#333 Jess Brady – Transcript

Jess Brady
I’m back. Hi, everyone. I am so excited to be back recording after a few weeks hiatus due to a pretty sick Jessie on tour. So a massive thanks to Clayton who stepped in in my absence. So I have been on my first what I’m coining mini retirement which if you listened to my podcasts I stole from one of my podcast guests, Laci Phillips, which I think it used to be called the Grand Tour maybe many years ago. Anyway, today, I come to you from downtown Athens. But having spent about eight weeks out of my business, having this first little mini retirement, I’m making today’s episode a little bit different. And I hope that you are okay with that. Because today, it’s just me. And I have been reflecting a lot on my business because my business is about to turn five, which is crazy. And whilst I don’t have the answers to all of the problems, I really thought that I could use this opportunity to talk a little bit more honestly and vulnerably about some of the things that I think upon reflection, we did quite well. And many of the things that we didn’t do so well. And look, when you look at a business from the outside, you always say the best bits, the shiniest bits, but I can assure you particularly for my journey, it has not been like that at all. And so today, what I want to reflect on are sort of the five top things that I think I would go back in time and really tell myself both good and bad. And then I’ve got a bonus little one at the end, which I think is probably the most important. So I hope that you are okay with just me today. And I am super excited. I have got an amazing lineup of guests over the next couple of weeks. But if you’ll indulge me, I really do want to talk about what I would do differently if I could. So in case you don’t know about me, I started in financial services in 2006. And I worked in corporate for I think about 11 or 12 years, awesome training ground awesome to learn a lot about how corporates do things and what they do well and what they don’t. And then I stepped out of corporate and started a financial advice business having never been a financial advisor before and having never run a business before. I’m going to talk a little bit about that. But I started it with my co founder Glenn, he also was an ex Macquarie Bank employee as I was. And yeah, if the business is about to turn five, we have I think 14 staff and we have made an enormous amount of errors and failures along the way. So I want to just start on a positive note and talk about what I think we did really well and what I would go back and say yes, go yes, queen, you did this. Well, good job. Nailed it. And I hope that this helps you if you are wanting to start your own business or just generally improve your business if you already have one. One of the things that we get a lot of praise for inside Fox in here is the brand and then niche. I think that we did this really, really really well. For me. I was always passionate about helping younger people, particularly women and particularly people in the LGBTQ plus community, because really, frankly, I didn’t feel that there was anywhere that they felt truly safe fronting up to and saying, I need help with all of this. Are you the right place for me? And so actually, Clayton, I’ll never forget this took us out for breakfast one day. And he was asking us a lot of questions about the business. And one of the things that came up was about our website. And we were like, Oh, we’re going to spend, you know, like 100 bucks and build something super fast. And he was like, No, I don’t think this is the right idea. I think you need to invest a lot of money and get your brand, right, particularly who you’re targeting, they care about what your brand looks like. And that was a very solid piece of advice. And we did listen to him, we didn’t always listen to good advice. But that was one though he did. And so we spent a huge amount of money. And God, a huge, like, the most amount of time I knew could be possible on the website design. But I think it ultimately, really stood the test of time, like we’ve made small updates to our fox and her website, one mini refresh, I guess you would call it, but people still comment on, you know, the tone and the brand. And people can tell really quickly and easily who we work for all with, and who we don’t. And so, if you are going to be quite niche, I would say make sure that you spend a lot of time on really speaking to that niche through your branding, and get a good website designer. If you can, I would actually get testimonials from like, call ask if you can call people that have worked with them. Because whilst the people that did our website, did a really great job that the hours that we had to put in I severely underestimated and it has to have been in the hundreds of hours, including multiple weekends of me going on Pinterest, looking at different design ideas. And I really thought that that’s what you paid a designer for. So it was a huge shock and lessen. Actually what we ended up doing because she really couldn’t grasp a lot of what we were trying to do and feel or the look and feel that we’re going for we actually had a focus group and we had her, we had her come and sit in incognito so that she could hear from the people that we wanted to work with firsthand. And we didn’t tell the people in the room that this was going to be our website designer. And after that, we felt a significant difference in how she would come to us with stylish approaches, I think, because we were a financial advice business, she really tried to make us much more formal, much more sort of normal. And we were like, No, we’re here to break the mold, we want to be different. And if I could go back, I would definitely make more of a concerted effort to give, you know, briefing guides and have a lot more prepped in terms of what I expect from them and timelines. We were sort of at their whim. And that did not work for me. And it certainly didn’t work very well. For Glenn, who is very structured and very organized. Ultimately, it was very stressful, but a very, very good outcome. So if you’re if your brand doesn’t speak to the niche that you’re targeting, having done this vaguely Well, I think it is an important area of focus and you can throw slash you’ll probably have to throw quite a decent amount of money into getting it right, it’s really easy to see the difference between one of those sort of $50, stock standard templated websites, and a custom built website. And the same goes for your logo, your font design, it doesn’t matter your your clients or members today, they actually care because it’s your shopfront, particularly in the world that we’re living in. Now. If you’re going to you know scrimp and save, I’d say don’t do it in those areas, find somewhere else that you can pull back the pennies definitely worked well, for us.

