Episode 34: Smashing The Plateau With David Shriner-Cahn
David Shriner-Cahn
David Shriner-Cahn’s weekly advice program has been named by Forbes as a Podcast To Power Up Your Ultra-Lean Business. David has also been recognized as an Entrepreneur That Will Change The Way You Communicate by Inc. Magazine.
David is the podcast host and community builder behind Smashing the Plateau, an online platform offering resources, accountability, and camaraderie to high-performing professionals who are making the leap from the corporate career track to entrepreneurial business ownership.
Starting your own business is hard enough without having to go it alone. Smashing The Plateau is David’s solution to the problems that keep entrepreneurs up at night. As he likes to say, “With the help of people just like you in our community, you’ll be able to do more of what you love and get paid what you’re worth.”
Smashing The Plateau is an entrepreneurial community that empowers corporate refugees to achieve their dreams. In this episode, founder David Shriner-Cahn shares his journey from the corporate world to entrepreneurship and the transformative impact of building a supportive community. Discover the importance of setting clear objectives, embracing collaboration and vulnerability, and fostering meaningful connections. Explore the unexpected collaborations that arise within the community and learn from successful entrepreneurs who have overcome plateaus through perseverance, focus, and discipline. Some of the key takeaways are: understanding the difference between goals and objectives for long-term success; embracing collaboration and vulnerability within a supportive entrepreneurial community; leveraging unexpected opportunities that arise through powerful connections; and unleashing the power of perseverance, focus, and discipline to smash through plateaus. Whether you're a corporate refugee or a seasoned entrepreneur, this episode will leave you motivated to unlock the full potential of your entrepreneurial journey through the power of community. Tune in!
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Smashing The Plateau With David Shriner-Cahn
David Shriner-Cahn‘s weekly advice program has been named by Forbes as a podcast to power up your ultra-lean business. David has also been recognized as an entrepreneur that will change the way you communicate by Inc. Magazine. David is the podcast host and community builder behind Smashing the Plateau, an online platform offering resources, accountability, and comradery to high-performing professionals who are making the leap from their corporate career track to entrepreneurial business ownership.
Starting your own business is hard enough without having to go it alone. Smashing the Plateau is David's solution to the problems that keep entrepreneurs up at night. As he likes to say, “With the help of people like you in our community, you’ll be able to do more of what you love and get paid what you’re worth.” I am so excited to have David join us. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It's exciting to be here and an honor.
I'm excited to have you. We're going to get into a wealth of knowledge because of the community that you serve and the community that you're in. I would be interested to learn from you right out of the gate. What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
This Is a piece of advice that I learned from someone who has been my coach on and off for years and whose program was a game changer for my life. It's about goals versus objectives. I like the person who taught me this. It is Nella Barkley. The way Nella describes goals, they're something that is specific enough so you know when you're working towards them, yet they're not time bound and not bound by metrics. You're never complete.
It is like your purpose and vision, what it is you're trying to work towards in your life, in your work. Objectives are measurable and concrete, that you know when you have reached an objective and you're finished with it. You can take your goals and break them down into many objectives and there will still be more objectives that you can work on.
For example, in my case, I'm empowering corporate refugees to do more of what they love and get paid what they are worth to support their ideal lifestyle. There will always be more to do when it comes to that, yet it's specific enough that I know when I'm focused on it and I'm working towards it. An example of an objective would be I want to grow the Smashing the Plateau community by 25% within the next 12 months. It's very concrete and measurable, and I know whether I hit that target or not.
Smashing The Plateau: Smashing The Plateau provides a home for corporate refugees who either want to or are starting running and growing their own businesses so that they can do more of what they love, get paid what they're worth, and support their ideal lifestyle.
That's awesome advice because I feel like the word goals is thrown around a little flippantly these days for good reason because we don't have a lot of conversations around defining what a goal is. I love the objective is what gives you the time-bound and the specificity. Thank you for sharing that with us. I love it. Tell us a little bit about Smashing the Plateau, the community.
