The Startup Sessions with Michael Knouse

As a busy entrepreneur, you’re on the lookout for ways to be more efficient and effective. This week’s guest is Dr. Jessica Brandes and we’re discussing how to reach your optimal state of physical and cognitive performance. This is a fascinating interview unlike any other that I’ve done.

“One person’s health can affect the economic outcome of an entire company.”

– Dr. Jessica Brandes

“Sacrificing sleep for the sake of work makes absolutely no sense.”

– Dr. Jessica Brandes

If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s likely that you’ve experienced sleepless nights, anxiety, stress and fatigue. Dr. Jessica Brandes will address these issues and help you achieve optimal physical and cognitive performance.

Dr. Jessica Brandes works specifically with results-driven individuals to optimize their physical and cognitive performance via physician-guided biohacking. She is the founding physician at Infuse Health, an independent private medical practice based in Portland, Oregon.

Patients that work with Jessica gather information about themselves and work to design a lifestyle that will make them feel better in the short term and prevent or reverse disease in the long term.

Have you ever had an unconventional idea or passion that you think may be a great business idea? Find out how this week’s guest, Nick Gray, turned an interesting hobby into a $1.2M+ business while revolutionizing a stagnant industry.

“I wanted to do something big in this world.”

– Nick Gray

 “Stories are how we make sense of the world.”

– Nick Gray

If you’ve ever taken a museum tour, you know that they can be pretty dull. Nick Gray is out to change that. Nick is the founder and CEO of Museum Hack, a company of renegade tour guides.

Museum Hack was founded out of a hobby that Nick had, which was giving tours to his friends on Friday and Saturday nights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Today, Museum Hack is a profitable business in the art world with 35+ employees who give custom tours at the best museums in New York City, Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

Tours include VIP, Marriage Proposals, Bachelorette Parties, Company Team Building and specially themed tours.

Jill and I completed phase one of our experiment to unplug for the last week of every month during the summer. Here’s an earlier recap in case you missed it: ‘Escaping The Trance of Busyness’.

Today I want to share some honest feelings and struggles about this experience. I’m sure it looked 100% amazing if you saw the photos on Facebook and Instagram. And it was a lot of fun but here’s the truth. 

I coach 10 clients a week, run a weekly podcast, host a monthly dinner series, and speak at conferences and events. There’s not a lot of room for error here. So removing 25% of the available time from my calendar last month was a real challenge.

Here’s what I learned:

It’s difficult to unplug when you love what you do. I love my work and I feel a strong connection to the purpose behind it. And that makes it very difficult for me to step away – even for a day. In other words, I’m not very good at just turning myself “off.”

It was a challenge for me to step away from everything because I felt like I intentionally disrupted the flow of my business. And it did take me out of my groove.

Do I have any regrets? Absolutely not. It was great to connect with nature and unplug but it did interrupt the projects that I was working on. I’m just being totally honest here.

I want to keep experimenting with unplugging but at this stage of my business it felt awkward and stressful to take a week off.

Which brings me directly to the next point…

The single biggest thing I learned from my week away is that I need more support. I’ve already got an amazing coach, a killer virtual assistant team, and a magical bookkeeping service that keeps me sane. But I need to add a dedicated team member that can help me take care of all the countless things that suck up my time – the things that I should be paying someone else to do so that I can truly unplug, recharge, and focus on the higher level parts of my business.

I’ve been denying that I need this. But my week away made it abundantly clear that I can’t (and no longer want to) do it all alone.

Two summers ago Jill and I set out on a month-long road trip and it took nearly two weeks for me to feel completely relaxed and to decompress. My experience with unplugging for a week confirmed that it will probably take more than a week for me to fully let go and be in a highly creative state. This is simply an observation and I’m not saying that I didn’t relax and enjoy myself. I just noticed that I didn’t fully relax and I think it takes more time to really decompress and feel totally unplugged.

I love experiments and this one is only one-third of the way complete. In other words, I’ve still got a lot to learn from our upcoming time away in July and August. This has already got me thinking about new ways to blend adventure + travel + work for the future. Which is the reason I left corporate work in the first place. As with every experiment, you can’t know what you’ll learn from it until you actually do it.

