TEA 254: The 3-Step Decision Framework for When Life Hits the Fan

0:00SPEAKER_00What do you do when you feel like everything is just crashing and burning in your life or maybe in an aspect of your business, which I guess is your life? And and and that's the question that I really want to answer today. And this was kind of this was kind of spawned by one of our clients uh that you know and love and we're very close to. And I ended up on a an impromptu hour and 40 minute one-on-one coaching session yesterday. And she had so much stuff going wrong. It's like she had climbed from the depths

0:30SPEAKER_00of like being stuck in her business for to like of $60,000, $70,000 a month. She climbed to almost three, well, I think she pushed over $300,000 a month in about a year and a half. She's cranking. In the last three months, things have just been going downhill. And I don't know if anyone here has ex listening to this or watching this has experienced that. But what do you do in those moments? And it was a really long, good conversation. And so I have brought Robert Reyes onto the podcast. Rob, I'm so excited you're here,

1:00SPEAKER_00man. Dude, I'm excited to be here. We're we Rob and I actually we we snuck away. We snuck, we snuck away from the whole team is moving right now, the entire building. Uh I mean, like we just finished renovating the second floor of our offices in downtown Ashland, Ohio. Now we bought this building back in 2018, almost two years of renovation uh for the e-commerce alley. We've occupied the first floor forever. We put up two private offices in it. We've we've now outgrown it. We're growing, and we had to renovate the second floor. So we gutted

1:31SPEAKER_00it.

1:32SPEAKER_01We have a

1:33SPEAKER_00It's so exciting. It's like the dream, it's the dream space, man. It looks amazing up there. It's beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I don't uh yeah, I don't I I had a vision years and years ago for what it would be like. I'm like, we'll have a studio, we'll have a control room, we'll have private offices, we'll have a huge, beautiful conference room with natural light. Right.

1:51SPEAKER_01Are you gonna keep the dungeon though? That's what I want to know.

1:54SPEAKER_00Yeah, where we are right now, by the way, anybody listening, we're in the dungeon. We call it the dungeon. This is this is actually in our building, the basement of it. It's really cool, actually. If you're watching this online, here I'll go to a wide shot here. There's this beautiful brick, or brick, uh stone in the background. This building is technically natural stone. It's natural stone. This is here originally. This is about a 116-year-old building right now. It's really cool. It was built in 1910. So this is built, it's on the National Historic Registry. And behind me, I'm gonna switch

2:24SPEAKER_00to a shot of me. If you're looking on YouTube right now, you'll see this like fireplace back here is actually a that was a tunnel, and this tunnel went to an old bank, and it's how they used to smuggle money. Yeah, we have the 12 historians come tell us the same exact story. They said they used to have a the bank used to trolley money out through this tunnel here, and they would actually go out the back with it because you know how we have that alley right by the restaurant back there that we own? Yeah, so they would literally trolley it out of for security. Because back in the day, back in like 1910, you didn't have cameras. So it was like if the bad guys just weren't on the scene by then,

2:55SPEAKER_00they just got away.

2:56SPEAKER_01Yeah, right. You didn't have bulletproof vans and all the security personnel share.

3:01SPEAKER_00Yeah, you just had someone on a horse and buggy or whatever the heck it was, you Isn't that crazy? Yeah, we had like 12 historians. But all that to say, we call this the dungeon. We joke, it's really cool down here. And and and you may not see it, but I have vision. This could be like speakeasy vibe, hang area for the the the crew and then clients when they come in. It's a beautiful space. I thought that was one of your dreams. Yeah, which so so right now, just to bring everyone up to speed, and I want to apologize first of all. I have received messages and DMs for the fact that we took a three-week hiatus on releasing

3:32SPEAKER_00podcast episodes. And I had people message me, I had someone message me, I hope she's listening right now. I think her name is Elise. My name is Agnise from Australia. She's like, hey, I don't know when you guys are releasing podcast episodes again, because I've been listening to it. Could you do an episode on AI video? And so Connor's flying up here uh next week for our mastermind we're hosting in person, which we're trying to get construction done and it's done now, and we all had clients flying in. And Connor, who's one of our coaches, he knows he's also an operator of a probably tracking five, six million in the business right now. He's gonna talk

4:02SPEAKER_00about AI video, and that's what was one of the requests. So, Robert, I brought you on here. If anyone doesn't know of Robert, um, I think we've only done one podcast episode in the past. Oh, one or two.

