Optimism vs. Reality through uncertainty | Ep 11

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:27:31.780

This is episode 11. And today I look back at history to help guide us through these uncertain times. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that. Hey. Hey. Welcome to the episode. It is a month into this shutdown quarantine from COVID 19, based on U.S. timelines, it's April 14th.

As I speak about this today, and I want to talk about what I've been advising clients on the last few weeks is optimism versus reality. There's some great studies out there, some great stories that I'm going to get into that I think are relevant right now.

And because we don't know how this is going to shake out, everybody's got a theory of what's really going on. There's lots of conspiracy theories. There's lots of different perspectives from both ends of the spectrum.

Some people want a police state where everybody's traced back to interaction with others that are deemed sick, that we get some kind of certificate that says we're healthy and can go back to work, can go to. On. On airplanes, can go to sporting events. I don't know if that's going to come down.

There's lots that say this is just an overblown flu and the numbers will settle that. This has the same death rate as the seasonal flu, a strong seasonal flu.

Again, regardless of hypotheses, regardless of policy ideas, you and I don't have any control over the politics, any control over what the governors in the US or the political leaders around the world are doing. I know that. I've heard in the Philippines, people are threatened at gunpoint to stay home. I've got a friend stuck in Panama.

They can only leave their condo two days a week for certain hours of the day based on their passport number. So liberty is definitely being restricted.

And I love the meme that was going around the other day that says quarantine is when you prevent the movement of sick people. Tyranny is when you prevent the movement of healthy people.

And because of the unknown around how this might spread, if you're asymptomatic, how long you might have it, how long you might be able to pass it on. It just makes it this giant unknown. So we're on lockdown. Businesses are severely hammered.

There's so many businesses that are going to not open when we get on the backside of this. And those owners did nothing wrong in the grand scheme of things.

Unlike 2008, where so many of us had bad fundamentals, myself included too much debt I carried in my mortgage brokerage unnecessarily. Obviously the mortgage industry was the straw that broke the camel's back. That's what we were the front line of, of that recession.

And so I was taken out.

I got to file bankruptcy in 08 and deserved every bit of it because I was running that business poorly, had bad fundamentals, was paying for payroll on credit lines that banks were throwing at me and was all upside down. But there are so many small businesses today that were running profitably, that were paying people that were delivering value.

And we're giving the owners some, some income, maybe not life changing, but enough to get ahead and maintain their overhead and keep things going. And they're gone and most of them aren't coming back.

So what I want to talk, to talk about is looking at the balance between being optimists, because us entrepreneurs are visionaries. We see the potential in everything. We can foresee an amazing future. We can see so much potential in everything we look at. That's great.

That's what drives the world.

That's what has created everything that we love and use today, from our laptops to our cell phones to our amazing furniture, to the kitchenwares that we use. All of that was invented and innovated by entrepreneurs with a vision, even the crappy Ronco 1995.

But wait, there's more stuff that's peddled online, on TV. Again, visionary entrepreneurs that created that stuff and we all benefit because of it.

In spite of what the world says about consumerism and in spite of what the world says about pollution, our lives are infinitely better because of the optimism and visionary perspectives of business owners and entrepreneurs. So we have that trait. But how do we avoid getting sideswiped by it?

Because there's a lot of discussion about a V rebound, that the market dropped fast but will bounce back just as strong. And unfortunately, that's not what the data is showing. To me.

If we would have been out of this lockdown by now, maybe by Easter, like Trump originally planned, maybe there'd be a chance. But every day that this goes on, are millions of more people getting laid off?

Are more businesses going in default, more tenants going in default, more mortgage holders going into default, that it just creates this cascade effect. And everything is connected in an economy.

And so once you start the dominoes falling, it all leads back to banks and money supply and lack of commerce going on. And so what do you do when it's so uncertain, we don't know what's next. We don't have any idea when the lockdowns are going to be released.

I mean, the Michigan governor, she has straight up lost her mind. It's like she wants to be the Maury povich of or TMZ of the governorship of the 50 states.

I mean, blocking people from being able to buy seeds or plants is insane. Those stores are open. The sections of plants and seeds are just cut off for whatever reason, I don't know.

And shutting down landscape businesses that don't come in contact with people. She. She's obviously the most extreme, but there. I've heard rumors that Ohio wants to stay on lockdown till June 15 and other states want to follow.

So we're in the midst of massive amounts of uncertainty. And I think going to look at history is a great place to figure out how we navigate through this.

