Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business building podcast, where we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking the bank and breaking your bank. Hey folks, I am Dave Braun and I’m here with my partner and cohost Larry Broughton, great friend of mine. And we are just looking forward to 2021, which we just are in right now.
Larry Broughton
00:00:26
That’s right. Hello, David.
Dave Braun
00:00:28
Yeah, how are you Larry?
Larry Broughton
00:00:29
I’m good. Thanks for being my friend, man.
Dave Braun
00:00:32
Yeah, it’s an awesome ride. Just getting over the holidays, had a good time.
Larry Broughton
00:00:38
Yeah. Life is an awesome ride for sure.
Dave Braun
00:00:41
It is. If you decide you want to make it that way. Let’s get into today’s topic. Now this is kind of the beginning of 2021, but what we’re going to talk about are some of the lessons that we’ve learned in 2020, and I know a lot of podcasts are going through this, but I think it’s good to reflect every now and then and see what did you learn? And you want to make sure that you actually get these ideas embedded in your brain so that you can, you know, take those lessons and move forward to having a better year the next year. So it applies to any year.
Larry Broughton
00:01:15
Yeah. And the interesting thing is Dave that this is the time of year people to do a lot of goal setting, right. And it’s hard to do goal setting, if you’re not actually looking back, I’m not a big fan of looking in their rear view mirror. I don’t like that, but there is time that we have to actually reflect. We have to look back a little bit, you know, we’ve got this tool that we’ve developed over the years called the whole health spider graph. That might be a great place for us to start. There’s eight spans on that spidergraph. And for folks who’ve been using it for awhile and we’ve got some of our coaching and mentoring clients have been using this for awhile and they’re seeing great success with that, because what’s measured is improved, right?
Larry Broughton
00:01:58
And this is really a tool that takes these eight separate areas of our life, including physical, financial professional. What else? Spiritual, Leisure, Friends, Family. I think I got all eight, and my cat, by the way, he gets here to visit, dude, you gotta get outta here. And so it takes those eight spans and we track ourselves, and how are we doing? Because sometimes we’re just not even aware how the heck are we doing? And then we rate that between one to 10, right? The idea is to get, on the whole health spider graph, all eight of these spans out closest to a 10 as possible. And the reason we do this is so many folks just focus on one of these areas of their life, financial success. And if that’s all you’re focusing on often times it’s family or friends or spiritual health is kind of diminished or just forgotten, neglected. And it’s like anything, any living being when you neglect it, it gets more fragile, withers up and dies, right? So that’s why this whole health spider graph is a great place for us to start. Do you mind if I share this so that folks who aren’t, haven’t been introduced to this. Let me share this with folks. Can you see that, Dave?
Dave Braun
00:03:23
And so Larry make sure you describe it for folks who aren’t able to watch our video.
Larry Broughton
00:03:27
Oh, good point. Good point. And so what we have here is basically goal setting using smart goals, a tool on these eight different spans. And the idea here is that, again, as I mentioned earlier, there are eight different areas where we want folks to be measuring improvement or areas where they’ve seen the less progress in their lives, on physical, financial, professional, leisure/fun, mental, spiritual, family and friends. So why are we doing this? Well, because frankly, when I first did this years ago, my business was rocking, but I turned my back on my family, turned my back on my friends. I was not taking time off. My spiritual life was in the tank. And so this is now an electronic tool that we have developed. And we’ve measured this over four different periods and you can do it over four consecutive months.
Larry Broughton
00:04:24
You can do it over, you know, once a quarter, but you rate yourself on a bunch of different metrics and you write your goals down. And then by the magic of clicking a button, it plots it onto a grid, eight spans. So ultimately it looks like a spider web and we call it a spider graph. It’s a very cool tool anyway. So, each time you measure yourself, it pops up with a different color on here. So it’s much easier to track when you look at the spider graph on how the heck it is that you’re doing. And so we oftentimes find for folks who are focused on one area of their life too much than another area of their life, kind of lower two becomes diminished. So for those who are watching, this is what the whole health spider graph looks like.