And the other thing that worked really well, so my my next point was, we have had a phenomenal amount of PR, this is a huge shock and surprise to me. Over the last five years, I didn’t think anyone would want to have my opinion put out anywhere. I don’t think anyone I didn’t think anyone would really care Glenn was very sure that no one would care about our opinion. And actually, what has transpired over the last five years is that I have got a beautiful network of people who work for different publications who will come to me and say, Hi, we’re running this story or what do you think about this? Or would you be willing to quote for this because they know what we are about, they know who we are as a brand. They know who we are, who we work with. And so they will naturally come to us for you know, tips that are for younger people typically about how to save money tips on ethical investing, or I’m really passionate about diversity and inclusion. So any pieces around that it just seems like a natural fit. So firstly, PR is not as scary or as hot as You think I think it’s really underrated in our world, people assume it’s like, going to be a huge time drain. That’s not been my experience. I think once you get to know a couple of journalists, if you’ve got a point of view, or you’ve got something to say, you can really pitch them an idea, or a thought you might want to do something called an op ed, which I’ve talked about with one of my other podcasts, guests very early on about what does that look like. And you’ll find quite naturally and organically that can grow and PR, even trade based media leads to opportunities. And so don’t underestimate PR in your business. Don’t think because you’re a small business, that you don’t, you know, have the clout to be able to go into PR, that’s definitely not my experience. We were doing PR stuff. When we were really new, like we had less than 50 Members, I think, and PR changed our business. It really did. It grew our business, it wasn’t always in the best, most logical way. Because if you get in a big publication, you can expect quite a lot of people to reach out to you. And that is sort of the Oprah effect on a tiny scale. It’s quite overwhelming. And I don’t know if that’s the best way to grow, because you sort of have these big surges of of inquiries and influxes. And then you’ve got to sort of scramble to get through them all. But I think PR is much easier and much more cost effective than many other marketing strategies that we tried in our business. So those are the two nice ones, I thought I would start with two things that we did. Well, now I want to talk about the things that we didn’t do so well. Number three, I had no idea how to give advice. Now this sounds really silly. And it is the benefit of hindsight, the most beautiful vision in the review rearview mirror? Is that like no one in their right mind would go and start a business with no experience. But I did. And I’m not sure that I would do it again, with no experience being really honest, I think it is a huge learning curve. And it’s not an easy learning curve. Anyway, this is probably a moot point, because I can’t imagine that many of you would be like, Oh, I’m a BDM. I have seen businesses, therefore I can run a business. I was hugely arrogant on that front. And I’m really happy to admit it, because it’s true. What I wish I had done is either had started in a business and worked there for a while, although I don’t think that that would have worked very well. For me personally, I could have started in a business in financial advice and sort of learned the ropes. Knowing what I know about myself, I don’t think I would have ever done that. What I could have done instead though, is I could have actually sat with business owners who may had offered for me to sit with them and watch them. And I in my arrogant state didn’t think I needed to know what they did, because I was going to do it better.

