Jab Till It Hurts - Chapter 5: Setbacks

Don’t expect miracles when you start your business. There are going to be early setbacks. In fact, there are going to be setbacks throughout your business life, and I’m not talking about setbacks of, like, a day without sales. I’m talking about weeks or months when shit just goes stagnant.

When that happens, people tend to go on the defense. What they do is, they tend to stop doing all the things that brought them early success. They go in the opposite direction and they start right hooking or trying to sell, because they’re getting desperate, and desperation leads people to do stupid shit. Instead, embrace the setbacks and recognize that there are things you might have shifted or changed. Get back to the basics of doing what you did to launch your new business.

  • Expect setbacks.

  • Don’t be thrown by them.

  • Understand that it’s part of the cycle, it’s part of the ebb and flow of business.

You are not infallible, your business is not bulletproof, and there’s a learning curve for all of us. Don’t let those moments of setback get you down. When shit isn’t working the way it used to, look at the way you’ve engineered your process. Say, “Hey, what’s changed? Am I doing something different? Did the market change?”

Always, always stay on the offense. Jab, jab, jab. Give, give, give.

If you take any advice from this book, all you have to do is remember the title: jab ‘till it hurts. Because that is how you’re going to win. Bring so much value that you suffocate the negative, the conversation about whatever’s going on. Keep jabbing.

Making Things Right

Mistakes happen; we all make mistakes. It’s not like you’re going to start your business and it’s going to be perfect right out of the gate. But if you fuck it up, fix it up.

You’re going to have an unhappy customer, a complaint on Facebook, a bad review left on Google, you just will—but how you respond will determine a ton about the future success of your business. If you ignore a bad review and let it fester that tells the world one thing: “I don’t give a shit about my customers.”

But if you respond in a thoughtful fashion, you can turn it around. Let’s say the customer is not happy with the quality of the product, and you respond, “Hey Josh, I’m really sorry you’re not happy with this. We’re going to DM you, we want to find out what’s wrong.” Then, afterward, you can go back onto the post and say, “We were able to contact the customer and resolve the issue.” Ask the customer to come back and explain that the issue was resolved, and they were happy.

Ignoring the bad review or negative feedback is an endorsement of that feedback. If you take a positive approach to managing your reputation as a business, you’re going to win. You’re going to win every single time.

Own your mistakes. Every business makes them. Turn your pissed off customers into raving fanatics and you can change the narrative of an unhappy customer with a bad experience. It’s really that easy. So again, if you fuck it up, fix it up.

Trolls and Haters

Some of the setbacks you experience as you build your business are going to come in the form of trolls and haters. Let’s face it, the internet has created a space where people feel safe saying shit they would never say to your damn face. They hide under the anonymity of the internet.

You have to be able to embrace the hate. When I say “embrace the hate,” I mean that as trolls develop and find you, and they will, you have to learn the difference between trolls and haters versus legitimate negative reviews. What I’ve started doing is I thank them for their feedback, which really pisses them off. But I go no further than that, and I don’t let them get under my skin anymore. What you need to do is embrace them, because there are trolls no matter what. Just be aware that getting trolled isn’t bad, it just means you have a growing online presence. In fact, I’d be more concerned if you never got trolled.

Someone’s going to tell you that your Matchbox collection sucks, that you know nothing about Rae Dunn, or that you don’t know shit about beef jerky or artwork. Your response can be, “Thanks! Appreciate the feedback. Have a great day.”

Suffocate the negative.

To a lot of people, trolls are perceived as a serious setback. No. Trolls mean you’re winning. Trolls mean you’re doing something right because you’ve got people’s attention. Suffocate that negative and learn to ignore the noise. If you have setbacks along your journey, reach out to me. Chat with me. I’d love to talk to you. I can’t help everybody, but I’ll do my best to connect.

By the way, that’s a jab.

Operational Hiccups

The earliest setbacks in Ad Zombies’ growth were all related to me. I created my own roadblocks because I didn’t understand the process world. What I did, and I wasted way more hours than I should have, was try to create a “process” that really wasn’t a process. It was me monkeying with the system, or how emails flowed, or how we delivered ads. I spent a lot of time on customer experience.