Even though it made me a little nutty, unplugging allowed me to slow down just enough to remind me of the importance of taking care of myself. For me, spending time in nature, spending quality time with Jill, and doing the things that feed my soul are ultimately good for me. 

Life isn’t just about business and busyness. Other things are important too. And I realize that for me to show up as my best self that I’ve got to find a good balance of work and play. I know this and I need to trust this.

Preparing to unplug for a week created an intense need for focus. The days leading up to my week-long escape and the days following were insanely focused on only the most important elements of my business – sales, delivering mind-blowing coaching to my clients, and planning for my upcoming events. All unnecessary emails, social media, conversations and other distractions were eliminated out of necessity. There was no room for anything else. I only had time for the most essential things.

Knowing what to focus on made everything easier. And knowing what to focus on required me to have absolute clarity on my outcomes and the strategies that will allow those outcomes to happen. Focus is what made it possible for me to step away for a week and return to a thriving business. To say that my ‘week off’ forced me find focus would be an understatement.

In the future, I will be sharing a lot more about slowing down to speed up, doing less (and doing it better), and getting one win at a time before moving forward. Because these are the things that are allowing me to have a coaching practice full of ideal clients, healthy revenue, work that feeds my Soul, and a life that feels amazing.

Until next time, live bravely and don’t be afraid to experiment with creating your ideal life and business. I can guarantee that you’ll learn a lot in the process!

Live bravely,

Michael

What’s your relationship with money like? We’re going to dive into that question as well as explore how entrepreneurs can develop powerful financial habits and why it’s so important to have healthy conversations about money.

“It’s not what you make, it’s what you spend.”

– Charlene Quaresma

“How you see your business 5-10 years from now will determine when and how you expand.”

– Charlene Quaresma

Charlene Quaresma is a different type of entrepreneur. As a Financial Advisor for Northwestern Mutual, her mission is to inspire her clients to live courageously and with purpose. She is a licensed Advisor and holds her FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) Series 6, 63 and 65 certifications.

She runs a broad practice and works with a team of specialists to offer:

Charlene is not your typical financial planner.  She didn’t dream of working in the industry; she never imagined she’d land in the world of investments and long term planning.  She began her career as a sales manager at a lingerie boutique and it was there where she discovered the powerful link between money and emotion, passion and vulnerability. With her, it’s not about judgment; it’s about owning your story and following your dreams.

Ryan Ayres is a business coach and strategist that has made it his mission to help other entrepreneurs make more money in their businesses while gaining some of their time back. He is the creator of the Focus 53 podcast and founder of Focus 53 – a one-stop shop for all things related to business productivity and operations.

“Until my one thing is done, everything else is a distraction.” – Ryan Ayres

Ryan is the founder of Focus 53 and host of the Focus 53 podcast.  As a business coach and strategist, Ryan has had the privilege of working with companies of all sizes, including Microsoft and Sports Illustrated, in addition to many smaller companies throughout the years.

Ryan’s passion for helping business owners runs deep. After starting a web design business, Ryan noticed that the majority of his clients thought that a new website would launch them into the next stage of their business. Knowing that this wasn’t the case, Ryan wanted to help these businesses find their focus and have a greater impact. Today, Ryan focuses on business operations and helping owners identify opportunities and solve roadblocks with the people and processes within their company.

Staying busy leaves you stagnant; not growing, not solving anything, and not living in your zone of genius. It is the equivalent of looking the other way and thinking that if you don’t see something it is not real.

An interesting thing happens when you shift into more purpose-driven work. If you’re not careful, it will consume you. It’s not like having the corporate job where you count down the minutes until the weekend arrives. Doing work you love, being committed to a purpose or calling greater than you, can easily lure you into working all the time.

I just spent an entire week unplugging from my regular day-to-day duties. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve done in a long time because my busy mind says that I should be getting caught up on projects that are long overdue.