II. So I really did not spend enough time understanding processes in our world, there are a myriad of different ways that an outcome can flow. And so what we did was that we built our processes, you know, in a petri dish, and we built them all stuck together. And so when we had to overhaul them, they were these big workflows that then created an enormous operational backlog really. And then because operations is not my forte, it really meant that Glenn had to break and fix and re break and fix all of the back office processes, because we were really quite silly, and we didn’t understand how they would work. So I would break the workflows down into much shorter pieces that are much more agile and easily adaptable. I think workflows in a business are super important, particularly in what we do, to make sure that things don’t get missed. But making them really long and making them not sort of a choose your own adventure path creates too much rigidity, and it creates too much time needed to step out and fix them. Once you actually figure out what it is that you’re doing. We spent so much time on these processes that did not work that were way too clunky, and that were really idealistic around how a client journey would flow. If I could go back in time, this is one of the most important things that I would do. I would spend so much more time on journey mapping on thinking about all of the different myriad of outcomes that could happen and how we were going to build processes for them. And then make them the shortest processes possible in terms of workflows and then figure out how we could stitch each of them together so that if we have to To break one, it wasn’t going to create an enormous cascading or triggering effect to the others, you can possibly sense that there is much trauma without talking about this. Because I truly think five years on, we still don’t even have this right, we have still got processes upon processes that are not optimal. It is the bane of Glenn’s existence, I know that it stresses him out on the daily. And actually a huge flaw of mine is because I’m not operationally wired, it really does fall to him, which I’m going to talk a little bit about as we move on. So yeah, we wasted way, way too much time on being in a petri dish or not actually doing this live, and then fixing it live, which I can’t tell you how important that is. And also, I wasted time on stuff in the business that added no value, it didn’t add any value to my business, to our members, and it didn’t add value to the profitability as well. So I think ultimately, when your time is such a precious resource, your most precious resource, it is really important to step back and think about what value am I gaining from doing this thing, this project? This? Whatever it is, and where is it gonna lie? Is it gonna mean that the business is stronger? Is it going to mean that our members are happier or our staff are happier? Or is it going to increase profitability? And if the answer is no to all of those, it probably means that you shouldn’t do it, or it should be the last on your priority list, I need to take that advice a lot more than I do. The next one. Number four is around staff or staff things hard? Well, it’s been really hard for me, I find this really difficult. If you have a team, I’m sure, I’m sure you’ll deeply resonate. And when I didn’t have a team, I thought I would nail this, I thought intuitively, I would be really good at it. From all my years of experience in corporate and don’t get me wrong, corporates do some of this stuff really well, particularly around processes around, you know, templating performance plans and check ins, I think that is something that we did do quite well, which we took from corporate. But by and large. If you asked me how well overall I did with staffing, the answer would be poor. So I think we have got about 50% of our hires. Right? That’s a pretty low success rate, I think in anyone’s book. And I don’t know about you, but for those of you that have had to get rid of people that weren’t quite the right fit, or that people decided themselves that they weren’t quite the right fit.