Larry Broughton
00:05:16
And I’m probably not describing it very well, but it’s very important that when you set your goals, you set what we call smart goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time sensitive. So for instance, this is from 2015, a guy named Bill Radison did it over four different periods. And he did a January, 2015, March, 2015, June, 2015 and December, 2015. So Bill didn’t have any specific time, he didn’t do it like every month or every quarter, just did it when it kind of came up, right? Actually, I guess this is quasi-quarterly. And so he was measuring his blood pressure on his physical, he wanted to get out of credit card debt, which is financial. Professionally, he wanted to complete his, the executive program that he was in. For leisure and fun he wanted to take off six days a month. For mental, he wanted to start a morning routine. For spiritual he wanted to read a meditation book in the morning as part of his morning routine and have a to-do list done each night. On family, he wanted to attend 50% of his kids’ events. That was the first time.
Larry Broughton
00:06:30
And I guess all the way through the month or all the way through the year, he wanted to spend 50% of his time on going to his kid’s events. I’m sorry, he wanted to attend 50% of his kids events. And then friends who wanted to call one friend a week to chat. He wanted to have two coffee dates a month and in a group thing. So listen, you can set your goals, whatever you want. But the key here is what’s measured is improved, right? So I’m going to unshare this and we can go back to actually chatting about what this looks like. Now, Dave, you have been one of those folks, you know what Fight Club is right, Dave, you know, the movie Fight Club. And you know what the number one rule in fight club is? What’s the number one rule in Fight Club, Dave?
Larry Broughton
00:07:13
You don’t talk about Fight Club. But there’s a meme that I saw going around that said the number one rule of 2021, it’s not to talk about 2020! But you have heard that there’s been a lot of people who have pivoted in this past year. I saw a video this morning by a woman. I guess I could mention her name, Sue Brooks, who I met through a mastermind program that I’ve spoken at, and she just bought an RV and she will be traveling around the country for the next year. She set a goal early in the year and said, this is what I’m going to do. And she started manifesting it and believing in it and taking action steps. And so now she’s has alot of her stuff moved completely into this RV, and she’s going to start traveling across the country.
Larry Broughton
00:08:05
She wanted to build her life and business so that she could do this anywhere. So what she was saying is that in spite of the challenges, 2020 had brought her, 2020 was actually one of her very best years in her life. There have been a lot of people like that. Dave, you’re one of those people. You’ve had a great year. You may have fallen short in some goals, but the lessons that you’ve learned from that based on the conversations you and I have had both professionally, personally, and our group that we belong to, it’s been a great growing year. So maybe we can kind of go through this. We can go through each of these spans and talk about what are the lessons we’ve learned in this past year, and I’ll chime in of course as well. But my sense is that this is probably, we’re going to break this into two different parts, a part one and a part two to this topic. So let’s try to get through half of these in this podcast and then we’ll hit the other half in the next one, is that all right?
Dave Braun
00:09:03
Yeah, that sounds good. And I think a couple of points on the spider graph…you explained it very well by the way, but I got a couple of points is this is whenever you do a little bit of a self examination, you’re gonna, unless you’re careful, you’re gonna hone in on that one area that you screwed up or the one area that you failed. And that’s not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is self-awareness and that awareness is what you did well and what you’d maybe need to improve on the next time, it’s to bring it to the forefront. One of the things that we’ve got in this tool, Larry, what I really love about it is, is that we solved the problem a couple of years ago with people skewing their results on the spider graph based on how they were emotionally feeling.
Larry Broughton
01:10:00
So under each of these, like under physical, we’ve got a dozen different markers that you rate yourself on. So it takes the emotional part out of it.
Dave Braun
01:10:10
Yeah. Because you want to accurately reflect how you’re doing, and you can do that a little bit better over time if you’re considering some of these, you know, these markers that we’ve got in.
Larry Broughton
01:10:21
That’s right. Because there may, I’m just going to tell you folks, it’s been a rough year for me professionally. And so depending on what day you catch me on, listen, I’m a work in progress, just like we all are. And so it depends on what day you catch me on sometimes depending on what hour of the day you catch me on, I may be on a different part of the rollercoaster ride.
