We’re back! After a 7-month hiatus on the podcast, we’re back with a new series of episodes over these next few months.
I’m making a turn on the show for this next stretch. Instead of interviews with experts and sharing sales strategies and tips, we’re going to run episodes focused on an idea that I call “Go Farther™.”
2023 was a hard year for a lot of us. While the pandemic was difficult (understatement…), 2021 was a booming year for most of us in the ecosystem. Money was flowing into the system and the economy was rocking. The bounce back from 2020 was like a rubber ball colliding with a granite wall.
But everything slowed down in 2022, and by 2023, lots of activity came to a halt. Global conflicts, interest rates, inflation, and the general economy made life in the startup world seem almost impossible.
Our business took a hit, too. When the cash flow waterfall from investors to startups dried up, we had to grind like crazy just to stay flat compared to 2022, and 2022 was a down year compared to 2021.
But while 2023 was a tough year, I made some good things happen, too.
Staying flat felt like a big accomplishment. I’m proud of the company and our team for getting there, and I’m grateful to our clients who trusted us with their scarce dollars.
Better, the environment forced me to refocus my business – to get tight on investments we were making, expenses we took on, and to narrow our niche even more and look under every rock for new business.
The end result is now a more profitable business, clients that are getting massive results, and a handful of work projects that’s got me enjoying the work I’m doing every day more than I have in many years.
Outside of work last year, I made sure to balance as well – continuing to train Brazilian jiu-jitsu despite a shoulder injury, coaching my son’s club soccer team (we won two championships – one in the Spring, another in the Fall), and watching my wife make some breakthroughs with her work. We made sure to spend time with our families, visiting my parents in New Jersey and hers in Boise. I also traveled east for my sister’s wedding and took a couple of trips to see my best friend – a guy I’ve known since we were 14- and 13-years old. I decided mid-year to run my first ultra-marathon in more than two years, and knocked out a 100k in October. The holidays focused on family and time together with friends.
With all of those wins, as the holidays were wrapping up, I felt like I could be doing a little bit better. While I kept physically fit, my diet lapsed – a little too much sugar and alcohol over the last two months, and not enough focus on maintaining fitness. Even training for the 100k wasn’t my normal regimen, and my finished time showed it – the clock doesn’t lie.
In January this year, I committed to 50 workouts + BJJ classes in 31 days. I committed to cutting out sugar, carbs and alcohol for the month. I committed to getting back on the path towards peak mental and physical shape.
I think it’s working. I’ve dropped weight. I’m sleeping better. I feel better. I’m happier and feeling a more steady energy flow throughout the days and weeks.
That brings me to the “Go Farther™” podcast series.
I first came up with the concept of “Go Farther™” in 2016 when I competed in Uberman – a multi-day triathlon that included swimming the Catalina Channel (21+ miles), cycling across sections of Southern California, and running a portion of the Badwater Ultramarathon course in Death Valley.
It’s then when I realized that setting a crazy goal – committing to something really freaking hard pushed me beyond my upper limits – then following through on the commitment led to extraordinary outcomes. Before, I had completed three Ironman triathlons. The Uberman experience showed me that I could go much, much farther.
I’ve talked about “Go Farther™” from time to time in the past – episodes, videos and blogs at the time after Uberman, and again in 2021 when I was training for and ran the Western States 100 ultra-marathon.
Now I feel like it’s time to go again, with intent. To help all of us make 2024 a breakout year from any personal or professional doldrums we might have felt last year, and might continue to be feeling now.
My goal is to share specific strategies, systems and skills that I’ve learned and work for me, using my personal experience as a backdrop to you and your team Go Farther™.
My hope is that there are at least a couple of ideas that you’ll be able to put to work for yourself and your team. One of our mantras in our coaching program is “Adopt & Adapt,” meaning that when show or teach selling frameworks (i.e. Running lead qualification calls, product demos, overcoming objections), for our clients to adopt it as is, then adapt it to their situation. A second mantra is “Implementing = Learning.” There are lots of ideas out there – until we implement those ideas, we won’t know if they work for us, how to modify them, and what we’ll learn.
The rest is improvisation, and good improvisation is based on knowing and mastering a fundamental skill set. There are some truths and core principles to abide by – working hard, putting in the effort and persisting when things get hard. After that, it’s all improvisation. Nothing is really out of the box as much as we’d like it to be.
My ask is that as you listen, if you find something helpful or useful, please share it with others around you – text them a link to the episode, email them a link to a blog post about an episode, and talk about the ideas I’m sharing with your peers and your team.