If I think about the ones that didn’t fit our business, well, I knew really soon. And I gave them the benefit of the doubt, because I really wanted it to work because they had taken a bet, and they had left something good. And we were desperate for help. And yet, if I really had listened to my God, it was extremely obvious, I think you can tell maybe within the first month, whether someone has the right fit, if they are the right fit, you know, you might not have them fully trained. Of course, you wouldn’t have been fully trained in the first month, but I think you can tell a lot about, you know who someone’s character is. And if I could go back in time, I would get rid of people that weren’t a good fit really, really soon. As soon as I figured out that there was no chance that they were going to stay, it did not benefit me, it certainly didn’t benefit the rest of the team, because they were able to see really quickly that this person wasn’t going to do the job that we’d hired them for, or this person doesn’t have the attitude that they had throughout the recruitment process, and then not fitting in. And that person feels really uncomfortable, like I think you can see when they don’t quite fit in. So if I could go back in time, I would do that exceptionally differently. I think using a recruiter that knows you gives you the best shot at getting the right candidate. And it’s so hard because what I found, and I don’t know about you, how people interview is not how people turn up to work. And I get it because they want to do a great job in the interview process. And they want to work at a company that you know on paper aligns with all the things they want to do, because our company sounds really cool from the outside. But it’s really hard work. And we’re really fast paced. And we say that a lot. I don’t know about you. But in my interview process, I spent about 50% of the time telling them all of the reasons why they probably don’t want to work for our company. All of the things that we’re currently trying to fix all of the problems that will exist 100% On the day that they turn up and probably still six months down the line. I want to be really clear about what’s good and what’s not good, because I don’t think it’s fair for them to make a big decision to move to a new company and may only sell the good parts. Even still, I think people don’t hear it people Don’t quite hear the bad stuff. And very quickly, I can see when people aren’t going to be able to handle the pace. And I think that’s also a flow from me, I think I expect way too much from our team. And I think if I could change one piece on the hiring front, I would flip how we hired, what we did was we hired people from an administrative perspective first. And then we hired an operational manager, much, much later, operational manager, today managers, the admin team, but throughout that process of what, two years, almost two years, they report it to either Glenn or myself, that for me, is not in hindsight, that was completely, completely the wrong way around. It costs more money. And this is probably why we didn’t do it in the first place, because you don’t get as much scale, and it’s not as profitable. But if you think about business, operational efficiency and long term improvement of the business, and actually just de risking your business, and to be more compliant, it seems so obvious that we did it the wrong way around. So if I could go back in time, I would make the big hire someone who is, you know, very experienced, costs more and ultimately, can build the processes and have the time dedicated to training new staff. Because when you’re doing the advice piece, and trying to make sure that people are doing the right thing, times five, or seven, or however many are in your team, you’re going to have mistakes made. And in our world, they’re big mistakes, and they’re expensive mistakes. And, you know, literally would keep me awake at night thinking about what have I missed? What have I not seen go through. And I also know that we didn’t have the right handbooks and training programs, and, you know, procedural guides, because we were still trying to fix things. And so it’s trying to train someone on a process that doesn’t really exist yet with no guidebook, when you’re not available a lot of the day, is really hard for your staff. And that put an enormous amount of pressure on our team to deliver something that they didn’t quite understand what they were delivering. And I know that for all of you, smart people, you’re probably like this is so

this is so obvious, Jess, but actually, all of the coaching and guidance we were given, was to start small and was to start with, you know, your admin people first. And, and I don’t think that that’s how I would do it again. So yes, I would definitely use a recruiter, definitely make sure that they know the culture that you’re going for what you’re trying to build, have a really clear role description, have a training plan, have clear processes. And don’t be the trainer. If you’re the full time adviser, you’re just not going to do a great enough job. And that poor person is going to be left languishing and feeling like they’re a failure. And that’s not who you want in your business because they hide secrets. If they make mistakes, and they don’t come with an innovative mindset, because they’re stressed, they’re stressed about not understanding their job properly. Which also got me thinking over the last little while, do you think this is a genuine question? I’d love your thoughts on this. LinkedIn, me because my emails are not getting checked time away, which is fab, do you think you can be an advisor and run the business at the same time? I think it depends on obviously you and the size of your business and what the business vision is. But I think if you’ve got more than two or three direct reports, I don’t think you can, I really don’t think that you can run in today’s level of complexity. I highly successful growth based financial advice business that is profitable, and give quality advice, full time, I have tried it and it broke, I can I broke both sides, when I was running the business really well. I wasn’t giving advice fast enough, or well enough, or my availability just wasn’t there. And simultaneously, when I was giving really great advice and doing lots of coaching, I just couldn’t have the time or space to run the business. And it’s a confronting thought because we want to do both, I really enjoy both. And yet, you have to pick which one is going to be your main focus, even if it’s not something that you can act on immediately if the vision is that you actually need to step up and out of your business so that it can survive. And so that you can run it in the way that you want to then I think that needs like a six months to one year lead time minimum. So, for me, I’ve spent a lot of time really thinking about what is it that really great leaders do and I think it’s that they pick one over the other and they then put their hands all into one. Because I don’t know about you, when you’ve got lots of staff and you’ve got lots of members who want to talk to you all the time, you constantly feel like you’re failing. And that is never a good place to live from. I’d love your thoughts on that. Number five, this is a really important one, we have the best community of people who want to help you, the X Y community is truly second to none. And people will open every facet of their business up for you, they will give you processes, they will give you all of their IP, in the hope that it will benefit you and your clients or your members and your life. And I didn’t take enough of that. I wanted to build something that was unique. And I thought and I thought that that meant that everything needed to be different. And whilst I had a really good community of people in x, y, who helped me from a camaraderie perspective, which cannot be understated, I didn’t utilize the multiple offers that I got to come in and see how people did stuff or to take people up on, you know, sitting with them for half a day and learning things because I didn’t think I had the time, I thought I was too busy.