In general, Smashing the Plateau is all about providing a home for corporate refugees who either want to or are starting to run and grow their own businesses to do more of what they love, get paid what they're worth, and support their ideal lifestyle. Right now, we have four elements that are part of what we do. One is the long-running podcast, Smashing the Plateau. That was how we got started in 2014.
Weekly episodes of stories and strategies that will inspire you and help you work towards your goals. A newsletter that is daily on weekdays and free and very short, actionable, inspiring, and practical tips. Sometimes they're very strategic. Sometimes it's a story about somebody. The podcast episode gets released on Mondays. On Fridays, we tend to focus more on community. I try to tie it to something that the podcast guest has said to make it relevant to the topic of the week.
The second is the newsletters. We have workshops that are periodic one-shot experiences that will help you work through a challenge. They give you a taste of what it's like to be in our community, but you're basically committing an hour of your time to go through this. The community is what we do 24/7 to support our members who are corporate refugees, who are collaborative, innovative, and motivated to succeed in their careers on their own terms.
I think about my own journey because I have officially been self-employed. Losing my team was the biggest struggle. I loved being part of a team. I loved my colleagues and my coworkers, and now all of a sudden, you're a team of one. That was the biggest shock to the system. I love that you've put together this community. I'm imagining it's because other people have felt the way I described. Is that the origin story?
It is totally the origin story. First of all, in addition to being your experience, it's also my experience. I was in the corporate environment for the first 28 years of my career. In 2006, I left my last job, started a solo consulting business, and made the leap with an idea of the business I wanted and what I wanted to do. I hadn't started anything when I left my job.
For example, I left my job on Friday and then Monday, I opened up my business. No solid business plan, no clients. It was an idea. For many people, particularly when you've been in your work for a while, you go from a place where you have a full calendar, an overflowing inbox, and a team of people to take care of all the things you're not responsible for.
You have this built-in social structure, and then you go out on your own. You have an empty calendar, an empty inbox, no team, and you're all alone. You have to get up and market and sell something that you've never had to market and sell before, which is yourself. Even if you've been in marketing and sales, selling a company that gives you a paycheck and selling yourself is very different.
I'm somebody who has always been part of communities in my life. Long before I left corporate, I was always involved in different things, both professionally and personally. It took me a while to find my footing as an entrepreneur and find my entrepreneurial colleagues and friends. Once I did, it was a game changer. I realized how important that is to be able to make this transition, particularly after running the podcast for so many years.
Community is a game-changer in being able to make the transition between corporate and entrepreneurship.
I had hundreds of conversations with mostly corporate refugees. My podcast guests are mostly corporate people who came out of corporate and started their own businesses. I saw how powerful it is to have a place where you feel safe to let your hair down and celebrate your wins, but also talk about where things are not working the way you want and what you can do about that.
You can hear from other people that may have had the same experiences so they can share things that have worked for them or people that are committed to listening to you and can ask you leading questions that will help you unpack what's going on and figure out how you can get over whatever plateau you're experiencing.
That's also the origin story of the name. I love that.
That is the origin story of the name. It's the origin story of everything we do.
It reminds me of little camps that you're in in your life. I'm an unmarried person, so I'm in the singles camp and the married people are in the married camp. Once the married people have kids, they're in the camp with the kids. You go into these different camps. I’ve noticed that now I'm in the entrepreneurial camp. The people that are starting to come into my life or the people that I'm having conversations with, it is interesting. I'm talking to a former CEO for a couple of different startups. He had high-profile jobs. He retired. I'm a little bit farther along in my journey.
We have some nice skillsets that overlap and don't compete. We're talking about approaching a project together. I'm thinking he's almost like my coworker. I'm viewing all these little friends as like my new coworkers. It is interesting because they're going through your pain and are at different stages. Some people are ahead of you and some people are behind you, but it is collaborative to see how open people are to helping. I'm assuming you found that a lot in the community and that's the purpose of the community. It’s people being open to help.
