The Reckoning: An Entrepreneurial Drowning
[ALIGNED] series, Post IV [EXTRICATE]
The Reckoning:
An Entrepreneurial Drowning
Post IV of [ALIGNED]
By Mike Brcic,
Chief Explorer, Wayfinders
This is the 4th post in my [ALIGNED] series, with tips, tools and wisdom to help you build an Aligned Company (resilient, self-managing, and purpose-driven) and Aligned Life (lived in line with your values, purpose and ideals).
If you’re here for the first time, I encourage you to Visit the Table of Contents to see all of the posts in the series, or start with the Introduction.
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We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of men.
- Ernest Shackleton, South
The reckoning came in the spring of 2017.
I’d just spent the previous 9 months giving just about everything I had - energy, time, sanity, and more - to launch a massive new project in my adventure travel company, Sacred Rides.
The project - called our Getaways program - had required, and was still demanding of me, many late nights and early mornings, and large amounts of stamina and resilience.
Impatient with our growth, the previous year I’d set the audacious goal of seeing the company operate in 150 countries within 5 years (by 2021).
Our growth had averaged a healthy 45% over the past 4 years and we’d been ranked “World’s #1 Mountain Bike Tour Company” by both National Geographic Adventure and Outside magazines.
Despite the successes and accolades, I felt a profound lack of fulfillment from these achievements.
Operating in an industry that had traditionally resisted scale, and operating with models that were complex and almost impossible to replicate in multiple destinations, I’d scratched my head to find solutions for achieving this audacious goal (as a point of reference, we’d added a dozen destinations over the past 5 years, a pace that many would already consider breakneck for the niche mountain bike tourism industry).
In early 2016, however, I stumbled across a PDF handbook called A Guide to Marketplaces by Boris Wertz and Angela Trans Kingyens.
It was a detailed, well-written handbook on how to create online marketplaces such as Airbnb or Uber, and it lit the spark that eventually became the new Getaways program.
I won’t bore you with the details - in a nutshell it was a program that gave people around the world the platform, tools and training to run guided mountain bike trips on their local trails: a bit of Airbnb with a side of franchise.
By late summer of that year I’d spent months putting everything together: developing the specs for our developers to build out the IT infrastructure; writing manuals for every aspect of the program; scouring the world for insurance partners; building the media database for our launch; and many more projects that I was, more or less, doing myself.
This was on top of the regular day-to-day running of the rest of the company, which was by no means running smoothly and should have commanded my full attention.
By the fall everything was in place for the initial launch. My plan was to bring on 20 ‘affiliates’ (we stayed away from the term franchisee for legal reasons) to beta test the technology and the program, at an annual fee of $3500 CAD.
The Getaways program home page
I sent hundreds of press releases; over a dozen articles followed, including some in major media. Emails were sent to thousands of people in our database, ads were running on multiple platforms, and bit by bit the word got out.
Within a few weeks, to my surprise, we hit our target of 20 paid affiliates.
The launch had achieved its goals so I closed access to the program.
I spent the winter gathering feedback from our affiliates, improving the technology and platform, and gearing up for another early spring launch, this time a bigger, more expansive (and expensive) one.
By March of 2017 the program was ready for a full launch. Within a week of this second launch I brought on, incredibly, another 25 affiliates.
Within the span of a few months, the company and the brand had expanded into 19 new countries, including several locations in Africa, a continent we’d previously never operated in and had virtually no exposure in.
Although these 45 new affiliates represented only about $150,000 in annual revenue (peanuts compared to the rest of the company), it was exciting for several reasons:
1) It was recurring revenue, something we’d never had before. If we supported our customers well then they would continue paying their annual fee for years to come.
2) The profit margins were super-high: once the development work and my setup work were complete, each new affiliate was almost pure profit (our cost to acquire new affiliates was less than $150 CAD per affiliate, and there was little additional cost associated with each new affiliate).