I think Viktor Frankl, who was a World War II prisoner of war in Auschwitz and wrote the great book Man's Search for Meaning, I think that is a fantastic book to read right now to give us perspective, because he was one of the very few to survive being in those concentration camps for so long when so many of his peers were dying.

And one of the quotes that he said afterward that I really love was, he says, when I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine that was ready for publication was. Was confiscated. Certainly my deep desire to write that manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

So he had something to look forward to. He had something to get back to. He had meaning, really.

And that's the whole premise of his world, of his gift to the world after surviving from the camps was man's search for meaning and helping all of us find meaning in our lives. Because when we have meaning, that's what allows us to survive in spite of all opposition, in spite of all conflict, in spite of all hardship.

Meaning is what allows us to survive. And I think that's what is so hard for me. I've had a number of friends commit suicide over the years. Contacts, close acquaintances.

That it was when they were overwhelmed from hopelessness and didn't see the point continuing and felt that taking their life would reduce their suffering and the suffering of those around them, the people that they were letting down because of whatever was going on in their lives. And that's a huge thing for me is helping people avoid that hopelessness, help them find their meaning. Because I think everybody has significance.

I think everybody is created to fulfill an amazing purpose in this life and I just to me helping business owners right now stay sane and find the silver lining through this. I think Frankl's teachings are great. So if you haven't read Man's Search for Meaning, highly recommend it. It's a great book.

I'm grateful that my friend Tom Schaff introduced me to it and I've read it multiple times over the years and I think this perspective of focusing on meaning and as opposed to focusing on frustration or focusing on what's been taken away unfairly or focusing on the uncertainty and fear that is caused from that uncertainty of not knowing what our political leaders are doing.

Because I don't know about you, but I haven't heard of any solutions of what we're going to have on the backside of this to combat either complete erosion of privacy and personal liberty or to instill a police state and just follow China's lead to have some kind of social monitoring system that restricts our movement unless we behave or marked as safe.

So there's so much uncertainty for me that I just have to stay focused on day by day and helping clients figure out how to navigate this, how to deal with their employees, how to prioritize their needs, how to figure out what is the most important thing and continue adjusting contingency plans. Because contingency plans are based on what is coming and are contingent upon they're dependent on what factors change.

And so since we don't know when the lockdown is going to be lifted, we don't know what the market's going to look like, we don't know how many people in our market are going to want what we've been giving. We have to adjust and adapt. And last week I talked about that plan in episode 10 on Plan Adapt, Innovate and Noise Reduction.

As one of my friends Marcus Ali said, it's the pain plan or the pain outline, Plan Adapt, Innovate and noise reduction. So we're constantly adapting.

We're constantly figuring out and pivoting from what the market once wanted to what they want now and how to make our organizations as sustainable as possible. I recently started subscribing to a blog called the Sovereign man by a guy named Simon Black.

And he, building off of the Frankel position, talks about a guy named James Stockdale who was a seven year prisoner of war during Vietnam and survived and was able to come out of that with some really great wisdom.

And another one from Frankl's perspective is focusing on what meaning Stockdale talked about that the optimists didn't survive during Vietnam, during their prisoner of war times, they would go through common situations in their mind where they'd say, oh, by Easter, we're going to be out. Oh, by 4th of July, we're going to be out. Oh, by Thanksgiving, we're going to be out. Oh, by Christmas or New Year's.

And then when each of those milestones went unfulfilled, those expectations were unmet. That's the source of all disappointment in life.

I've talked about this in my book, Unstated expectations being the source of all conflict in my marriage and in this case Stockdale's talking about that. These prisoners of war have these expectations. They're optimistic expectations. They would be considered inspiring by most and they would hold on.

And then when those times would come and pass and not be met, they would be completely unfulfilled. And those were the people that didn't survive. And so how do you balance this optimism versus reality?

Well, I've got a couple rubrics that I use, a couple lines that I say to myself that it's all working out for good in the end, and I've survived. I've solved every problem that I've ever had. And we come from a long line of survivors. Now.

I'm blessed because I have some pretty good detail on my family lineage. My mom got into it back in the 90s and dug real deep and found out some really interesting stories.

One that kind of anchors this perspective of coming from a long line of survivors. And I think we all have these stories. They didn't get passed down, and so we don't know them.

But my great grandfather on my mom's side, it was my mom's dad's dad. His name's Larry Eklund, and he was born in Minnesota.

His parents were immigrants from Sweden and Norway, I think, and his dad was a chiropractor or an optometrist, I think one of the two, and had a dairy. And so there were five boys.

My great grandfather was the second in line and his dad, in the early 1900s, I don't want to say around 1910, came out to California in the middle of winter and was enamored by a communist or a commune, sorry, not communist, a commune living in Antelope Valley down south in Southern California deserts. And he fell in love with it.