That ties into some of our community guidelines, which also reflect who's in the community. Collaboration is a key guideline. It's something that we prize and people that are in the community are very collaborative. Making space for people to feel comfortable being vulnerable is important. Not being overly self-promotional is important because what tends to happen, like you described in a scenario where you're doing this little dance with a colleague.
It could potentially be that you end up helping this other person more in terms of their business goals, maybe they help you more, or maybe you help each other and it's totally like a 50% win-win. Sometimes it's more one, sometimes it's more the other, but there's this exchange element that is the underpinning of everything that's going on.
I have noticed, too, people are very generous with what they share, even if it doesn't come back necessarily. If I contribute more, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's got to give me the 50% back because it almost feels like somebody else is going to help me 50% more. It's almost like a pay-it-forward type of environment too, where if you're generous with your time and resources, that generosity usually comes back. It may not be tomorrow, a year from now, or a couple of years from now, but it is cool to see how that cycle comes full circle.
It comes from unexpected places.
All the time. What's been my most personal fun part of this is you never know who you're going to talk to. I'm so excited to talk to you, David. One of the reasons why I was so excited to talk to you is because, since 2014, you have had all sorts of entrepreneurs at your fingertips. You've been overviewing this community and seeing the struggles and strengths. I would like to get into some of the common themes you see amongst that group of individuals. Can you share some of the common traits that make someone successful in self-employment and entrepreneurship?
Motivation is a big part of it. For example, when you are in corporate, your performance is generally judged on how often you get it right by you. In my experience, when I was getting performance reviews, there was a lot more emphasis on the small parts of my job that I wasn't hitting the numbers on versus the overwhelming majority that I was doing. Like an employee, if you're getting more than 10% wrong, you're going to hear about it.
As an entrepreneur, you're constantly putting yourself out there trying things. You have no idea how well it's going to work or if it's going to work at all. I feel like it's the opposite. As an entrepreneur, you're usually doing well if you're getting more than 10% right. That's a big difference. You need to be comfortable with getting it wrong most of the time.
As an employee, if you're getting more than 10% wrong, you're going to hear about it. As an entrepreneur, if you're getting more than 10% right, you're usually doing really well.
Another thing that's helpful when you're getting it wrong most of the time, that can be a bummer. You do need your community to support you when you're going through these constant experiences of negativity because they come up a lot. That's one. Another one, we talked a little bit about being collaborative.
As I was preparing for our conversation, I'm thinking about two people in our community that have this fascinating, unexpected collaboration that has evolved. One person is a consultant, coach, speaker, and author. Another one is someone who is a book consultant and literary agent. The unexpected collaboration is the book consultant-literary agent is helping the speaker-author with their speaking engagements. The agent is good at supporting thought leaders because they've worked primarily on nonfiction authors that have written many types of business books.
They're helping the speaker raise their profile, increase their fees substantially, and have speaking offerings that are new where they weren't making any money before. It's been like a win for both of them, which was totally unexpected. That's one example of something that can happen with collaboration.
Another trait that is common, and I’ve already mentioned it, is vulnerability. There's one member who, several years ago, was struggling financially. Primarily peer support has taken one particular client from a place of month-to-month fees that were very marginal, annual renewing contracts that are about five times the price and take less time to deliver. That is totally through the impact of the peers in the community. It's quite remarkable.
Did they ask for help? How did they get the support? In terms of being vulnerable? Did they say, “I'm struggling here financially?”
“I'm struggling financially. I have this new client. Here's what I'm working on. Here's what they've asked me to propose. Would you be willing to take a look at this proposal?” That's being vulnerable. You're sharing a proposal that you've drafted in confidence with a handful of people, but then they got the feedback, “You need to ask for more.” Instead of asking for this a month at a time, why not make it a twelve-month contract? The client was getting funding on an annual basis or possibly multiple years at a time of funding. The client was in a position to be able to handle a twelve-month contract. It's worked out well.
Vulnerability needs a place in everyone's roles a little bit more intentionally. If you crack the door open to be slightly more vulnerable, I feel like other people share their vulnerabilities too. The relationships become a lot stronger so that when it comes to business-generating activities, it's a lot easier because you have that foundational relationship.