Oh, the beautiful irony of realizing that that investment in time would have paid so much more in dividends. And so I guess this is my open offer to all of you as well, I don’t think he would want to sit with me from an operational standpoint, but I am so very happy to open up and show you what we do in certain aspects. But it’s not just me, it’s the whole community that you have. It is literally at your fingertips. And I’ve had people from the XY community say to me before, yeah, but just you know, lots of people, like people will, will let you see because you know, you’ve been around for a long time. And I say to them, that’s not true. That’s totally not true. I have been around for a long time. And I do know a lot of people, but people are so supportive of everyone. And even if it’s not your natural style, to say to someone, hi, I don’t really know you, but I’ve been watching you. And I see your posts, and it looks like you do this super well. Would there be any chance that I can come and see this? Or could you have, you know, a 15 or 20 minute virtual chat with me, I would be very shocked and surprised if someone said no to you. So please don’t think that you exist alone, you do not. And I can guarantee you that whatever challenge that you’re holding in your business right now, whatever challenge you’re holding in the advice view, right now, there are people who have been there before you there of people who have walked this road many times and know it well. And so if you’re like me, and you’re not very good at asking for help, it’s going to be super detrimental to your business, it’s going to take so much longer for you to figure things out. And ultimately, you’re either giving advice that suboptimal or you’re losing profitability along the way, neither of those are great outcomes. So I would say lean on the community as much as you can. We are here to support each other. And everyone benefits because what you probably don’t realize is that you have brilliant nuggets of wisdom that you can help them with as well. Now, my last one is a little bonus one. And this is probably my most raw and my most are honest thing about what I would do differently if I could go back in time. And I’m sure that you’ve heard me if you’ve listened to a few of my podcasts, you probably know where I’m going with this is that I supremely burnt myself out like well and truly into the ground, digging the hole, way, way down and then really struggled to get out. So I have an autoimmune condition, which I manage. I think reasonably well. Doctors might say differently. And my doctors have been screaming at me for the last well several years to slow down. That my adrenal glands are like way way the readings are way, way, way too high. And they would tell me, Jess, you’re on the path to burnout. I’ve had glandular fever twice. Joy, did you realize you can have glandular fever twice? Yes, you can. I think it’s only 5%. Lucky me. And so I know what proper burnout feels like. And running a business burnt me out more than I can explain. And I want to sort of give you a bit of a story that helped shake me to think differently. This is a real story. So I dated this guy a number of years ago. And his family had a very, very successful business, a really successful business. They had the business for a really long On time, and they ended up with a number of partners inside the business and the father was the CEO of the company. And he would never, ever take a break. He didn’t want things to be missed. He ran the business. And you know, this old adage of, you know, I want to go on a holiday, but you know, I run a business. And when you run a business, you can’t do that. That was totally his mindset, we would go on holidays together, and his laptop would be within 30 centimeters of his body, almost at all times, he would take it to the pool, he would take it to the beach, I think the only time you didn’t take it was at dinner, which maybe he did. And he maybe he worked when we weren’t watching, but he worked constantly. And he eventually sold the business he was able to do exceptionally well, exceptionally well, after all those years of hard work. And by everyone’s account, phenomenal business. He sold the business for a truckload of money. And then he died, he died. I think he was retired for less than 12 months before he died. He didn’t have any warning, he died of a sudden, very large heart attack, he didn’t know any had any underlying health, or heart issues.