I was trying to create the perfect customer experience, and the perfect customer experience to our customer is just delivering the freaking ad copy. That’s it, it’s really simple. Good ad copy, that’s it. They don’t care how it’s wrapped, they don’t care if it’s pretty. They just want ad copy, because that’s their pain point. Yet I spent a shitload of time trying to perfect the visuals, what people saw when they ordered from us. It was a disaster. As soon as I stopped doing that, and got out of my own way, things got a lot better and smoother. It didn’t hurt that I had an operational ninja, in Brandon, who had previously built a multi-million-dollar business.

It’s a Chess Game

There are games you play as a child that are very short—Clue, Chutes & Ladders—but none of them are like chess. Chess is a game of strategy and patience. Determining your every move, your every decision, hopefully allows you to eventually checkmate whomever it is you’re playing against.

The strategy you deploy today for your business isn’t for today’s results; it’s for tomorrow’s checkmate. Every decision you make needs to take into account that everything you do will be seen by everyone. When you get on social media, you’ve got to avoid talking about politics. I don’t care if you’re Right or Left. If you post about it, you’re going to divide half of your potential customers, and keep them away from you, keep them from doing business with you. It’s a polarizing and unnecessary conversation to have. This is a business conversation. Politics does not mix into this.

When you are publishing stuff on Facebook and you’re publishing your content on YouTube and Instagram, remember that it’s going to be there for everyone to see and it’s forever. Put some thought behind what you put out. Take some time to think before you act. If you’re documenting, that’s fine. Documenting is just following the process and the story as you go. But if you’re putting out thoughtful content that needs to be decisive and have action, think about what you post before you post it. In this chess game, you will lose if you piss off people because you’re dividing them due to personal feelings.

You have to make strategic moves and strategic decisions to move your business forward. But you can also make decisions that hurt it. And what I’ve talked about here in this section is one of them.

Plan B

Always have a Plan B. You never know when shit’s gonna hit the fan. Things can go south. Plan for it. It’ll happen, it always does.

It was just before the July 4th holiday weekend, and days before I was scheduled to leave for California for my family vacation, when I found out Brandon, my magic button maker, was in a serious car accident in Idaho. He and his son Blake were in Idaho for Blake’s wakeboarding competition, when a missed stop sign caused a 55 mph collision and sent both of them to the hospital. Brandon ended up being transported to a Level 1 trauma center.

In the days that followed, I knew Brandon was hurt and out of commission. I knew that he had punctured a lung, fractured ribs, all sorts of things that take a toll on the human body. But I was thankful that he and his son were not killed in this accident. It was that bad.

Brandon wasn’t ready to be bombarded with operational problems as he recovered from this accident, so I had to switch gears and put on my 360-degree creative, operations, and everything hat for several weeks to give Brandon the necessary time to heal. The goal was not to bother him with minutiae.

What I discovered at that moment was while we have backup systems for our automation, and we have redundancies in so many areas of our business, we didn’t have a Plan B for the worst-case scenario. What if one of your key people is injured or, God forbid, killed? What is your back up plan? Does everyone know where everything is? Does everyone know how to access the files? Edit things? Get in the backend of systems?

You have to have a Plan B at all times.

That was something we didn’t have for this scenario. Because how would you ever think that this scenario would come to pass? You don’t. We don’t think about our mortality. All we think about is the day-to-day functioning and operation of our lives. And then we’re smacked in the face with a dose of mortality. So, I beg of you, I implore you, as you build your business, make sure that the trusted ones around you know the ins and outs of your business, so that should anything happen—should the unthinkable happen—business doesn’t shut down because of one person.

Dealing with the Dark Days

In 2018, the word entrepreneur is so overused and so glamorized; everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. You’ll see it in their Facebook profiles and their Instagram, “Look at me, I’m an entrepreneur!” with their 100-dollar bills and their photoshopped Lamborghinis.

Entrepreneurship is glamorized and idolized, but there are things about being an entrepreneur that people don’t talk about. I talk about it because it’s a real thing for me and it’s heavy—and that is the isolation and the loneliness of entrepreneurship. There aren’t many people wired the way you are wired or the way I am wired. Entrepreneurs have certain traits, and so you can go deep and go by yourself, and do things, and take the reins, and create something because that’s who you are, that’s part of your soul. But the side of entrepreneurship that people don’t talk about is the loneliness. When you are building your own business, man, there are a lot of people who want to give you advice, but no one is there when you are working on this thing by yourself, when you’re up against a brick wall in the middle of the night, and you’re experiencing nothing but hardship, heartache, and heartburn... and none of the joy.