Think about what happens in a strong marriage. If the two partners are not vulnerable with each other, it's not going to be a strong marriage, but when they are vulnerable and totally open, it can be rock solid.
Their little baby, that's the business, gets to flourish. We have motivation. You have to be clear on your motivation. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I like the 10%. If you're getting 10% right, that's a good thing. I'm going to use that as my new metric. Thank you for that. Also, being vulnerable. Any other comment traits you see in this group?
Being open to unexpected opportunities. That's important. It's tied to what we talked about already when it comes to collaboration because these unexpected opportunities then evolve. For example, when I started my business, I came out of the nonprofit sector, was a nonprofit management consultant, and joined a business networking group. One of the members asked me to help him with his solo business.
I'm like, “What do I know about running a solo business? I just started mine.” I have years of experience, but it's all running these not one-person nonprofit organizations. He says, “I know you can help.” I'm like, “Okay.” That ended up being my first privately held business client. From there, there were others. Eventually, this turned into a whole area of expertise around solopreneurship. I wasn't looking for that particular business, but it came towards me and I was like, “This makes sense to pursue.”
You have three truths to live by. I feel like this speaks to one of your truths of being a tortoise, building that first client and then the second client, and being open to going with the flow. Can you talk a little bit about that? What does it mean to be a tortoise? Let's get into some of the other truths to live by.
Sure. It also ties into what we talked about with being 10%. Thomas Edison is credited with bringing the light bulb to market after about 10,000 failed attempts. Imagine the mindset that it takes to test 10,000 light bulbs that don't work before one does. This is a marathon. It's not a sprint. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you're going to try a lot of things that don't work.
This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you're going to try a lot of things that don't work.
It's interesting. When I started the podcast Smashing the Plateau, podcasting was in its infancy compared to where it is now. In 2014, if you looked at the number of business top podcasts, there were a lot of podcasts about startups. Those of us that are entrepreneurs for the long term don't spend most of our time in startup mode.
Particularly the successful people, they're spending their time in operational mode, working on something that has reached some level of sustainability and making it better, figuring out ways to maybe work fewer hours and make more money, which is not all that sexy. It's not as appealing as the startup hustle, but that's where success lies.
I focused on what it takes to achieve long-term success. Initially, that was what the podcast was about. I kept hearing that focus, discipline, and perseverance are the characteristics that lead you to long-term success. That is what the tortoise is all about, whereas the hare is about a quick win. Quick wins are fleeting. They come and go and they tend not to lead to long-term success or even long-term happiness.
It's like weight loss. You can do a crash diet and lose 10 pounds in a couple of weeks, but if you lose 10 pounds by building the right habits and the right strength training, I like that a lot. Focus and discipline. What was the third trait?
Perseverance.
What I like about that, too, is that it personally gives me permission to not measure myself where I'm at in my business too. I do feel like I'm in the building the machine stage right now, but it's getting to a point where it's pivoting to some of the operation's best practices. How can I do this more intentionally? How can I outsource things? I’ve noticed I need a lot of support from different people in my network to help me get the operation stuff underway. The other two truths to live by. Being a tortoise is one. What are the other two?
You can do what you love and get paid what you're worth. We've talked a lot about that. We have a particular methodology that we use that is the underpinning of that. The other one is building your own business is easier if you don't do it alone. We've talked a lot about that too.
It's such a great piece. All of these being uncomfortable, being vulnerable, and having your own motivation, ties to an overarching thread of having the right mindset to do it. You're going to come up upon 90% failure. I would be interested from you when that happens. Do you have suggestions on how to stay motivated when times are tough?
You're not going to be surprised by my answer, but it's the community. There are three kinds of experiences that you need to be engaged in regularly. Large group activities where you're connecting with a large group of people and you're putting yourself out there. It is going to mean being vulnerable. For example, our platform has a place where you can ask your community. People pose a question and they look for support and they're looking for feedback and help, they will get it. If you post it on the platform, everybody's going to see it. That's a large group experience.