And it really shocked me, because I realized that this man who had poured his life, his soul into his business, for the hope of having the retirement and the life of his dreams never got them. And we have really glorified hustle culture, the culture, that means that you never switch off that you’re always available that you have to reply to emails immediately, because you can see them pop up on your phone. When I worked for one of the companies that I worked for, it wasn’t just like a nice to have, it was sort of compulsory, it was built into the company culture, that that’s how we work. That’s how you become successful. I mean, your definition of success is pretty wild, if that’s what successful looks like. And yet we have convinced ourselves that working so hard all the time is the answer to happiness is the answer to create business success. And I don’t think it is. And I tell you this, having tried that, and failed, I had a friend put this post on Instagram, that really made me think it was she’s got two small children, and she runs a business. So like many of you, she’s a busy lady. And it said, I would die for my kids. And then it said yes, but would you live for them. Now she runs a gym. And her post was around the fact that so many people talk about how much they would sacrifice for their children, and how they would die for them. But what she sees often is that people aren’t doing the things that help us live, happy, fulfilling, healthy lives, which is ultimately what we need to show to our children. I don’t have children, but I took it as a lesson for myself, because often I feel a bit like a child. And I think it is an important confronting thought. And of course, we want to make sacrifices so that, you know, we can leave the world in a better place, be it for our children, or just for legacy otherwise. But I think we need to think about what cost is that to you? And are you comfortable with the cost? I love saying yes to things. I love, love saying yes, I say yes. When I should say no. all the damn time. I also really, really love variety. So anything that’s new and exciting, I run out, I get really, really energized by. But when you have to do the thing that you’ve said yes to on top of all of the other things, if you haven’t been able to offload the others, very, very quickly, I discovered I had a huge backlog. And mine never ever stopped. Because in corporate, when you say yes to something, you can allocate resources to other people, because there’s so many people in corporate to allocate resources to but when you run a small business, and that you’re running a lean business, a growth based business, and you know that every time you say yes, you’re adding to your plate without able to take things off. It really quickly adds up. For me what I’ve had to do, and I think I talked about this a few weeks ago, is I’ve had to schedule in my calendar all the time, I think it takes to do all the things because that then lets me see truly how much free time I have. And then I’m able to quickly identify whether I can say yes to something or not. I had a goal of only wanting to work 50 hours over the last year. For some of you might think that that’s a small amount. Some of you might think that’s a really high amount. I failed at that goal. I failed to demonstrably add that goal. On average, there is no way that I worked 50 hours, I definitely worked a lot more. And if I could go back, I would say to myself, just there’s lots of cool projects. But you need to focus on what’s going to add the most value to you and your business. And you can’t keep drinking from a glass that is empty. So I’d love to ask you, where are you at, on the burnout scale, it’s a fake scale have made it up. If zero is you don’t feel burnt out at all. Brilliant, write to me, tell me all your secrets, I need to know them immediately. So I can share them with everyone else. 10 is you feel really stressed and really burnt out. Please pick a number, there is no shame in whatever your number is. And just observe whatever that number is. And so whatever your number is, right now, I want you to ask yourself, if you keep doing everything exactly as you have planned, where do you think you’re going to be in the next six months? on that scale? Does the next six months have you moving up the burnt up scale or down, or maybe you’re staying exactly the same? I gave myself every reason under the sun as to why I couldn’t make fundamental changes that I needed to, to reduce my burnout. Many of the reasons were very justifiable. They helped me justify why my burnout was okay. But it wasn’t. And what happens when you burn out is that you become really unproductive things that would take you a really short amount of time, things that are seemingly easy become really hard, because you become really overwhelmed. And what I do when I’m overwhelmed, I don’t know about you is I procrastinate. Procrastination is shit. And I do not recommend it. But I do it. I can feel myself doing it when I’m overwhelmed. And so then what happens is because I’ve procrastinated something then becomes urgent. So then I need to hustle to get it done to meet a deadline, which stresses me out, super stresses me up. Can you see the vicious cycle, I was on a path to braking, proper braking. And so I took a break, I have transitioned all of my