Dave Braun
01:10:40
Yeah. And I think in sometimes though, too, Larry, is that you’ve got to say, well, yeah, there’s a certain result that I’ve wanted to get. But on the other hand, it’s like I was thrown a deck of cards, like your business, the hospitality industry, right. You’re thrown a deck of cards. Are you doing the best with the hand that you’ve got. Is there anything else that you could have done and you just, and that’s the way it is in life. Sometimes you just have to be satisfied with what you, what you’ve done. That you’ve put everything that you can into it.
Larry Broughton
01:11:14
That’s a hashtag TFTR, Thanks For The Reminder on that day. Well, let’s get started on this. So Dave, the first span that we tend to measure is physical. What lesson did you learn in 2020 about physical health?
Dave Braun
01:11:29
Well, I’ve always loved to go to the gym. Like I, I grew up in the gym and yeah. It’s like, I started pumping iron when I was I think it was eighth grade and freshmen in high school. One of the strongest guys in high school at the time. And I just had loved the gym. Well guess what happened in 2020 is I couldn’t go to the gym! And there’s something that we’re going to talk about later on. And I think the next episode, where we talk about sanctuaries and the gym was one of my sanctuaries where I felt safe and comfortable. We’re going to talk about that in the next episode, but one of the things I’ve discovered physically is I did not have to go to the gym to get a great workout.
Dave Braun
01:12:21
I stopped going to the gym, I think at the end of the February. And you know, we were at the conference. And so I it’s been like 10 months, I’ve found different ways using my brain to figure out how do I, how can I get around the fact that I couldn’t go to the gym? So here’s some of the things that I did was I grabbed some YouTube videos, some yoga videos, I love yoga. And I modified a couple of them, to extend them or to skip something based upon where I wanted it harder or maybe not. And so I edited them. I turned a shorter yoga,aerobic video into a longer one. And I tell you, Larry, when I’m done with that, I’m sweating like a pig! And then of course I started thinking, I supplemented with some of my own ideas.
Dave Braun
01:13:18
I have my backpack. I took, cause I’m not using my backpack to go anywhere. So I took everything out and I filled it up with, I didn’t have any free weights. Well, what did I do is I filled it up with gallons of water and bottles of water. A bottle of water weighs about eight and a little over eight pounds per gallon. So I stuffed that thing as much as I could. And then I do push-ups with it. And I’ll just yoga with it. I tell ya, I was sore on some of those workouts. They were awesome. I got some cables, I have a pull-up bar. So I was able to get a really good workout. Now I still miss going to the gym and I will once I can. But that was one of the things that I really learned, one of my top lessons is, when it’s physically and it applies to every area, but when you are denied one thing that you really enjoy, you can figure out a way around it to get that same feeling, enjoyment, that same mental exercise that you need or physical, whatever, you can figure out a way around it just, you got to embrace the change that’s around.
Larry Broughton
01:14:34
That’s great. That’s interesting. You know, some of our coaching clients are shocked when they get into the program and we start talking about this stuff, like the physical part, and particularly, there are a lot of men in our program that are about our age…
Dave Braun
01:14:47
Young bucks, right? The young bucks.
Larry Broughton
01:14:49
Exactly. Exactly. But I fall into this category too, where I tend not to go to the doctor. And so the lessons I learned this year is I was on blood pressure medication years ago, and then went off it, I dropped a bunch of weight and got fit again. And what I realized because of this,this is not an excuse. I’m just stating, this is where I was there for awhile. I was basically working around the clock. I was on calls at midnight and one o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the morning. So I was getting very little sleep. My blood pressure was way high. And so I went in for a physical early in the pandemic and he said, dude, your blood pressure is back up.
Larry Broughton
01:15:35
We need to get to get you on medication. Now in the old days, Dave, I would have fought that. And so part of the physical was, I said, okay, if this is what we have to do, this is what we have to do. So I immediately went on blood pressure medication. The lesson here is listen to your doctors. You have to do this stuff for your own health. And you’ve had some medical stuff as well. And you’ve been listening to doctors as well. So that’s one of the things I’ve learned this year, listen to people that are smarter than you are in this. Number two, one of the things on the physical routine that I have an absolutely militant about is I continue to take my morning supplements and my morning smoothie that has Super Greens, maca, cinnamon, cacao, a great high quality protein in it.