And he called back to his wife who was pregnant with their sixth boy and said, so sell everything and pack up and move out. So they sold the dairy, packed up five boys, she was pregnant. They move out to Antelope Valley.

And I think my great grandfather was around 12 at the time and 10 or 12 somewhere in there. And so they lived there for a few years. And my great, great great grandfather Oscar was kind of the commune's doctor.

And at some point he ended up getting a boil on his neck and had somebody there try to lance it and they cut his jugular and he bled out and died. And so my great grandfather and his older brother Oscar Jr. Were the two men of the house. And they were around 15 and 16 or 15 and 17 at this time.

And there's six boys in the house and their mother in this commune. And the oldest, Oscar Bails, he's like, I'm out. And they never heard from him again.

So now my great grandfather and his next youngest brother John are the two men of the house at let's say 15 and 14 or 15 and 16 and 14 or something like that. And they had to take care of the family. The three younger boys and their mother, they moved up near Fresno.

They had some long lost relatives that she knew. They moved up there. That's how he ended up in Fresno. That's how that side of the family started in Fresno.

And he just went on to live an amazing life of he was on the US Olympic ski patrol. He sailed down to Cabo yearly with friends from San Francisco to Cabo and overcame so much hardship and lived an amazing life.

And my grandfather not getting into my entire family history, but what they overcame set me up so much better than I ever could have imagined. And for the fact that even I got here is a miracle in and of itself given the hardships they had to overcome.

And so when I realized that every one of us comes from a very long line of survivors, I don't know why, but that gives me hope that, that we'll figure it out as we keep going. And so looking at Frankel's focusing on meaning, Stockdale, don't set arbitrary optimistic timelines that you have no control over.

And then my perspective of that we all come from long lines of survivors. I think that helps shift the expectations that yes, some of our entitlements, some of our luxuries have been removed from us.

We're all in hardship right now because we either can't go out like we used to, we can't be with friends like we used to, we can't do our normal activities that may release stress. Like for me, that's playing tennis. So I'm walking around my neighborhood and being more active that way.

But all of us have been inhibited in some way from this pandemic. And so our lives are less comfortable than they were before, but we still live better than 99.9% of the history of the world.

So optimism versus reality. Start looking at what's shifting in your market and how can you serve them.

You've got to let go of the expectation that your business is going to stay the same that it has before. I'm not saying go and change your business overnight, but you definitely have to start looking at what is real versus what is your.

Your innate optimism.

And so if you're in a business where you've been pausing services for clients or you've been delaying and you're like, oh, it'll just pick back up, but you've been carrying some of the same overhead, I would definitely question those assumptions.

Because unless you're in a core business like taxes or maintenance and repair of things that people can't fix, but they're still going to own or housing or food production, unless you're in those core businesses that are never going to go anywhere, you may have a business that needs to drastically change its fulfillment model to fit with the new reality, whatever the new normal becomes. So I've seen a lot of ideas popping up and I really. These are just pop up business ideas that I don't particularly care for.

I think they're kind of gold rush type businesses. I don't think they necessarily have longevity, but some of them are like selling personal protective equipment.

I mean, there's so many people I know they're sourcing masks right now and I think we're going to have a glut of masks. I think masks are going to be this year's fidget spinners times a thousand. Because I don't think society personally is just my hypothesis.

I don't think society is going to want to wear masks long term. You can't see so much facial expression. You have no idea how to interpret how somebody else is behaving or feeling.

When you can't see their nose or their mouth in relation to their eyes, they're uncomfortable, they're not used properly, they create a lot of trash and waste that people leave all around. So I don't think selling masks and gloves is a long term viable business for most people. I think it's a flash in the pan.

Another one is remote work training like on Zoom. I have seen so many people offering Zoom training and workbooks and guides on how to work remotely.

The problem is once everybody's trained and they kind of pick it up. There's not much sustainability for that. There's not much ongoing training for that.

The training world is a difficult sale to start with and most people that make money in training are selling to big corporations. And it's around training that's required, whether it's ongoing safety or continuing education.

But once we get through the wave of everybody figuring out how to work from home and set up their workspace, zoom training and remote work training is gone. I think that dies fast. And then the other one is grocery delivery. Obviously that's a huge value right now. The grocery stores aren't equipped for it.

They may be changing their business models. And we knew that in the dot com era there were so many grocery delivery businesses that failed.

And there's been attempts at it over the years and it's getting a little better.