So except for a mid-week coaching collaboration and a couple of client catch up calls, I spent the majority of the last week camping on Mt. Hood and relaxing at the beach. This is part of my commitment to experiment with unplugging during the last week of every month through the summer.

To be completely honest, part of the time spent at the beach was dedicated to planning the next quarter. My wife Jill and I are at a point where we realize just how important it is to step away and create a 90 day plan for achieving the things that are most important. Otherwise, our businesses will stay the same and we’ll look up at the end of 90 days and wonder how another quarter slipped by without getting our most important work done.

Escape to Timothy Lake – Mt. Hood. Oregon

I realize that I’ve been highly focused on the topic of ‘busyness’ lately. That’s because I’ve been struggling with it – in my life and in my business.

I’ve also recognized that I’ve used busyness as a shield to avoid confronting unpleasant truths in my life. In her New York Times bestseller, Daring Greatly, Dr. Brene Brown argues that people use different numbing strategies as armor against vulnerability — showing other people who you really are. And before you think that this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not numbing with drugs or alcohol, Dr. Brown talks about one of the most prevalent numbing strategies people use – something she calls “crazy-busy.” She says, “I often say that when they start having 12-step meetings for busy-aholics, they’ll need to rent out football stadiums. We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.”

If you’re stuck in crazy-busy land, where do you even start to come up for air? Here are three strategies to begin digging yourself out:

1) Set boundaries. You’ve heard this a million times, but you really need to establish firm boundaries around your time and your energy.

I realize that most people won’t create the time to do this but it’s what I had to do to finally get a grip and create boundaries for myself.

Consider the following system:

Take a piece of paper and divide it onto three sections: Do it, Delegate it, and Ditch it.

Commit to checking in every hour or two throughout your work day over the next week. Set a timer and take stock of what tasks you’ve been focused on every 1-2 hours and then categorize your activities in one of the three sections.

Do it: If it’s something that no one else but you can do, then put it in this column. For me, this would include things like coaching my clients or recording my podcast.

Delegate it: If it’s something that you can delegate or offload to someone else, then write it down here. I promise that you’ll be amazed at all of the shit you’re doing that someone else could be doing way more efficiently than you. An example for me would be bookkeeping, editing my podcast, formatting my weekly blog/newsletter. And trust me when I say that the longer you wait to delegate these kinds of things, the harder it will be for you to do it.

Ditch it: Is this something you have to do at all? Can you let it go completely? Believe me, there are things in your day that probably aren’t necessary at all. An example for me would be spending more than 15 minutes a day on social media or engaging in news media. Be honest with yourself here.

2) Establish your balance builders and balance busters. I do this exercise in my resilience coaching to help people think about how to manage their energy and rethink what work/life balance really means.

Make a table with four squares labeled as follows: Balance Builders — Work; Balance Builders — Non-Work; Balance Busters — Work; and Balance Busters — Non-Work. Balance builders are those activities that build your energy and rejuvenate you while balance busters are those activities that deplete or drain your energy.

Take a few moments to write down all of those activities, people and tasks that make you feel alive vs the ones that drain you. Do this in the areas of work and non-work.

I’m always shocked at how much time we spend doing activities that drain us — both at work and outside of work. In fact, in a recent conversation with a client they realized that they spend 90 percent of their time doing activities that drain them and only 10 percent of their time doing activities that energize and rejuvenate them! No wonder we’re burning out.

3) Get mentally fit. A fundamental tenet of cognitive science is that your thoughts drive your emotions and actions. When you have an emotion or reaction to a stress producing event that you don’t like or that surprises you, map out what you were thinking in the heat of the moment right before you reacted. Developing self-awareness around your thoughts will help you get better at processing your emotions and reactions in a way that will help you stop undercutting your performance and instead, build resilience.

In order to keep yourself from burning out, it can help to take a close look at what’s driving your addiction to being busy. I’ve found that journaling first thing in the morning is a great way for me to capture my thoughts and check in with how I’m really doing. Most of us will miss the warning signs along the way and have a wake up call in the form of a stress induced illness or accident. Do everything you can to prevent this.