A small group is being with probably fewer than a dozen people on a regular basis. For example, we have an accountability program where we match people up in a small group. Our groups are about 6 to 8 each and they meet monthly and have a space where they can communicate between the monthly sessions. That's a way to engage with a small number of people that are going to get to know you well, you'll get to know them well.
I'm in another community where I run a weekly mastermind. Even though the community is pretty big and there's no way I can get to know everybody in the community, in the mastermind, I know we have about ten people. We’ve developed some nice relationships and supported one another. In our community, we also have private guidance groups that are generally up to six people each that meet with. Same purpose. Connect with a small group on a regular basis and it'll be an anchor.
The other one is one-to-one. You and I talked about this earlier. I have a lot of different one-to-one relationships that I maintain in different ways. For example, I have a handful of people that I will text every Friday. Either I text them or they text me. I know if I have gone through a Friday and I haven't heard from somebody, I’ll start to worry, “Are they okay?” We have a program in our community where we'll make introductions between two members of the community to foster this one-to-one relationship building. That's important.
It's nice because I feel like that type of relationship is different. It's different from a client-consultant relationship too. You do need those types of structures. I love that you boil it down to large group, small group, and one-on-one. I am thinking about my own business. I’ve unofficially done that in some form factor, but I like the idea of having it structured with people that know your specific struggles because then you're able to speak to what you need at that moment.
I have a couple of former clients. They all started their own interior design business. We get together once a quarter for dinner and we call it entrepreneur dinner, and we share our wins and then we share our goals. We feel pretty good at keeping it up, but it is unofficial and we're not necessarily in the same space. It's a different thing.
I like the idea of being aligned a little bit more strategically with people who are in a business similar to yours. All of this community is people in similar business situations. I would be interested because this is a sales and business development-focused show, do you see certain areas where entrepreneurs get stuck in their prospecting efforts?
Particularly corporate refugees. I love this question. I'm glad you sent me the questions in advance so I could think about them. One is that you need to focus on what you can control. Too often, we get overwhelmed and stressed by things we can't control. That's a big one.
Can you give an example?
I can get stressed about the size of my podcast audience or I can get stressed about how many impressions I get on a LinkedIn post. I have no control over that. I can control what I write. If I think what I write is helpful to my audience, okay. If I get actual concrete feedback from somebody that I can work on, that's great. If it's something that is a vanity metric that I have no control over, what's the point of getting stressed over that? Honestly, it doesn't drive my business metrics or anything else. That's one. Another one is being able to delegate. Too many people are reluctant to delegate.
I'm right there with you. I'm in that piece where I'm starting to delegate and outsource things and it's a little nerve-wracking because you don't know if they will do it in the way you want it done. That's the whole point of delegating. I see where it's a roadblock for people.
Another one, one that I have seen a lot, is that consultants undercharge way too often. They think that price is going to be the major decision factor and it often isn't. Sometimes it is, but very often it's not. I think you need to be clear on what value you bring to the table and what value you're going to provide to the client. Price accordingly.
Especially with early-stage consultants, I’ve also seen they're generally too broad in what they offer. They're afraid to go narrow because they think they're leaving money on the table. I know it's Marketing 101 to go narrow, but consultants have a hard time with that. As an employee, you're paid well to solve complex, non-repeatable problems. As a business owner, you get paid well to solve problems that may seem complex to your clients. That's why they hire you. The simpler they are for you, and the easier it is for you to repeat the process, the more profitable it is.
Now I feel like you're speaking right into my soul, David. I feel like thinking about some of my first proposals in my business and they were coming to me with big problems and I knew I could solve it in something that resulted in millions of dollars. It was a big ROI, but I do think that I wasn't clear in explaining the value.
One area that I am getting much better at, but I struggled with at the beginning, and maybe it's because I'm a corporate refugee, is the balance of how much you share upfront to prove that you know what you're talking about. You're talking but not enough where this is the stuff people pay me for. That seems to me a delicate dance.
