MBA2397 Why It Feels Like You Are Always Putting Out Fires + Free Ride Friday

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, the business podcast that always got your back with practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a free ride to the$100 MBA. Our program is showing you how to become a better entrepreneur, 100 % guaranteed over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode.

0:42In today's episode, you will learn why it feels like you're always putting out fires. As a business owner, you feel like a professional firefighter. Almost on a daily basis, you're waking up to problems, new problems, problems that you need to solve. Some of these problems are huge. They're critical to the life of the business. Some of them, not so huge, but still got to get them done. Why is this the case? Why are there so many fires as a business owner? And what can you do about it? How can you become better at this? This is something I've been studying for some time. I've actually been thinking about for years and been wanting to do an episode about it.

1:19So here it is, the culmination of my work on this topic. At the end of this episode, you're going to feel better about your business. You're going to feel better about how to deal with these fires, with these problems that face you and your business every day. You're going to have a better approach. And best of all, they're not going to be fires anymore. I'll tell you what I mean. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of the things a lot of people don't really grasp or comprehend is as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, your life, your career is not the same as anybody else in a job.

1:53Jobs have job descriptions. There's parameters to what you have to deal with. There's parameters to what you're responsible for. So there's only so much that can go wrong. OK, it's not like you're not going to deal with any problems in a job, but you're dealing with far less fires than an entrepreneur. Why? Well, I really researched this topic. I took a look at my own career, my own past. I've spoken to so many entrepreneurs about this, people that run multimillion dollar businesses, small startups, big startups, all kinds. And here's the truth. Business owners are innovators. You're constantly doing new things, whether it's with a marketing campaign, whether it's with a new hire, whether it's with new products or services.

2:36You're doing new things all the time. You're introducing new things to your business and to your life all the time. You have to. Innovation is really the lifeblood of every entrepreneur. You got to keep doing that so that you can stay competitive. So anytime you start changing things in your business, in your life, introduce new factors, new possibilities, the likelihood of something going wrong is high. When I started to realize this, I had a epiphany. I had a change of mindset. And that is, I got to stop getting all riled up and upset and anxious and feeling horrible every time there's a fire.

3:16Why? Because that's just par for the course. This is part of the package. You have to deal with problems. Now, you can get better at it. You can outsource it. You can manage it. There's all different kinds of techniques. But the reason why this is happening is because you're an entrepreneur, because you have a business. That's it. This is just what comes with the deal. You're in the problem-solving business. One of the things that helped me change the way I see this is for a book called 4 ,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. I talked about this book earlier this year, one of the best books I've read this year, if not the best book.

3:46and he talks about that we live under this myth that if I just do this one thing, if I get to this level in life, when I climb this mountain, there'll be no problems. The funny thing is that we don't learn from our past. We've climbed mountains before. We've achieved things before. We have moved up in life, so to speak, or in our career and gotten better. And did problems go away? No, they didn't. You just exchanged them for higher level problems. Just think about it. No matter how old you are, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, no matter how old you are, look at your past. Was there ever a time in your life where there was zero problems for a long period of time?

4:23No, that's just not life. And that's not business. Business is dealing with challenges. So embrace it. Understand that you will have fires. You will have problems. Expect it. Understand that's what you do. If you didn't have that, you wouldn't have anything to do, right? You wouldn't have any challenges. And really, that's what they are. They're new challenges. Now, they're extremely stressful in the moment. Trust me, I've gone through some serious fires in my businesses in the past. And in the moment, you just want to, you know, let the ground swallow you, right? You just want it to be over. But what you realize is all these fires you've put out before, all these problems you solved before, they prepare you for the next problem because you realize I've done this before.

5:09I can do it again. This is just normal. And the more problems you have, the more you get better at it, the better you are in terms of controlling your emotions and not getting riled up and learning how to do things calmly and get help from others, from your team, from managers on your team, from people that can take action. So now when I have any kind of problem, big or small fire in my business, I set up a protocol. And the protocol is, first, I like to identify what exactly is the problem. What's the problem? What are we trying to solve here? Sometimes in the panic, we forget what we're trying to do here.

5:44We just want the bleeding to stop. We want the problem just to stop. So identify, this is what we're trying to do. This is the problem. This is what we're trying to solve. The next thing is, what needs to be done right now and what needs to be done later? And literally all these steps happen within five minutes. So I literally write it down. This is what needs to be done right now to stop the bleeding or stop things from going wrong or to reduce the impact. And then this is how we can solve this problem permanently in the long run. Step three is who can do these things for me, right? As problem solvers, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we often think that the responsibility is on us.

6:22We have to do all the work. No, yes, you're responsible, but it doesn't mean you have to implement. It means that you just need to make sure it gets done. So you have probably people on your team that can do a lot of those things that need solving. Or you can find somebody, you can freelance somebody, you can hire somebody quickly on a project. You can seek help from a friend or from a colleague or from somebody who maybe works in the same coworking space as you. And you might have three or four tasks. Figure out who can do each task and try your best not to do any of them. If you have to do one, fine, that's okay.