Entrepreneurship is glamorized like it’s the best thing ever and you’re going to make a billion dollars, and they forget to talk about the people who are sitting there depressed in their office contemplating suicide. Ninety-nine percent of the time I love life, I just do, but I’d be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that the thought has crossed my mind—that the darkness has crept in, and I’ve thought, I just can’t do this anymore. It’s lonely and isolating, and I think the worst part of it is, there really aren’t that many people wired like this. The ones who say they are, really aren’t, because when you reach out to people who claim to be entrepreneurs, they don’t know what you’re talking about. Instead, they’re all hype: “I’ve got my job, and I’ve got my side hustle, and I’ve got my e-com, my Alibaba drop ship deal going, and I’m making money, I’m rolling in it!” But they really aren’t; it’s just the story they’re telling everyone. They don’t talk about the darkness, the isolation.

Sitting in an office sometimes, by yourself, with your own thoughts, is the scariest freaking thing ever. Because your mind can really fuck with you. A lot of people don’t talk about this because it’s dark and ugly, but it needs to be talked about because entrepreneurs have one of the highest suicide rates of any segment of the population.

You know, when you sit somewhere by yourself eight, 10, 12, 18 hours a day, you’ve got nothing but you and your thoughts. With entrepreneurship, you can have really high highs, and within minutes or hours, you can have crashing lows, just based on the cycle of where the business is.

I had a business consultant who, as we were growing my other company said, “Hey, you’ve got to stop doing that and start focusing on this, because every time you go here, the business gets smaller. When you become a doer instead of an entrepreneur, the business contracts. You have to grow, so you do, but then you stop and become a worker bee and the business contracts.”

When you go through those cycles, it beats the shit out of you emotionally. You think you’re never going to get this right and you’re never going to amount to whatever it is you think you should amount to with this business. It’s as isolating as hell because you can’t talk to people about this.

Nobody understands. Your friends who are working some 9 to 5 job with some company have no idea. They’re done with their workday, and they’re going to their daughter’s dance recital. They’re not building something for the future, they’re building something for somebody else’s future. It’s really hard to have a conversation with them because they can’t relate. I have many friends who can’t relate to the fact that I would start my day at 5 AM and go to bed at 11 or push to midnight; they can’t comprehend that.

They can’t comprehend not being able to sit down with your spouse and binge watch, on a weekend, whatever it is they want to watch. I will not sit and watch baseball games because they’re too long. I’m not going to dedicate my life to watching sports on TV or binge watching a show when I’ve got an empire to build. So, as you’re growing your business you do isolate yourself, you become very insular—not because you don’t want to be social, but because you’re building something and you’re jazzed about it.

You might have an extraordinary sales day, whatever extraordinary is to you, and then you get one pissed off customer email and that totally brings you down. Running your own business? I envision it as what bipolar people go through— incredible highs followed by crashing lows. Entrepreneurship is like that. Between those highs are these deep, dark valleys—valleys you can get lost in very easily.

Reach Out and Connect

I encourage you, if you’re reading this book or listening to this book, and you’re an entrepreneur and you’re feeling that darkness right this moment, connect with me. Reach out to me, DM, Facebook, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Connect with me. Don’t go it alone, because you could get yourself into a dark hole that you can’t get out of, and you deserve better than that. You just do.

When you’re sinking, what you need to do is extract yourself from that situation in that moment. Get out of the cave in your house, or the office you occupy. Get out of there. Call a friend, get together with humans. This is such an isolating and lonely game, no matter who you are. Look, even some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world experience loneliness and darkness. Why? Because no one thinks like us, except us. Other entrepreneurs can relate to the feelings, to where you are, today, in this moment. The average person who has a job, who doesn’t aspire to do something outside of the box? That person can’t relate to what you’re doing, to where you are with your business. They just can’t, they don’t live in this world. When things get dark, and it’s lonely, don’t wallow. Don’t sit there in that darkness. Stop what you’re doing and get out and interact with the world.

If one of my kids was starting a business and sitting in the cave I’m talking about here, the advice I would give them is to simply make sure, as you go through these waves, these dark periods as you’re starting your business, that you have your core, a solid foundation of friends who understand you, who know you. They may not be in the same place as you, but these are people who will drop everything to go grab a beer with you. When you have those dark moments, you need to shake them off quickly by extracting yourself from the situation.