The irony of doing any of these exercises is that you’ll be required to set aside time to do them, even though you feel like you don’t have any extra time. I didn’t have the extra time to take a week off from my business and unplug, plan and reconnect with my wife. But doing so has forced me to get really clear about what’s important, what to let go of, and where I need to invest in people, processes and systems that will allow me to enjoy the life and business that I’m building.

I try to remind myself to cherish every moment I have with my family, friends, and the people I care about. I fight the urge to stay busy and ‘check out’ of being in the present moment, because if I let this moment slip away, I will never get it back.

I read somewhere that if you stick your hand in a river you can never touch the same water twice, because by the time you stick your hand back in, the water has moved on. It is like that with time and being busy simply for the sake of being busy; once that moment is gone you can never get it back.

Live bravely,

Michael

What does it take to build genuine and meaningful business connections? We all know that business success depends largely on our ability to connect with others both in-person and online. In this episode you’ll learn how to master the art of building meaningful business connections that last.

“How can you serve others if you don’t know what they need and want?” – Patrick Galvin

Patrick Galvin is the co-founder and Chief Galvanizer of The Galvanizing Group, a relationship marketing company in Portland, Oregon. Patrick enjoys galvanizing individuals and companies to create connections that increase loyalty, referrals, and sales without advertising.

Patrick is also an accomplished professional speaker and served as president of the Oregon Chapter of the National Speakers Association. Since 2004, he has delivered hundreds of presentations to associations and companies throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe. He inspires people to integrate their face-to-face and online networking activities and also speaks on branding, word of mouth marketing, customer service, and public relations.

In March 2016, Patrick published a new book The Connector’s Way: A Story About Building Business One Relationship at a Time, a parable about a struggling business owner who discovers simple yet effective ways to cultivate relationships in the real world and online that fuel his success.

“What people really remember is how you make them feel.” – Patrick Galvin

I ran into a friend a few days ago and when I asked her how she was doing, she looked at me and said: “I’m so busy… I am so busy… have so much going on.”

Almost immediately after, I ran into another friend and asked him how he was. Again, same tone, same response: “I’m just so busy… got so much to do.”

How did we create a world in which we have more and more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just… be?

Busy has become a badge of honor, particularly for entrepreneurs and business builders. The more you sell and the more clients you have, the more you are valued, seen as important, and worthy.

For many years, my worth was tied to my BUSY job — who was I if I wasn’t the Director of Sales for the Western Region? I had to wrestle with that question when I decided not to return to the corporate world and chose to start a new business doing something completely different.

But my busyness simply carried over into a new role as an entrepreneur – one where it became even more acceptable to be busy all the time. Working a few evenings a week turned into working a half day on Saturday and then I slowly started finding ways to justify why I was working all the time.

“Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.”

– Tim Ferriss

Here’s what I’ve realized. Many of us are afflicted with the disease of being “busy” (and let’s call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease). It’s spiritually destructive to our health and wellbeing. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.

For some of us, the work at home entrepreneurs, the lines between work and home have become blurred. We are connected to work. All. The. Freaking. Time.

One of my own struggles is balancing all of the tasks that I must get done every day while still having a meaningful life, a sense of community, and a balanced existence.

I’m currently challenging my own relationship with work in new ways. Because how else am I going to be able to truly serve my clients unless I’m taking the time to unplug and be at ease?

As entrepreneurs, we have the freedom to create our own schedules and if we are stressed and busy it’s our own damn fault.

To think BIG and have breakthroughs you must create space to think. You have to have time to learn, grow, and recharge properly.

To create great things you need to create space in your schedule to breathe. Just like a writer or an artist has to start with a blank page, you have to create some white space in your life for creativity and your best work to happen.

I’ve recently made a commitment to create space in my life by taking the last week of every month off through the summer. I’ve thought about doing this for the past two years and starting this month, my wife and I have blocked off the last week of every month this summer to travel, enjoy life, and connect to the things that are the most important in our lives.

As my coach Dana Corey just said to me this week, “An important part of any business is creating your ideal business.”

So starting on Sunday, we’ll be taking the Winnebago to Timothy Lake for a few days and then retreating to the Oregon Coast for the rest of the week.