Larry Broughton
01:16:26
And then I’ve got supplements. And the funny thing is, a lot of the supplements that the CDC and a lot of these doctors are talking about to help with the whole virus thing I’ve been taking for years, which is great, D and zinc and tumeric and all these other, other things. Next thing, number three, on my health was sleep, get sleep when I can. There was a time early on in the pandemic when I was getting very little sleep. And when I was, it was very interrupted, but now I’m actually taking healthy sleep supplements, like magnesium is one of those supplements that will help you sleep. Melatonin or whatever it is you want to find, whether it’s hemp or whatever, find what you’re comfortable with, that help you sleep. Don’t just feel like you’ve got to fight it, you know? And then actually as you prepare for sleep, just like a lot of us have morning routines, we should have an evening routine of winding down. And this does tie in a little bit with, for me, the spiritual side and the mental side, is I do gratitude stuff and I find that calms me while I’m taking the supplements, some of the supplements before I go to bed and that gets better sleep. So that’s the physical side for me.
Larry Broughton
01:17:49
Anything else on the physical before we go to the next one?
Dave Braun
01:17:51
No, that’s awesome. I just think that starting off with a smoothie, I do that too. I think starting off your day, that way, it’s like, no matter what else happens, Larry, you’ve got all that nutrition. And even if you don’t eat the rest of the day, you’ve at least got the minimum that you need.
Larry Broughton
01:18:10
That’s the thing that I remind people of is that it may not support me calorically, but nutritionally, I could go forever. I could go every day and not eat the rest of the day, and I get all the nutrients that I need right there.
Dave Braun
01:18:26
Okay. Critically important.
Larry Broughton
01:18:27
And by the way, and then it reduces a lot of the cravings from the day. All right, let’s switch to the next one. Dave, it’s financial. What have you learned in the past year?
Dave Braun
01:18:36
So one of the things that was important to me, that I learned and Larry, some of these lessons are just like a TFTR. Thanks for the reminder. So for me, it was the importance of having a financial advisor and here was the big reasonhy is that? You know me and how we’ve saved over the years and we’re doing good, pretty good. And you know, one of the things that I’ve done over the last since, and I’ve got it every single month since January, 2010, so that’s coming up to 11 years now, I’ve tracked my net worth every month. So I’ve got data to be able to make decisions and stuff, but sometimes, you still will succumb to the emotions. And if you guys all remember in March, towards the end of March, well, actually at the end of February, the stock market was way up doing great and then pandemic hit, lockdowns,
Dave Braun
01:19:39
Everything shut down in the financial markets. Within a matter of like, I guess about three weeks, the markets went down by like 30 something percent in a matter of few weeks, that was unprecedented. It was totally unprecedented. It’s gone down more than that, but that’s been over the course of several months. Cheryl and I were like, what do we do? Should we sell? We were worried, like everybody else was worried, is this going to ever come back? So we started panicking a little bit. And so we had an advisor, the importance of having advisors in every area of your life, but specifically financial, we talked to him and he’s like, and I’ve known him for a long time and we’re friends. And he said, dude, if you sell, before I sell, I’m going to come wrestle you to the ground. You’re going to have to pin me to the ground before you’re going to sell. And you know, of course it’s my money and I could do with it what I wanted, but you get the idea, right? He was like, I’m not going to let you make a mistake.
Larry Broughton
02:20:54
He could’ve got fees.
Dave Braun
02:20:56
Oh my gosh. Yeah. He could’ve said whatever. It doesn’t matter. You know, I agree. Do what you want, but no he cares. Right. And because we’ve stayed in and what we’ve done is we’ve had a really good year from a financial perspective. And so what, what they also did is there’s a unique quality of them is that they’ve got the young and the old together and they give the proper perspective of the financial markets, which is so important because there’s a lot of history there. And one of the things too, is that I learned that we, in the moment of, I guess, a pandemic, but of a crisis, we will automatically go to think, oh my gosh, this has never happened before.