As your business grows and you taste success, the dark days don’t lessen, but I can say that the highs become higher and the lows stay the same. So, it feels like you’re much happier, but you still have those dark moments. Just the other day, we had a customer in an online chat who was being incredibly difficult. The saying is, “The customer is always right,” but I’m going to tell you, that’s bullshit. The customer is not always right—they think they’re always right, but there are times the customer is wrong. You have to educate them. As a business owner, your job is to clarify a situation for them so they understand their options. This customer was being such a difficult person and I felt so beat down by the end of this conversation.

This came at the end of a day in which we had extraordinary sales. Like, sales that make you jump and high five. Those highs...just get higher. The lows don’t get any lower.

Ten years ago, my struggle was different. When I was an employee it was, “How quickly can I get the hell out of the office, so I can get home?” My depression came in the form of salespeople turning stuff in on a Friday right before a holiday weekend. While they were sipping margaritas poolside, I was stuck at the office doing creative. That’s the difference.

Today, it’s all self-generated. It’s not somebody else imposing their will on my life. It’s me and my business. The darkness is different. It used to be resentment. Now it’s just cyclical waves of business.

Entrepreneurship and Relationships

I have been married to this incredibly patient woman, Allison, since 1995. And I will tell you, I don’t know how she puts up with me, because I can have an incredibly amazing day, and then the next moment something goes south, and I can go in completely the opposite direction. I am on this rollercoaster of happy-sad, happy-sad, happy-sad. Joyous, grumpy. You go from standing on top of the mountain with your hands on your hips like a superhero to the next moment, where you’re in the fetal position on the ground feeling like, “This’ll never work.”

Having a spouse who understands who you are is so vital. If you’re in a relationship with someone who is trying to change you or mold you to who they think you should be, it’s not a good relationship for anyone, but for an entrepreneur, it’s a death sentence. You have to be you, you have to be flexible, you have to be free-thinking.

My wife gives me the air cover, on a daily basis, to do what I do in my business. But at the same time, she pays the consequences for it. Eighteen-hour days take their toll, especially when you have a family with five kids. My work days sometimes kill our family time. That’s not to say I don’t go to my children’s soccer games, or football games, or orchestra performances. But my work is my life, my passion. My work is my rocket fuel. I can’t breathe without it.

Building a business like this is hard work. Having a partner, a spouse, who understands the journey, who understands the work that goes into it to be able to reap the rewards down the road is critical. If you don’t have that person in your life, if you’re trying to do this with someone who doesn’t understand, that relationship is going to crumble, it’s just going to fall apart.

Successful Businesses and Entrepreneurial Failures

Whether a business is a success or a failure is determined by the individual. A company doesn’t have to make $10 million or $100 million a year to be successful if your goal is to provide an income for your family that is equal to or slightly above what you were making in the corporate world. You may only need $70,000 a year to support your family, so a business that generates this amount is successful.

I believe there are more successful businesses all around us than most people realize, but I also think that a lot of people have unrealistic goals and expectations of what their business could be or should generate in terms of revenue. If Ad Zombies never grew above a $500,000 a year company, that would be fine. Because what that would do is support my family and my internal team enough that everybody could make a living and be happy doing what they do.

Success doesn’t always equal millions and millions of dollars. Now, if your business gets there, great! Congratulations! But don’t go in expecting to just crush the shit out of it and make $10 million. I had zero, ZERO expectations that Ad Zombies would become anything because it was an accident. The fact that it was able to provide a stable income, and then several stable incomes for team members, is remarkable. Is the business successful? Absolutely. Would I be upset if the business never grew beyond what it is today? Not at all.

Success is in the mind of the individual. Success is not some magic number that we strive for. No matter how much business my company does, or how much growth, I pay myself a very modest salary to comfortably support my family. The rest gets reinvested back in the business. You don’t have to get crazy to blow all your money or start living like a king.

Will my salary change? Sure, absolutely. I think you find the financial point you need to be happy. That set point, whether it’s money or work-life balance or whatever.

Wantrepreneurs and Opportuneurs

Today, the word entrepreneur is used very loosely. Too often, people call themselves entrepreneurs when they’re really wantrepreneurs. I still don’t call myself an entrepreneur. A lot of people look at me that way, but I consider myself a guy who started a business and is grinding and hustling and doing what he’s gotta do to grow it. I have a lot of entrepreneurial tendencies, and I think it’s either in your DNA or it’s not. I don’t think you can teach people how to be entrepreneurs.