Will I do any work during that time?

Probably.

I’m a work in progress after all.

The point is that I’m removing myself from my normal environment and creating space to think, to slow down, to just… be.

I used to work for two of the smartest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz.

Last year Marc’s reported net worth was listed at $700M and Ben’s net worth was listed at $500M. Today they run one to the top VC firms in the world with $4.2 billion in assets.

Working for them was like being in advanced business bootcamp every day. Everyone in the company had higher expectations of themselves than others and it was a culture of 100% responsibility. Marc and Ben were two of the smartest, caring and most business savvy people I’ve ever met. And one of the most important things I learned from them is that busy people are not successful, and successful people aren’t busy.

What this means is that there’s a big difference between being productive and being busy. While working for Ben and Marc, there was always a clear definition of what it looked like to be busy and what it looked liked to do “smart work” and the difference between the two. And honestly, I’ve never been more productive in my life than when I was in that environment.

So if you’re busy, stop fooling yourself.

Being busy is just an excuse for not being disciplined enough to focus on what really matters most.

One of the questions that I ask my clients often is “what does your business need from you the most, right now?” Whatever that is, stop working on everything else and focus your time on doing fewer things, better. (And if you’re not sure about what you should be focused on, we should talk.)

The real secret to success is to have the time and energy to focus on the most interesting and important work that can create momentum in your business. Anything else is probably keeping you stuck, frustrated and “busy.”

Live bravely,

Michael

Genevieve LeMarchal is an entrepreneur with a growing startup, who also teaches entrepreneurs how she went from being stumped about sales and growth; to triple digit growth and a steadily growing business.

 “I remember thinking, this is the end. Actual bad things are happening.”

“Start being the entrepreneur that you are meant to be. And start being that person right now.”

Genevieve LeMarchal has been an entrepreneur for over a decade. She has learned how to raise money, scale and grow a business, and navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship. Genevieve understands that your skill as an entrepreneur can make the difference between a booming business and struggling to make payroll. And she knows that your #1 job as a business owner is to sell.

By learning how to build a pipeline and focus on sales, she has taken her life and business to new heights. She is also committed to teaching other founders how to sell.

Question of The Day: Do you have a plan for fueling business growth and filling your sales pipeline with ideal customers? 

I just returned from leading a three day coaching retreat with a client in beautiful Bend, Oregon. We laughed, we played, we ate, we hiked, we planned, we did yoga, and we intentionally stepped away from the hustle & bustle of everyday life to make sure my client is stepping into the boldest and most creative vision for her business and life.

If you’re anything like her, you want to make real things happen. Things that matter. You’re committed to a life of growth and impact.

So you plug in. You’re heads down in your business. You squeeze every possible moment out of the time you have, consuming, creating, connecting, rinsing and repeating. Occasionally, you breath, but only if forced.

Partly because it gives you more to think about. But, also, because it’s just become your default. Space terrifies you. And maybe, just maybe, you’re even driven by the fear that if you release your foot from the accelerator, business will come to a screeching halt!

The thing is…

It doesn’t matter how productive or how busy you are if the ideas you’re building on don’t represent the best you have to offer.

And your best ideas rarely, if ever, come when you’re filling every second of your life with something to do.

Brilliance shows up when you disconnect from the day-to-day routines and reconnect to space.

To plug into your best self, you’ve first got to unplug. To create the space for brilliance to emerge.

The past few days has taught me that if you want miracles to appear, unplugging is non-negotiable.

The immersion coaching retreat with my client looked a little like this:

Intentionally unplugging in Bend, Oregon

If you want to your brilliance to shine, you must intentionally create space for it emerge. Life is not about getting stuff done. Life is about creating space for your most brilliant ideas to flourish.

It doesn’t matter how productive you are unless the ideas you’re building on represent the best you have to offer.

And the best you have to offer rarely shows up when you’re filling every moment with busywork.

Genius comes when you disconnect from busyness and you reconnect with yourself.

If you kill the space, you kill the dream.

Embrace the space and let your brilliance shine.

Live bravely,

Michael