6:56But by splitting up what needs to be done and outsourcing it to other people, you actually can get things done quickly. Because instead of you trying to do four or five things, you do one thing and three or four other people do the rest. You just speed things up a lot easier. And usually they're doing something that they're an expert at, that they've done before and can help you. I then do the same thing with the long-term solution. And I tell myself, this will pass. I've solved problems before, we'll solve them again. Now, it's important to understand now that you know this, that fires are par for the course and they're going to come and you're going to have problems.

7:28And that's just how it is in business. It doesn't mean you're on edge always. It doesn't mean you can't relax or have any kind of enjoyment because a fire is around the corner. In fact, it means the opposite. You have to enjoy yourself. You have to actually embrace the challenge and say, yeah, I could take this on. I can do this. I've done this before and I will do it again. And even if I've done it before, I'm going to learn something in this process. And even when the fire is done and dusted, try your best to understand that it's okay. It's normal for this to happen and to move on and to enjoy you having a business.

8:00Okay. It's very easy for you to get really riled up and to have kind of like PTSD from fires and be like, every time something happens, you're like, oh, this bad thing is going to happen again in my business. A customer is going to complain on Google reviews or my telecom company is going to have an outage and then I can't process any credit cards in my store. or my hosting provider is going to have some sort of downtime. The point here is there's a good chance that could happen again. There's a good chance you'll have another fire. There's no point in worrying because worrying doesn't solve problems.

8:30Worrying just makes it worse. And to calm your worry, remember that this is supposed to happen and you will weather the storm. Now, I want to focus on something that's very important. If you're a bootstrap entrepreneur, if you're somebody that has built your business yourself and then you started building out a team and really you're a problem solver by nature and many entrepreneurs are, you have to be careful because many of us derive our significance in solving problems, even subconsciously. We're not even conscious of it. And you might be saying, Omar, I don't want problems. I don't want fires.

9:04Are you telling me I'm creating fires on purpose? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you become so accustomed to solving problems and being in that mode of firefighting that that becomes your comfort zone, that you actually find comfort when things are chaotic. That's what you're used to because that's what you've been doing maybe for the first few years of your business. So that when things start to level off, things get better and there's a little bit more consistency and a little bit more calm in your business because you have some structure and some systems and some team members helping you out that you might perceive things that are not problems as problems so that you can feel comfortable again.

9:41I know this sounds strange, but it's very common and I've even seen it in myself. And that's why I can identify it and articulate it to you right now. Just because you can solve problems doesn't mean you should be solving problems all the time. You shouldn't want to have to flex that muscle all the time. This is why it's good to have a scale in your head or even on a piece of paper from one to 10. You know, if you've ever seen that chart in hospitals or in doctor's office of the smiley face and the levels of pain and like it has a picture for like really painful, how much pain you're having. and the smiley face is not smiling at all, it's grimacing and that's a 10.

10:19So really you wanna do the same thing with your business when it comes to your fires or problems where you wanna be like, okay, from a scale of a one to 10, 10 meaning this can cause my business to just collapse and not exist. And one being, even if I don't solve this problem right now, if I put it off, nothing's gonna happen, it's okay. By being honest about where the problem lies, it allows you to be like, okay, not such a big problem. It's not an eight, nine or 10. It's more like a four or five. This is not really a fire or an emergency. We can solve this and I can calmly communicate this to the team.

10:52Listen, your team follows your lead. So if you're panicking and you're really not in a good state, every time there is a problem or a fire, this creates a really kind of uneasy culture in your business. But if sometimes you have a challenge, say, hey guys, we have a little bit of a problem here, a little bit of a challenge. I need you to just work on this today. Make sure it's solved. Hear what it is. They will actually respect the urgency of an 8, 9, or 10 problem because your demeanor and the way you're addressing them is going to be different. It's going to be like, guys, code red, drop everything.

11:22We need to solve this in the next hour. So to wrap up, it's normal for a business to have challenges, to have fires. You're innovating. You're changing. You're improving. You're changing the game. You're making a mark in this world. You're bound to ruffle some feathers. You're bound to make some mistakes or have some pitfalls. But how you react to it matters. not only for your team and effectively solving the problem, but also for your own mental health and your enjoyment of the business. If your adrenals are through the roof every day, you're just not going to make it. Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show, but today's episode is not over.

11:53It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Keep On Going. That's the handle on Apple Podcasts. Keep On Going says, I just started a B2C F &B brand in South Korea. Five stars. B2C is business to consumer. F &B is food and beverage. Let's see what Keep On Going said. Still, this show is so much helpful with much relevance on how to build and run a business. Thanks. Thanks to Keep On Going all the way from South Korea. Your mission is to email me at omar at 100mba.net so you can claim your free ride to the$100 MBA. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and a review.

12:28Listen in on Friday, just like right now to see if you won. It's that simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's a reason why most people are not entrepreneurs. It's the same reason why most people are not rock climbers. It takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of work. It's risky. It takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard work. It's stressful. But with every pain, there's reward. The harder something is, the more fulfilling it is at the end when you achieve it. So give yourself some credit. Pat yourself on the back today because you're one of those people. You're one of those people that actually does hard things.

13:03Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.