4:13SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, that's true. So so I brought Rob on, he is the director of like our coaching and community, which is just incredible. And Rob knows a lot about frameworks and how we think and what we do, and you get to encounter a lot of people that are in tough spots.

4:26SPEAKER_01Absolutely.

4:27SPEAKER_00I mean, most of the what I've observed is most people don't show up to coaching when they're good. The ones that do, I'm so proud because I'm like, yes, you don't just need coaching and help when things are good. You need it all the time.

4:40SPEAKER_01I feel like it's happening more frequently where we're actually having e-com owners showing up, being the flies on the wall, and actually providing encouragement in the chat as people are getting. So like I see the community growing in a beautiful way.

4:55SPEAKER_00Yes, it is. It's so, it's so special, and and I'm just so grateful for what we get to do um every single day. And so I brought Robert on because like I want to talk about something that is very real and visceral and we feel. And it's not if this is going to happen to you. It's like when this is going to happen to you. And that is stuff's not gonna go your way. You're gonna get the diagnosis in life, you're gonna get the the the deal is gonna fall through with the wholesaler, the sales aren't gonna come, your ad account is gonna get banned, something's gonna crash and burn

5:25SPEAKER_00at some point, at least in my experience. You ever have one of those happen? Oh, absolutely. Life doesn't go your way?

5:31SPEAKER_01Just a few times. That's sarcasm, by the way. I know it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell.

5:36SPEAKER_00You know, we were just talking, Rob and I were talking this morning. We're like, we're geeking out. We're at our our our lunchroom table, and we're like, we have our iPads open and we're just like geeking out, like drawing frameworks. I'm like, okay, so here's a new way, I'm starting to think about this. And he's like, what if we do this? And so we like geek out on frameworks and thinking. And one of the things we're talking about this morning was Kaizen. Can you explain Kaizen? Any anybody here?

5:55SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I I learned Kaizen, I would probably say about five years ago, truly, and and I heard about it before, but Kaizen, the principle ultimately is that small incremental improvements over time lead to much more success. So most of the the easiest way to explain it is for weight loss journeys. You have, you know, you have two people. One is that saying to themselves,

6:26SPEAKER_01I want to lose 20 pounds by summer so that I could go to the beach and look phenomenal, right? It's it's so common. Everyone thinks I want to lose 20 pounds in the next four months. They spend the next four months really trying to come up with, okay, so what fitness plan do I have to do? What diet do I have to run? Right? And and they inevitably a month goes by, and then another month goes by, and they try the one diet, but they find out that they really just don't like it. And so they end up falling off the diet

6:56SPEAKER_01and and they're chasing these trends, and summer comes along and they're upset, right? In Kaizen, this principle of small improvements, instead, you tell yourself today, I'm going to not drink two cans of coke, I'll only drink one, right? Today, I'm not going to keep buying white bleached wheat like bread, I'm gonna go for the whole grain, right? And then over time, you start making better healthy choices. Inevitably, by

7:27SPEAKER_01the time summer comes along, because you're changing all these little habits, you've actually lost more weight than the person that was two in their head. So I I equate that to e-comm with our clients of don't overthink it, make a change, make a step.

7:45SPEAKER_00Rob sharing that this morning, and I come in and I'm like, I actually look at this differently. I look at it as, which I agree with it by the way, the incremental. Like if I was to say, hey, I'm gonna make a 1% growth every single week, 2% growth every week, it'll compound. I understand compounding, and that's great. I looked at it as like a lot of times things feel sudden where everything feels like it's crashing and burning right now, and we believe that it's just because like it's just like a flip of a switch and suddenly everything's happening. And very, very rarely, short of meta outages

8:16SPEAKER_00and things out of our control, which is the absolute minority moments in life, it's actually gradual and then sudden. And so you were talking about Kaizen, and I was like, you know, I think of the conversation I had, it feels like everything's crashing and burning, but a lot of times things happen gradually, but they but there's a moment where the pain peaks. And if you feel this pain at the height, and it just everything hits right. And for this client, truthfully, I I was meeting with her and I said, I'm like, I asked her about, you know, some other aspects of her life. She was really vulnerable about like a surgery