You can share the what, not the how. They're going to hire you because they can't do the how or they don't want to do the how. I find that the more you share about the outcome they can get and what they need to do to get that outcome, but not the how. Honestly, I struggled with this when it came to starting my own community. I was thinking, “Who is it going to be for?” It took me a while to define the ideal community member.
By saying corporate refugees, I am eliminating a lot of potential business in theory. There are lots of business owners who would benefit from the community. The experience of going from corporate to your own business and typically, our members have had a substantial amount of corporate experience. It varies. Some are on the lower end. We have a member who was a few members that are like 40-plus years in corporate and then went out on their own. I would say one extreme.
Most people are more in the middle. We've created a very clear niche. Also, I struggled with, “How do we price this?” If you look at community models, they're all over the map, from free to there are communities that are $19 a month. I wonder, “What can you provide for $19 a month and be profitable?” There are communities that are thousands of dollars a month. For an online community, for corporate refugees, thousands of dollars a month to me seems a little high.
We're $197 a month, which seems like it's a fair price for something where we provide a lot of value. It's not an inconsequential amount, which also means for people that are going to join, even though there's no long-term commitment, we even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. You're not going to commit to $197 a month unless you're going to do some work. It’s skin in the game. The reality is you're not going to be successful unless you do the work.
One of the things that I struggled with is external accountability. When you work for a corporation, you have metrics, sales goals, and a boss. There's a structure that's inherent as part of your role. All of a sudden, it's like, “I could do whatever I want with my days. What am I going to focus on?” That's why I personally enjoy coaching and accountability partners because you need that to meet your objectives, not your goals. It's great that you're providing this platform for people to build community.
I would always joke that being in sales, for me, was like being paid to make friends. Building relationships comes naturally to me. Some of the feedback that I get from this show is I'm giving individuals some tools if it doesn't come naturally to them. What's nice about a membership program and community is you have this machine to build these networks and connections. People don't have to do it themselves because people struggle to build relationships.
As a matter of fact, we've categorized the takeaways from many of our podcasts, and they tend to fall into four categories. Relationships is one. Mindset is another one. Business development is an obvious one and productivity is a big issue.
I like to think that I'm working on the top three, but productivity is something that I could use some support with too. Let's talk about mindset a little bit, too, because I would be interested. When I went through the pandemic quarantine, that's where I built a lot of the habits, tools, and mindset that enabled me to be brave enough to take the leap.
I don't think I had those qualities before the pandemic. I look at that time as a blessing for me to get strong in my mind and have faith in myself. It took a lot of work and it takes work every day. I would be curious, how do mindset and mindfulness come up in your own personal business and then the community at large?
I try to have a positive mindset. I start my day by writing something that I’ve experienced the day before that can lead to at least a positive mindset to get me started for the day. I will meditate for about ten minutes and do a very short amount of physical exercise. I find that that structure gets me going with it as positive of a mindset as possible.
That's very similar to my morning. I get the coffee and I write the gratitude journal, but it's usually a recap of the wins from the day before. I have noticed if I don't do that, my days are a little bit grumpier. You don't have to share if you don't want to, but do you use an app to meditate or have you been doing it long enough? Can you tell us a little bit about your ten-minute meditation?
I do use an app and by the way, the meditation is something that I’ve started. The meditation piece is something new, but I find it helpful. Yes, I do have an app. I use an app and it is called Ten Percent.
I haven't heard of that one. Thank you. I did an episode about An Introduction to Meditation because I do think that has been a big game changer in my own personal life. It's something that I’ve had to make it a practice and it's not hard. I do it in my bed. It's easy. As I was preparing for this interview, I was like, “I want to ask David if he meditates,” but I don't know if that's an appropriate question to ask someone without a heads-up. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that. Can you share what impact it's had on you since you started?
I haven't missed a day since I started doing it. I find that I start the day more relaxed.
If you take that little bit of time, then the rest of your day becomes so much more productive. What I see is we all jump in, wake up, go to our phones, look at our email, and then suddenly, our day is off at a potential negative start if there's an email in there you don't like. If you could take a little bit of time for yourself, I feel like the rest of those hours working are a little bit more positive.