Dave Braun
02:21:50
This is the worst ever. But I was reading an article that they sent me and you go back in time and all these financial crisises, remember that real estate crap that happened in 2008-9, and the internet bubble in 2000, everybody said, this is unprecedented! It’s never happened before, what do we do? Every single time…and we recover every single time. And it’s been that way forever. So somebody like that, a good mentor or a coach, this just happened to be in the financial area, but the good mentor or coach will have the experience and will give you a good perspective. Because if you go back and you think about it, it’s like, wait a second, we had some pretty bad crisises in this country. When Nixon resigned, the president resigned, that shocked our political world, and the person that was the president, Gerald Ford ,was actually unelected. He was appointed vice president before that. And then 911. So there’s been all kinds of crazy stuff that happens. And in the moment we get caught up in thinking that, oh, we’re not going to survive. Or this is the worst ever. And it’s important to have advisors in all areas to help you navigate those waters.
Larry Broughton
02:23:11
Now there are a lot of our viewers and listeners who have not been as blessed and been able to seed or fund a retirement or savings over the years. Maybe it’s through divorce or economic tragedy or whatever it is right? If their life has been spun upside down. And so you may recall, a few years ago, we put together a tool. I forget the exact name of it. It was the cashflow document. Do you have the app I’m gonna have that there? 48 powerful ways to immediately improve your personal and business cashflow immediately. Now, the funny thing is Dave, we’ve given that away at talks that we’ve done. We give to our coaching clients, I think it’s actually available on store.yoogozi.com.
Dave Braun
02:24:05
I don’t know. We take it down sometimes.
Larry Broughton
02:24:08
It used to be. But we’ve had folks go through that and who have kind of found money in their home and in their lifestyle to the tune of some folks, several thousand dollars a month. Then there’s 48 different ways to kind of go through. It’s basically an audit on your life and to come up with some found money. And I tell you, during this past year, I’ve had to use that, that document. Because you know, I’ve not taken a paycheck in 11 months at this point 10, 10 months from the company. I’m just being honest with you folks. You’ll see that, we’re all about being honest around here. And so we’ve had to be cautious around the Broughton household about where we’re spending money. And I realized, Dave, on the financial side, the awakening I’ve had this past year is that I got fat and happy for the last several years.
Larry Broughton
02:25:07
When you’ve got a lot of money coming in, it covers a lot of the warts that we’ve got in our lives. And I’ve made the commitment. I’ve prayed about this. I’ve made the commitment, when things turn back around ,and they’re about to for us on the hotel side, is I’m not going to go back to the old sloppy ways of managing my money? So that’s been a wake up call for me. One of the things I want to remind people of when we talk about the financial side and you’re talking about net worth, and I think that’s so important to be measuring our net worth, but don’t tie your self worth to your net worth. This is why we do a whole health spider graph. There are a lot of other areas in our lives that we need to be measuring and not just the financial side, but I think particularly for men who aren’t entrepreneurs, but particularly for entrepreneurs, we do tie our self worth to our net worth. And maybe one of the tools we need to be working on over the years, Dave, is how do we take this and actually put value to our whole health spider graph. Wouldn’t that’d be an awesome thing, right? So that there’s actually an index for, what’s the value of freedom, holy smokes. Like it’s true freedom in our lives. So don’t tell your self worth to your net worth.
Dave Braun
02:26:24
I’m glad you brought that up because that’s related to, on the spider graph, is you could be in danger of doing that to any area. Especially in any area, you may have a tendency to do that to any area that maybe you’re, out of a scale of one to 10, you’re a two or something, you can say, oh, I’m just no good. I’m a two. I can’t seem to get a handle on this.
Larry Broughton
02:26:48
Yeah, that’s right. So the other lesson that I learned in the financial area, and then it’s a reminder, cause I’ve known this, it was one of those aha ,TFTR moments is that the average business in the United States has 28 days of cash flow in their business. Dave, we’re now 10 pushing 11 months into this pandemic. And this is why a lot of businesses have gone under. And the hospitality, travel ,restaurant, retail businesses have been hit harder than any industry. That’s not me saying it cause I’m in it. It’s just a fact. And what do you do when the light switch gets turned off and all of a sudden zero revenue coming in by no fault of your own, like you were saying earlier, how do you weather that storm? And so for us, we thank goodness, from the management company perspective, we’ve never had a lot of debt.
