Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Hey guys real quick, if you know somebody who’s in business, or if you know somebody who’s trying to start their own business or better their life, would you partner with me in changing lives and share the show with them? If not, could you really just leave a review or rate it, I appreciate the partnership guys.

Well, today, I want to really talk about focus. And I really want to talk about a mistake that Andrew and I made early on in business. First, focus is very important. And I’ll define focus focus is What you’re currently looking at. And focus is where you’re directing all of your energy and effort into, right. And so if you’re focused on marketing for the company, a lot of your energy and effort is going to go into building out marketing or whatever it is, if you’re focused on culture, and implementing culture, all your energy and effort or the majority of your energy and effort is going to go building out culture. So focused to me also means What is taking the majority of time from you to accomplish and where you’re putting the majority of your energy and effort into.

So that being said, when Andrew and I started business, and when we opened up the company, one of our biggest problems we had was a lack of focus. Because this is What happened, we started getting clients and we started having production work. It was me and him when we started out, we are grinding, we made the conscious decision not to go in debt, we didn’t want to go in debt, we didn’t want to be tied to a bank and then tied to monthly payments every month to hold overheads we didn’t want to have investors in our lives, because we didn’t want somebody else to own us or own the company. Right. And so it was just us. And What happened is, we lost focus of What we were doing. Because all of a sudden, we have promises to keep to clients in this, this is What happens. We had promises to keep clients in. So we let our work in our own work be sacrificed and be hindered and hurt to keep our promises to our clients.

And What I mean by promises is this, oh, Here’s our service, they hire us for the service. And now we have promised to fulfill our end of the deal. When they signed the contract it included us and they’re like, Hey, this is What we promised to do for you. We agreed to do marketing for you. We’ve agreed to all these design sets and all these other things that we have promised you that we would accomplish and do and do well. And when we did that, when we got into those places, we lost focus of What we are building. And especially because we are new to the game, we had a lot of fires in the company. So you had all these things pulling at us in different directions. And we lost sight of the original goal, which was What to build a company to build and create a living organism that is self sustaining. Without Andrew and I.

That’s one of my definitions for a company is a living organism because it’s alive, it just lives differently than a human being. Instead of needing nutrients, it needs cashflow, and it needs people. It needs trust and reputation identity. It’s really similar to people. But it’s a living organism that is self sustaining. And we lost sight of that. And as a result, we got sucked into production work, we got sucked into all the technical we got sucked into all these things. And then finally, when we got sick and tired of being sick and tired, we lifted our heads up and like What happened to us. It’s like, Oh, we lost focus of the original goal. We lost focus of What we are out to build.

And I say this lightly. We’ve got a Harvard degree in stupidity. I know a lot of What not to do, because I’ve done a lot of What not to do. And this is one of the biggest things. And I would say even the biggest regret I have when starting the business with Andrew is not prioritizing, and setting aside set hard time every day that this is for us to build. And this is for us to create the vision that we want to create. And part of it is we got stuck on how do you do it? How do we technically need to do this? Right? I didn’t, I didn’t have any corporate experience. He didn’t have any corporate experience. We started from scratch, we really started really weird for how most people start. Most people, they get a job with where they want to work, which I think is an excellent idea. If you want to start your own company, go work for somebody who’s already doing What you do, or is doing something similar to What you do you go work for them and learn. Right and we didn’t do that. We started from scratch. And so we ended up learning everything in all the little details that are normally skipped.

And so the point of What I’m saying is this is if you’re starting your own thing, know that fires are going to pop up know that customer promises are going to be there make time for yourself to actually focus on building the entity you have set out To build or the life that you have set out to build.

So, that being said, Guys, I’m out of time so I’ll catch you later peace