. They’re increasing by a few every month, but revenue is going in the wrong direction. And so, I pivoted it into a subscription model and we went to, by the end of the year, we were at 18k or no, by the end of 2015, we were at about 18, 16, $18,000 a month in revenue.

John:

And then, I kind of hit a wall, hired a business coach. We reworked some things and we went to the next level. And then to be honest with you, we kind of mucked around. I brought on a business partner technology… On the technology side, we built, rebuilt all of our technology. We pivoted the business model to a marketplace/escrow model. And then mid last year, middle of three, few months into the pandemic, we decided, hey, we need to trim back the product and make this thing self-sustaining.

John:

And to be 100% transparent with you, we flat-lined revenue for two and a half years. Actually revenue went down a little bit. We were still profitable-ish, but revenue went down and then we did actually get to a point where we weren’t profitable, I was overspending. I was investing heavily. And we ended up about two months of cash in the bank, maybe, something like that. And everyone, if all of our customers had left, I basically could have paid the bills for two months. Trimmed the company back, had to let someone go, cut back my own salary.

John:

Long story short, now that mid to end of February, as I’m recording this, it’s going to be released early March. We are up about 70… about 60 some percent year on year and we’re up 70% since July. So, we’ve turned the business around and it feels good. We’ve got big cash buffer in the bank, which is awesome. But recently, what I’ve been feeling is that things are busy. I was actually, last night, my wife and I ate dinner with our kiddo, I put kiddo to bed because my wife wasn’t feeling well.

John:

And I came downstairs and did the dishes. And then I was like, “Okay, I got to go do some more work. I have some more things to work on.” I remarked too, I was like, “Things feel really busy right now.” And I used to crush work time. I honestly haven’t for the last few years, 30, 35 hours a week, it’s been nice. It’s been really nice, that the business has grown over the last eight months. And business has felt more sane than it did for the previous year, year and a half. So, that’s really, really nice, but I was like, “Man, things feel really busy right now.” And then I was looking at revenue and talking to my business partner, our CTO, who’s one of my best friends. And he and I were just kind of talking through some things and I was a little bit grumpy, a little bit short recently about some things and said some things that I definitely don’t regret, but I said them in a way that could have been interpreted in… I said them, and it could have been interpreted in other ways.

John:

Ali is very gracious to me and knows me and puts what I say in the context of all of our conversations and our partnership. And so he didn’t, but if it had been someone else, they may have taken it the wrong way. And I was trying to think through why. Why does this feel hard? Why do things feel hard right now? Why do things feel busy? I was looking at it, and I was like, “Holy crap.” We have grown so much that there’s just more required at this point. And the things that we’ve been doing that got us here, that got us through the shift and got us the gains that we’ve seen, that have helped us build back up the cash buffer so we have a defensible business, and we can invest into things that we can invest in to learning faster, invest cash in to learning faster and not have to spend more of our time. We can hire people to help us learn faster.

John:

The things that got us to this point are not going to get us to the next level. And so, we’ve kind of come to a decision and we basically say, “Okay, do we put in more time? Or do we… Can we hire people,” which we are, we are hiring people. But then also there’s some of these bigger things going on in the business, like we need to redo all of our internal reporting to drive sales and to drive our visibility into the business and how well every customer is getting value. And how do we get agencies closing better? To should we even bring people into our top level so that… if we don’t know what their close rates are? All these sorts of things.

John:

And then also, Ali and I were on Slack today, and I said something, I forget even what I said. And he goes, he laughs and texts… And like, “Ha ha, sounds like teenager problems.” I’m like, “You mean teenager product problems?” He’s like, “Yeah.” But he’s not like… he wasn’t calling me a teenager. And that’s me giving him the benefit of the doubt and asking for clarification. But recognizing that we’ve grown from a, I don’t know, a nine year old, 10 year old, something like that, where she’ll need a lot