Larry Broughton
02:27:44
We’ve had a revolving line of credit, that kind of thing, but we’ve never been a debt heavy organization, but I can tell you moving forward, we’re going to have a much larger cash reserve than we did this time. Now it is 10 months later, we’re still surviving, that tells you something. But it’s razor thin sometimes. And so we’re really going to have a much larger cash reserve. And the great thing about when you’ve got a cash reserve, you can continue to invest in people and marketing. When you don’t have those and you can’t invest in that stuff., and those are the things that are really going to make your business grow. So those are my lessons in financial. Anything else Dave, you want to talk about there?
Dave Braun
02:28:25
No, that’s great.
Larry Broughton
02:28:27
Let’s talk about the next span in the whole health spider graph. So far, we’ve talked about physical. We’ve talked about financial. The next span is professional. What’s been a lesson that you learned in the past 12 months about your professional life, Dave?
Dave Braun
02:28:40
I think there’s a couple of them that I wanted to bring out. One of ’em was the importance of continuing, even when things are uncertain and when things are crazy. And sometimes even when you don’t feel like it, the importance of continuing to invest in new products and services that are going to benefit your clients. And of course investing in yourself and your company and your team members, the importance of continuing to invest in new products and services that are going to meet the needs for your clients. So for us at Pro Website Creators, we’re rolling out now our SEO service, search engine optimization service. And by doing that, we’ve learned that we made some mistakes in some of our designs in the past when we redone some websites. And when I say mistakes, they’re minor mistakes, but it’s taken us to a much better level as an agency than if we wouldn’t have done that. And so we’re still committed to doing it, we’re pushing that out, even though there’s this craziness going on. So that would be one example. And the other example is what we have done, Larry, you and I, and October is how we launched a HireMyVA 2.0.
Larry Broughton
02:29:59
In spite of what was going on?
Dave Braun
03:30:02
But we kept getting the nudge, the need, and people hearing that they’re struggling with working remotely, they’re struggling with hiring people virtually. And how does that work and how do you keep track? And it’s one of the reasons why we got this podcast as well. A couple of major things here in the last year and those have been really important. And when you’re launching new things, it helps you mentally as well.
Larry Broughton
03:30:34
Yeah, it sure does. It reminds me, Dave, it does remind you, and we’ve also launched the VICTORY masterclass based on our best selling book is that, I learned this in martial arts, but heard it from folks who have been trained in the medical area as well. When you learn a new technique, you watch the technique three times, you do the technique three times and you teach it three times. And it gets your brain really wired well. Think about that. People doing surgery. They’ve watched it three times. They’ve done it three times and now they’re teaching it three times. So that’s what I think that this does, when you develop a new program or new system, it doesn’t have to be a program that you’re marketing, but a new marketing system or a new onboarding process. When you start teaching it you start realizing, oh, there might be a little hole here in our process.
Larry Broughton
03:31:28
And so I really like that. You know, the other thing I think Dave, that I learned in this past year is not just investing in the professional development of our team and our clients but invest in the emotional and spiritual development of our teams. One of our mantras is if you want to do great things, you gotta be a great person. And so if we can create great people on our teams, then professionally they develop, the more professionally developed they are the better service they’re gonna provide to our clients. And so I think that it iss imperative as leaders, as business owners and entrepreneurs, to, when you see greatness or you see potential in your team member, you speak it out loud, you say it to them. That’s been the big thing for me because there’s been times during the past year where I’ve had team members who have been like, just doubting themselves, because they’re busting their tail, they’re trying new things, some things aren’t working and they’re like, oh, well, it’s a different environment. Yeah, that might’ve worked 10 months ago when everything was sunshine and lollipops and rainbows, but it’s not now, but at least you’re taking the risk. So professionally, the thing that I’ve learned is to allow your team members to take smart risk. And if they fail, do an AAR, an After Action Review, learn from it and try to maybe do a course correction along the way. So those are the two professional things I learned in this in the past year.
Dave Braun
03:33:03
Yeah. I’ve got one more. I think the other one was I, and I still want to reach out to customers more. It’s not natural for me. So I just need to reach out to them more and not in an impersonal way, an email. Cause we did that at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we recorded a webinar and we said, here’s some of the things that you can do to help survive, once this is going. And so we did that. We, we did that before. Like any other company did that, which was great. But I think there needs to be a little bit more personal reach out on my part and to take advantage of videos.