Some people are opportuneurs, not entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur sees something and realizes there’s a market and creates something to fill a need. An opportuneur just looks for every opportunity to cash in and make money. They go in with the mindset of, “I’m going to crush it and make a bazillion dollars!” As soon as they taste a little success, they get flashy. They go buy a car they can’t afford, watches they don’t need, they get really fancy with their homes, and start to burn through that money. Just like an athlete newly signed to an NFL contract.

When things start to go south, there’s no reserve, there’s nothing left in the tank because all they’ve done is burn through every penny they’ve made. They’re really not setting themselves for a long- term profitable, financially sound business. They’re setting themselves up for quick hits, like a junkie. They get a hit of heroin, and it feels good, but then they need more heroin. If you build this thing right and build this thing slowly, it’ll feed you for decades. In many businesses, it’ll feed generations.

Nothing Fixes Broken

This is going to be a hard pill for many to swallow, but nothing fixes a broken mindset. Nothing is going to fix your happiness, and often when people are chasing an entrepreneurial dream, they’re chasing the wrong happiness. They’re chasing money.

I can tell you firsthand: money doesn’t buy happiness. In fact, recent news stories about Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain committing suicide are further proof that no matter how much money you have, you can’t buy happiness. Anthony, a chef, author, and guy who had his own TV show traveling the world, was one of my favorite storytellers, ever, who took his own life in a hotel room in Paris. You hear about these tragedies again and again and again, but it seems like only the celebrities are the ones that grab the headlines and get people’s attention. If that’s what it takes, that’s fine.

Money cannot buy you happiness.

There are a lot of wantrepreneurs out there who are not chasing the right thing. They’re chasing what they perceive to be happiness, namely money. In reality, money is only one component of the big picture. You can chase as many dollars as you want, but there comes a time when no amount of money in the world fixes your broken shit. I was broken for many years. I was chasing hundreds of thousands of dollars because that was my goal. I wanted to grow as much money as I could, or get as much money as I could, because I thought that that would make me happy. After all, if I had money, then I could go on vacations, and if I had money, then I could buy this shit, and that shit. I could buy this car and that car.

There’s this perceived value that is put on money when in reality, happiness comes from within. It comes from doing something that feeds your soul. It comes from doing the right thing. There’s no external force that’s in control of your happiness. It’s all within you. I feel like Yoda saying, “The power of The Force is within you.” Yoda was right. It really is. Instead of trying to build a business around a dollar amount, build your business around your passion, and the dollars will come. This is starting to sound like a theme, right?

As of the day I wrote this chapter, we just came off a horrific month in my business. We shed—that means lost—over $160,000 in revenue. Gone. If money bought happiness, I’d be devastated. But I’m not. It happens. This is what happens in business. You have cycles. We onboarded a lot of unqualified clients, and then two, three months into the relationship, they realized that they are in way over their head, and while working with us is great, they don’t have the business to sustain the relationship with us, so they opt out. And that’s gonna happen. It’s called churn, attrition, and in business, you’re going to have churn.

Shedding $160,000 to most people would be devastating. Financially, it impacts the business. Yes. But is it devastating to me? No! Because that’s not what makes me happy, and that’s not what should make you happy. What makes me happy is going to Mexico with my family. The money simply gives us the freedom to do that. But not the happiness. The happiness comes from being with my family, from going to amusement parks with my kids.

Money is an admission fee. That’s all it is. It’s not happiness.

Key Points from Chapter 5

  • There will be setbacks as you grow your business. Don’t freak out. Setbacks are natural. When they occur, focus on jabbing and doing the things that worked in the beginning.

  • Suffocate the trolls by thanking them and then ignoring them.

  • Remember, money cannot buy happiness.

  • If you’re stuck in a dark, lonely place as an entrepreneur, reach out to a friend, or reach out to me. I understand how you are feeling and I want to help.

  • Entrepreneurship is not all glamorous.

  • As you grow your business and experience more successes, the highs will become higher and the lows will stay the same.

Yes? GREAT!

If it did and you feel compelled to buy a few copies of my book to give away as Christmas gifts to friends, I’m okay with that!

Get your copy of Jab Till It Hurts here or tap on the book cover.

Want the audio version of this? You can get that by subscribing to my podcast EntreGrow.

 
Ken 'Spanky' MoskowitzJab Till It Hurts, Gary Vaynerchuk, Spanky Moskowitz, TYC, Best-Selling Author