But unless you have huge logistics and infrastructure that gives you a competitive advantage to compete with Amazons and the Safeways and all the big grocers that already have that infrastructure, you're essentially just low paid delivery service. Which there's been delivery services in every industry under the sun from legal to my mortgage days, we had fast couriers around town.

And I don't think grocery delivery scales in any business unless you've got huge logistical infrastructure advantages.

So when you look at what to change, I think some of the things that I see are providing counseling, providing mindset training, providing relief around tasks that people aren't used to doing.

So I do think there's ongoing benefit to education, home home education for kids that are used to learning at school and parents that are used to having their kids learn at school.

I think there's a lot of opportunity to help them provide some structure, get some sanity so that the parents can get some space to actually get their work done. Because it's an inefficient environment.

Having kids that need attention, that are used to teachers keeping them corralled and their parents aren't used to keeping them corralled all day, that are trying to get their work done, that's a huge opportunity. Providing something around the education and mindful attention to kids could be huge.

I think that the preschools and daycares that are being hit right now really hard, I think they've got a huge opportunity on the backside of this if they provide some sanitation solutions and ways to help reduce the spread of disease between little kids, because little kids in those places are petri dishes and bring it home and spread it. So there's opportunity there on the backside of this.

And Then I think around finance, personal finance has always been something that I've found interesting, but the mass majority of society isn't really open to it because they always just either have enough credit or make enough money and get by. But I think we're going to be hitting a really hard recession, especially if this lockdown lasts into May.

This recession is going to be deep and long and it's going to be affecting so many people's finances.

So helping them negotiate, getting out of contracts or leases or mortgages or debts, restructuring all of that stuff, helping them figure out how to prioritize what matters, figuring out alternative ways to make money. I know the gig economy was really growing leading up to this and I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon.

Especially as business owners realize how much they can get done without full time employees in their office or in their employment that are just costly. And so I think there's going to be a lot of innovation around HR policies.

I think consulting to small businesses around creating innovative HR policies is worthwhile. I know the results.

Only work environment group that came out of Best Buy, they've restarted some of their content sharing@gorow.com G-O-R-O-W e.com so goresultsonlyworkenvironment.com and I think there's opportunities there. But I think the and I obviously anything online, anything digital, anything that equips people to do those things.

I know my friends over at Kajabi are crushing it with their knowledge commerce platform and content management platforms. That's just skyrocketing now that people have time and availability to actually build that. And there are going to be more people learning remotely.

So I think those are the things that we look to adapt to. And again, finishing, finishing this whole thread of optimism versus reality.

I think taking it day by day, not making any plans until you see clarity around where this is going. Don't take any financial risks, don't carry credit for people, don't extend yourself on projects that you're not getting paid on.

Break them down into smaller payments, break them down into smaller milestones, shorten your accounts receivable. All of those things I would do to reduce your risk. And then keep adapting, keep trying new offers, keep testing.

That's the best thing right now is you now have absolute carte blanche to try new offers. Change everything you do.

Nobody's going to question it, nobody's going to think you're flaky, nobody's going to think that you're flighty or changing or that your business is at risk because you're changing things. Everybody's businesses are at risk right now, so I hope that's useful again. My Facebook group Bottleneck Breakthrough Method is continuing to grow.

We're sharing lots of details around the payment protection plan and economic impact disaster loans. I've got a number of clients and Shannon Stewart, a friend of mine who's got a tax planning service.

A number of her clients have all gotten funding, so it's starting to hit. If you don't have a local bank, Fountainhead Commercial Capital, my friend Chris Hearn runs that.

I know they're swamped, but they're the best out there for SBA lending and I think local credit unions are the best source of funding right now. They seem to be the most eager to help.

The big four Chase, Wells Fargo, bank of America and Citi are all a steaming pile of crap and nobody's getting anything out of them. They're protecting themselves and trying to position I think for even more market takeover is my opinion. And their risk mitigation is too high.

They're not willing to play with the small guys. So go find a local bank, a local credit union and try to get that payment protection plan if you qualify for it.

If you've got employees, use the 8 weeks get it grant, get it for forgiven through a grant, document all your paperwork for payroll and take advantage of this because I know anybody listening to this right now are the good guys and I want more good guys to win. More small business owners to come out ahead of this.

If you have any questions, topics, things you want to talk about on the podcast podcastottleneckbreakthrough.com is the email podcastottleneckbreakthrough.com Otherwise, keep going, keep optimistic, keep looking at reality and I'll look forward to updating you as I get more insights and more clarity on what's coming next. Have a great day. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from Triptych of snippets by Septah Helix. It's used under Creative Commons.