Dave Braun
03:33:57
You remember Ryan Ottosen, right? So he reached out to me, he was updating his contact list and he recorded a video message and he said, reply back, How can I pray for you? That kind of thing. And so I replied back and he recorded a video of himself praying for me and sent it to me. And then I responded, I did the same thing for him. And it was like, why can’t I record a couple of videos, just talking to my clients and asking them, Hey, you want to schedule something? And we can talk about your business. There’s so many ways to use the technology to be a little bit more personal because email is so impersonal. So there’s all these little ways and it won’t cost us that much time.
Larry Broughton
03:34:44
Yeah. And you made a comment about 90 seconds ago, 120 seconds ago about the people who pay our bills, who buy our services and use the word customers. And just now about 30 seconds ago, you referred to them as clients. I think that if we can get it in our heads, Dave, and you do, and it was just a slip of the tongue. When we think of those folks as clients, we’re more likely to reach out to them and believe me, I’m the same way with you. We could all do a better job of reaching out to our clients. But if you think about them as customers, which are transactional, you take the money and then the business is done, you’re more likely not to reach back out to them. But if you think that everybody who gives you money for some service or product you provided as a client that listen, you’re one of those guys that clients become your friends. I’m always impressed with that. And so I think that’s a good way to kind of get around that mental roadblock that we might have.
Dave Braun
03:35:54
If I think of my clients as friends, I would never call them customers. But yeah, I think it was a Freudian slip, but yeah, you’re right. Like you had said, language is important.
Larry Broughton
03:36:02
Words have meaning.
Dave Braun
03:36:06
We’ve gone through three of them. Larry, we got five more to go. Do you want to do one more?
Larry Broughton
03:36:11
Let’s do one more. Let’s do leisure and fun. And then we can wrap up this podcast and do part two another day.
Dave Braun
03:36:17
So leisure and fun. A little bit more leisurely and a little bit more fun here. So one of the things that I’ve really learned a little bit, kind of relearned, most of these things you already know, but for me, it was to really embrace cycles of rest and execution. And what I had to do this holiday season, you know, I enjoy my work and everything, and I feel so obligated to my clients to work hard for them. But what I decided to do this time is just to force myself and my team to take downtime between Christmas and New Years. And of course, we set it up to minimize any impact, this is a great time to do it, but I forced myself to take that downtime. I said, Nope, I’m not going to go to work. I’m just going to allow myself to do a little binge Netflix watching. And so one of those lessons is that, and we covered everything as a team, as we needed to, but one of the lessons to be able to do that is you got to build a team!
Larry Broughton
03:37:30
Yeah,
Dave Braun
03:37:31
Yeah, exactly. You got to build a team because we had somebody covering every day so that they can handle an emergency that came up or they could alert me or whatever. So that was just a lesson that I needed o relearn.
Larry Broughton
03:37:49
Which is a huge benefit of this program! We have all started out, listen every business started out with one person and an idea, and by the way, zero revenue. So don’t beat yourselves up about where you are in the process. But you can’t take a week off or two weeks off around the holidays and have clients and do it by yourself, and invariably something is going to come up. And so the purpose of this program is to help you find more freedom. And so I’m glad to hear that you were able to do that. We had a client, not a client, one of our outsource services when we signed up with them, they said, Hey, here are the days that are office is closed. And I remember looking at like, what, you’re closing your business down?
Larry Broughton
03:38:44
Listen, if there’s an emergency, of course, we will have an MOD, a manager on duty, available to help you. But for the most part, we’re not doing our regular services then. And I thought, yeah, you don’t know me, but I remember as we approached Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and then New Years, they just send out a gentle reminder, just let you know, our office is gonna be closed between this date and this date should you need, if it should be a real emergency, there will be someone available. And I said, darn it, good for them. Good for them. And good for you, Dave, for doing that.
Dave Braun
03:39:19
Yeah. Sometimes we don’t realize that this entrepreneurial journey is not a continuous sprint. It’s a marathon.