8:47SPEAKER_00thing that went wrong, a diagnosis of someone that she loves that happened, and then her business is going downhill, like the revenue is going downhill at the same time. It's like so everything kind of compounded to this moment. Some people call that the perfect storm. And so I look at it as if you're experiencing a moment in life where it feels feels like everything is crashing and burning, the worst that could happen is literally happening. Uh sometimes it is suddenly, but sometimes it is gradual, most often it's actually gradually. And in business, I am a believer that it's

9:17SPEAKER_00largely self-induced. And so that's why I was telling Rob with I'm like, you know, incremental and good direction, good. Incremental and bad direction, bad, because you don't realize you're doing it because it's so small until it's too late or you feel an extreme amount of pain.

9:37SPEAKER_02Yeah.

9:38SPEAKER_00And so, so in this, regardless of how you get there, some things are sudden, some things are kind of gradual. What I think of is this is like circumstances will change. Sometimes we'll gradually put ourselves in a good spot or gradually put ourselves in a bad spot. But who we are in the moment shouldn't change. And that's ultimately what I think this I want this, I want to talk through a framework of thinking. And I'm inviting Rob into this, by the way. He volunteered and I was like, hey, walk downstairs with me. I want you to sit on this podcast. He has no idea what we're about to walk through. Yeah.

10:07SPEAKER_00Um and I want to take you on this journey of it because I know you've gone through tough stuff in your life. Yeah. And somebody listening right now is in a tough spot right now. They're in the like crap's hitting the fan. I feel like everything is falling apart. I feel like my personal life, my family life, my business life, something is going wrong, or they're in the perfect storm of all of it going wrong.

10:30SPEAKER_02Yeah.

10:31SPEAKER_00And I want to walk the journey with them and with you if that's all right.

10:33SPEAKER_02Yeah.

10:34SPEAKER_01I actually totally have something that 100% relates to that. And it surprisingly enough incorporates all three.

10:43SPEAKER_00Business, personal, family? Yes. Okay, so I want okay, so tell me about tell me about a moment in your life or an experience that you had. And everybody that's listening or watching right now, I want you to think of this. What is a moment that was so painful that you can remember in the past part of your life that you made it through? What you got?

11:03SPEAKER_01So when I was about 20 years old, and actually from 19 to 20, I I went to pursue a dream of building a restaurant with my dad. And that had always been his dream growing up. And so I myself felt very just like energized with the idea of holy cow, I can help impact making his dream a reality. I'm so down. So I left Ohio

11:33SPEAKER_01and moved to Utah in a two weeks' time. Thinking back, it was a completely irrational decision. But but I'm You made the decision in two weeks to just up and move Ohio to Utah? Yes. I was I thought it was like way more plain than that. No, I took everything. Well, and by everything, I mean you're 19, so you know, a guitar, you're old Honda. Yeah, yeah, right. So like I didn't I didn't have a lot, but uh but but yeah, I I uprooted my life at the time, and at the time I was actually

12:04SPEAKER_01going to college for human services, by the way.

12:06SPEAKER_00Oh, I didn't know that.

12:07SPEAKER_01Did you graduate college? No, I dropped out to Utah. Oh, drop dropouts unite, man. Yeah, absolutely. I think that we're both living our passions. So uh so I end up moving uh across the United States to Utah to start this restaurant. Well, to make a long story short, the restaurant was pretty successful, but it could have been more successful. And so actually, this year marks the 10-year anniversary that the restaurant ended up closing down. So so the

12:37SPEAKER_01the decision to inevitably move back and lead me back here eventually, right, happened just because my my dad and I just were having conflicting business views and and we weren't really in tune with making the same or making decisions that would follow the same path. And so ultimately, the way that I described it to him was two lions can't share the same den. Wow, yeah, you told your dad that?