members to a new, amazing advisor, because I had to, because I realized that the business needed it. My members needed it. And I needed it. And it’s a really hard lesson to get to. And I really wish that I didn’t work myself into the ground over the last five years. The success of the business is because we worked ourselves probably into the ground for the last five years. But nothing is worth that. And your health is not worth that. And the idea that actually you could build up a business and actually not be around for its success. Because you’ve not prioritized your health was not an OK story for me. I wasn’t okay and comfortable with that. And so, thus my mini retirement. Now I want to tell you that the first few days of my mini retirement, I think I might have been shell shocked. I landed in Paris, which poor me, obviously Poor me. But I felt really weird, you could probably say that it was jet lag. But I’ve been jet lagged many times, this is not jet lag. I was dazed and sort of confused. And really, really, really overwhelmed. Probably going to Paris peak summer, when you’re burnt out is not the optimal thing to do. Yes, if I could go back in time, I would probably change that as well. And I was probably still suffering the consequences of that for the first couple of weeks actually. And I noticed that this built up anxiety that I had living inside of me, which felt a little bit like birds trying to escape from a cage that I just assumed was normal. Started to dissipate. I had been living with this feeling. And I had just become so used to it, I sort of forgot that it was there. And so when you’re on leave, and you start listening to your body, for me anyway, I realized that I was ignoring everything that didn’t fit with what I wanted to do, because it was better for me. I was ignoring how tired I was ignoring what my body was asking of me, which was to slow down because it didn’t help me get all the things that I wanted to get done, done.

I then got sick in the middle of my trip, which if you know anything about burnout apparently is very common. And I have now come out the other side which I feel really good about. And I’ve been reading a lot about burnout actually, JP Morgan has a really interesting had a really interesting theory. So he believed in working for nine months and taking three months off a year. I mean, that is a huge luxury and I don’t think very many people would get to do that. But there is a lot of brain based research that says that having an extended break so this is for more than a few weeks. does create neurological pathways that help you unconsciously solve problems, when you’re not even thinking about them, your body must be in a state of relaxation, though for it to happen. So if you’re constantly stressed, this doesn’t ring true. And so for me having come out the other side, I feel so much better. Now, I don’t think everyone’s gonna get the opportunity to take eight weeks off, you don’t need to take eight weeks off, let’s be really clear about this. But if you are really high on that burnout scale, and it’s impacting your business, your staff or your family, including you, then you’re probably going to have to make Lakhmi some really big changes to make yourself feel better. Hindsight is a beautiful, wonderful thing. And of course, with 2020 vision, we would all do things a little bit differently. But I often get people come up to me telling me all of the great and shiny things that they see about my business. And I don’t think I speak enough about all the things that are not going perfectly. And so today, I really wanted to share with you, you know, my thoughts and feelings, the fact that I haven’t done a lot of things when in fact, I haven’t done most things well. It’s just the things that we have done well stand out because I obviously want to amplify. But I think it’s important in the interest of community to share the fact that there have been sleepless nights, lots of tears, lots of tantrums many therapists sessions, particularly to my mother, who is unqualified and often uninterested in my daily dribble about business challenges, but it can be really lonely, it can be lonely at the top, it can be lonely, if you are a sole practitioner, it can be lonely if you’re feeling isolated in a business that doesn’t feel like the right fit to you. And we know that our profession is feeling really stressed and really unwell from a mental health perspective. And so it would be remiss of me to not speak about that at length from my perspective. So I hope that this has helped you I feel so energized and so excited I have to calm myself down when I’m in a state because I know that this is when I run too hard. And then the cycle continues. But I have some really really exciting guests lined up for the next couple of weeks. You are going to learn lots about all different areas because you know I like to talk about anything and everything please keep leaving LinkedIn me people LinkedIn me messages all the time about guests that we’ve had about ideas that they have for podcast guests things they want to learn about. And I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. I’m not going to do the rapid fire questions to myself. I’m not that crazy, but good luck. Look after yourself. And I look forward to bringing you more wisdom through our guests soon.