Larry Broughton
03:39:27
Well, it is a marathon. I think most people get into the entrepreneurial arena because of the freedom that its meant to create for them. Some people use money, profit, cashflow as a benchmark, but truly the reason most people are in the entrepreneurial arena is because they want some kind of freedom. They don’t want have to report to someone else. They want to be able to take an idea, make it a reality. But we can’t do that 24/7 day in, day out, we need a breather. We need to have a breather. Anything else in the leisure and fun, Dave, I’ve got one other or two others. What I have found on the leisure and fun side is, I have to be intentional. I do love what I do. I do love the entrepreneurial journey.
Larry Broughton
04:40:14
I do love the ups and downs. Dave, you might not believe it. But even when I’m having the downs, I’d rather do this than ever go work for somebody else. But I have to remind myself, my kids have this cat, that’s for them, but my dog is my, oh my gosh, he has my heart. And he has forced me to get at least some leisure and fun in because I have to take him out for a walk. I’ve got to take him to the park to run, or he lets me know it’s time to go! So I listen to that. And when you’re accountable to someone else or something else, it forces you to do it. This is why accountability partners are so good, it’s why a gym, a workout partner is important.
Larry Broughton
04:41:06
But the other little thing that I’ve really gotten in a good habit of, and I’m not embarrassed to tell you this, I get amazing sunsets from my house. I live up in the hills, I look back towards the ocean and I get these stunning sunsets and every night, like virtually every night, I’ll bet you over 300 nights this past year, I went out, watched the sunset, took a few deep breaths, took some pictures and videos and send some of the videos to a few friends and was like, ah, so I’m enjoying this vicariously through texting these videos out. Those little things bring a little bit of leisure and a little bit of pleasure into my life. And it’s also a spiritual thing for me too. I think that’s one of the keys for leisure. Like you said, wherever you can find sanctuary for some people, leisure is going to the gym. And also piggybacks onto the physical. But for me, I think open space, sunsets, it revitalizes me. And that is a fun little thing. And then I get into fun, little banter as well. Left to my own devices, I would work until I dropped, you know, every day. I can’t do that any longer.
Larry Broughton
04:42:34
So today we talked about four spans on the eight spans of the whole health spider graph. We talked about physical, the lessons we learned there, we talked about financial. We talked about professional. We talked about leisure and fun. I’d like to hear any of you folks, if you had some aha moments or some lessons learned in the past year, leave them in the comments wherever you see or hear this recording. I’d love to hear it. We’re always listening to, we’re trying to find new ways to grow as well. And if you’ve got some goals for the next year, I’d love to hear those as well. The best part of this program, I think is the community forum that we have. And so if you want to go into the community forum and post your stuff, you’re welcome to do that as well. But let’s share ideas because we are all on this journey together, this entrepreneurial journey, which is one of the most dangerous and risky journeys you could be on in life other than maybe picking up a weapon and being deployed. And it’s better to do it with some partners, with some friends along the way who’ve got your back. So please participate in the forum on this, the community forum. Dave, anything else my friend?
Dave Braun
04:43:48
No, that about wraps it. The next one, we’re going to talk about the mental things you learned.
Larry Broughton
04:43:56
Cuck-coo!
Dave Braun
04:43:57
The spiritual, family, and then of course friends.
Larry Broughton
04:44:00
Yeah. That’s good.
Dave Braun
04:44:02
Well thank you everyone for being with us. This was fun. I know it was a little bit longer episode than normal, but hope you stuck with it and learned a few things like Larry said, give us your thoughts, give us your comments, your ah-has, right? Just share those with us. But remember overall, building a team is THE way to reclaim your freedom! We talked about that today, allowing you to have freedom, allowing you to have leisure time off, assuming you want to take it, build a team to do you want to do, but that is what ultimately will help you to get freedom. We’re here to help you, of course. So three things we want you to do right now, we’d really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to the podcast. That way you’ll get notifications when we’ve got the new episodes. And then number two is give us a rating. Preferably five star. And then number three, go to HireMyVA.com for more information on our course and our community. Because remember even without experience, without any experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for, hire, and thrive with virtual assistants. Larry and I’ve helped a lot of folks. And of course we can help you too! Just go to HireMyVA.com for more information!
Larry Broughton
04:45:10
That’s right. Hey, my friends, we love you. And we’re glad you’re on this journey with us and do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor. Now go do something significant today. Go get ’em!
Dave Braun
04:45:20
Take care, bye!