13:08SPEAKER_01Yeah, because because what I found is that we were both very much leaders, right? We were both that that type of I'm going to lead charge and I'm going to make decisions. Now, of course, me being the son and having much less experience. Looking back, I have a lot of reflection on the fact that rightly so, he had a lot of hesitation to some of my recommendations, right? Because I had less experience than him, 14 years less, as he would remind me at the

13:39SPEAKER_01time. But but one thing that continually has happened since is he constantly says, Man, if I would have just listened to a few of those suggestions that you would have gave me, I think that we would have been able to make it. I just wish that you would have never left. So that's why I I'm starting to think through because when you said making small incremental decisions that are in the wrong way, and then eventually everything crashes down around you. In my mind, I experienced

14:09SPEAKER_01each little misdirection the wrong way in our communication style. And in his view, and we just talked about it not too long ago, in his view, he just never understood why I left over an argument over a plating arrangement of a strawberry chicken salad. In his mind, it was all about the fact that we were fighting about a salad. Yeah, but he thought that was the sudden that was that was that was the sudden catalyst.

14:39SPEAKER_01He could never understand over the years why a chicken salad ended up breaking apart our business arrangement. And for me, it was well, Dad, actually, we had multiple, multiple instances where I would give you recommendations on small incremental improvements, such as changing the hours of operation, changing the wage structures, commission structures, whatever you have, right? Changing the way that we hire people, the interview processes. And mind you, I'm

15:09SPEAKER_0119 or 20 years old, so I get it. I I was inexperienced, but I've always kind of had this mind of dreaming better ways to make things. And and so like I I have a lot of grace with that. You know, I I probably if my son was coming up to me and telling me how to run my dream business, yeah. It's hard. It would be hard.

15:30SPEAKER_00To not think that I know best. Exactly. I know better, I'm wiser. Yeah, but in the heat of the moment, I mean, that was really hard for me.

15:38SPEAKER_01Yeah.

15:39SPEAKER_00I mean, so if you make the decision. So you go through this experience with your dad, you move out to Utah on a whim, you go there. How long did you work there for? A year. Okay. So you worked almost to the date. Almost so one year, it's not like you showed up and then on day 365, suddenly everything went to crap and you're like, all right, see ya, I'm out of here. Is it was probably every little interaction, every disagreement, every thought, negative thing that you ever, every jab that he made at you or slight that he made at you that was like, you know,

16:09SPEAKER_00lighthearted and kind of jokey, but it was sarcastically poking funny. Sarcasm. Yeah. So it's like it probably was like death by thousand cutting you exactly the whole way until finally that like they kind of say, the straw, the boat, the camel's back, right? So that experience. Now, I want to what how old were you? I was 20 when I made the decision to move back. Okay. You're 20 years old. Looking back at that moment, what's something that you would tell that version of yourself going through that moment now? Because you've made it

16:40SPEAKER_00through the other side and you probably feel like a much better spot of life.

16:43SPEAKER_01I feel like it empowered me to be the leader that I am, honestly. The the amount of turmoil that that was or the trial that I went through led to the way that I think today, right? So I wouldn't take it back.

16:58SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and I agree on, I mean, like so many of these experiences can be used for good, or they can be used for turmoil that we turn back and we just constantly reflect on how terrible it was and what was meaningful. Ruminate on the past, right. But you took it and you've used it for good. But I want you to I want you to think of something. So when you're going through that, I want you to picture what it was like in the moment, the strawberry salad, you're with your dad, there's that moment, right? If you were to go look back on the however many years ago, 10-year-old version of you was 16 years ago. Okay, so if you look 16

17:29SPEAKER_00years, oh, because it was 10 years since the business shut down. So 16-year younger version of you, you if you were literally able to appear, go back in time and tell tell that person, looking at that person going through that version of that moment, what's something you would have told them about that.

17:50SPEAKER_01I think at the immediate moment when we had the argument, we

17:58SPEAKER_01both had this way of kind of shutting down. And so we ended on a bad note, a sour note, and we both shut down. And he basically said, Let's talk about it tonight after work, but take the day off. And I didn't have a car on my own, so I was left to wander to Park City, which is a beautiful city. But when you've lived there for a year, you've seen every

18:28SPEAKER_01store. So there wasn't a lot of sightseeing that I was gonna do for the whole work day. So I was just very frustrated. But in the moment, I remember just thinking, what do I do? I'm stranded, I'm lost. I there's not a taxi in sight that's going to drive me an hour and a half home. I'm not gonna stay outside this entire time. And so what I would have probably told myself is, hey, just breathe. Everything's gonna be fine, and