Here's the thing about email, looking at your phone, and all that. It's when you look at email and you look at whatever is on your phone, it's reactive. It's almost inevitable that there will be something that all of a sudden is added to your already big to-do list that was unplanned. How can it not cause some stress? If you journal, meditate, and exercise, those are all proactive that you have control over.
Proactivity to start your day is going to lead to a more positive outlook, which is a more positive mindset, which leads to an easier way of handling stress and working on your goals and objectives.
I’ve interviewed many guests that have the practice of having one big thing that is important for the long-term success of their business that they are going to do for the first chunk of time during the day before they will look at email, open their phone, or listen, watch, or read the news. Some people will say they'll take two hours to work on something first before doing anything else. I wish I had that level of discipline and control and I could shut out the world for the first two hours of my day. Either I'd be getting up at 3:00 in the morning or I would have a lot of control and not let other stuff impose their own to-do lists on mine. I'm not that good.
I hear that a lot too, and I’ve always been in the Pacific time zone and the world is halfway through their day already by the time you're looking at your laptop. It is hard to chunk down the first two hours. I'm right there with you, but I like that that's a common thing. Have you seen any other common tips like that through the guests that you've interviewed?
It's like what we talked about. Here's the thing. When you're an employee, your time is structured by somebody else's agenda. That's why they pay you every payday. As an entrepreneur, particularly if you're coming out of corporate, there's this idea of freedom that I can do whatever I want with my time. You can do whatever you want with your time, but the more structured you are on focusing on what's going to provide the biggest impact and when to do the different pieces, the more successful you're going to be, and probably the more fulfilled and happier you'll be.
It's about finding the structure that works for you. I always struggled with somebody else imposing structure. I was never good at it. My kids make fun of me that Daddy always says rules are meant to be broken, yet here I am in my own business. I'm the one who sets the rules. Am I setting rules for other people to break them? I don't know. For me, it's about having control over what I do with my time and when. It's not about not being structured. It’s not being controlled about what I do and not being disciplined, but it's about having the agency to do it my way.
Giving yourself structure is what's going to lead to ultimate success. If the ultimate success is measured by your freedom, your joy, happiness, and fulfillment in your career, and then, ideally the income and getting paid what you're worth. That's such a great thing that you're shepherding into the world. Your community is grateful to have you. David, before we wrap, I'd like to ask first if there's anything else you'd like to share and then I’ll end it with where people can find you and the show.
99+ Tip to Smash Your Plateau + Bonus Tips
I mentioned that our podcasts have fallen into these four categories, mindset, business development, relationships, and productivity. We've distilled about 99 episodes into these 4 categories. I ask each guest a bonus question that's not part of the podcast episode. I ask them, “What's your most actionable tip to improve your,” and I ask them to pick 1 of those 4 categories and answer the question. These are short. They're generally like 1 to 3 sentences in the answer. We've taken these and put them into an eBook with a link to the episode, and that's available. We created a special link for your show. It’s SmashingThePlateau.com/ProspectingOnPurpose.
That's such a great idea. Can I ask you that question right back at you? Are you ready for that? What's one of the most actionable tips when it comes to mindset, business development, relationships, or productivity?
When you're in a conversation with a prospect, it's common to think about what is the problem that they're discussing with you right now. Think about how this may be a recurring problem that will lead you to a recurring relationship with them, recurring revenue for your business, and recurring solutions for your client.
When you're in a conversation, it's common to think about the problem that they're discussing with you right now. Think about how this may be a recurring problem that will lead you to a recurring relationship with them that will lead to recurring revenue for your business.
That applies to a lot of different people too. If you're in a corporate role and you're talking to a client, it's the same concept. Thank you so much for that. David, anything else you'd like to add before we wrap?
I think we're good. Thank you.
I can't wait to get into Smashing the Plateau. It seems like something that is long overdue for the community and I love that you've been doing it for so long. I appreciate your time and expertise on the show.