3) Each affiliate also acted as a marketing department: they had huge incentive to promote their location, which would in the process promote the Sacred Rides brand all over the world. The affiliates’ customers, if they had a great experience, could potentially become customers of the longer, much more expensive core trips that we ran at head office.
We were well on our way to achieving my goal of operating in 150 countries by 2021. I could see the cover of Entrepreneur magazine, an 8-figure exit, and speaking opportunities around the world in my future.
I should have been ecstatic.
Only I wasn’t.
The stress of getting the program launched and then growing it had been getting to me, a realization that was slowly becoming inescapable. My anxiety level was sky high, and the internal self-questioning had become deafening.
More troublingly, the sheer effort I’d put into the business over the past year had put a tremendous strain on my relationships with my wife and children.
My reckoning had arrived.
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The Reckoning, Part II
“Basically, I think you need two things to get by in this world: a sense of humor and the ability to laugh when your ego is destroyed.” - Arlo Guthrie
I’ve always been pretty good at managing stress.
Perhaps it’s my international disposition, or perhaps it’s something I’ve earned after over 20 years of riding the rollercoaster of entrepreneurial life.
By the spring of 2017, however, the strain of the previous year was pushing me over the brink. In addition to our core business of operating weeklong mountain bike adventures around the globe, with over 50 staff to manage, I now had those 45 new ostensible ’staff’ - members/affiliates of our new Getaways program - scattered around the globe, who were also paying customers expecting momentous things as a result of their investments.
These were workaday people, working regular jobs, who had bought into my promise of earning a living from riding their mountain bikes.
To them, the dream loomed large and I was the one who would bring it to them.
I still hadn’t fully solved the insurance question; operating mountain bike tours is a risky undertaking and I knew many of our affiliates would want and need the security of liability insurance. I also knew that most of them wouldn’t have a clue about how to navigate this complex world, so I’d taken it upon myself to find insurance partners in order to make the process easier and cheaper for them.
By the spring of 2017, through sheer will and persistence and reaching out and speaking to over 40 people in the insurance industry, I’d managed to find two partners who could offer discounted and expedited coverage to most of our affiliates in Canada and the USA.
Repeating the above process for insurers in dozens of other countries by then looked so daunting (I don’t speak Malay!) that I gave up on finding partners outside of North America and I decided to drop the insurance requirement for affiliates outside of North America. I simply wasn’t prepared to repeat this Herculean effort - an effort that had yielded coverage for exactly two of the 150 countries we were planning to operate in - ever again.
While I was agonizing over insurance and lamenting my failure in this arena (certainly more a failure of planning than of effort), other storm clouds began gathering on the horizon.
I’d already spent most of the money I’d raised from investors the previous summer and we were facing yet another cash crunch.
An approximation of me stressed out about my cash flow. That’s not me, but I would like to have that couch.
It became quickly apparent that I hadn’t raised enough cash to properly launch this program, and the effort and time and energy that it had required of me had come at the expense of the core business of the company.
It was during these trying months that the question of ‘Why?' began to creep in to my consciousness.
As I reflected on the past year - a year in which I’d spent the majority of it doing things I hated: raising money from skeptical investors, writing technical spec sheets for developers, filling out lengthy insurance questionnaires - I began to wonder what had driven me to this point.
I knew that launching anything worthwhile into the world required sacrifice and a healthy measure of hardship, and I thought I was prepared for it, but as ‘success’ loomed (remember, we’d brought on 45 affiliates in a few short months and had more than doubled the number of countries we were operating in - exactly what I had planned) the shine of the trophy I’d been seeking became less and less burnished.
Questions, heretofore absent or at least silent, began to populate my thoughts.
Why was I doing this?
Would achieving the goal make me happier?
More fulfilled?
A better person?
As I was struggling with these questions, two gifts came into my life that shone a bright light onto them, and forced me to start coming up with answers.
The first was a short yet powerful book called Ego is the Enemy.
This pithy book by Ryan Holiday hit me like a brick. As I turned the pages, I saw myself in each paragraph, each word. I came to realize, with every passing page, how much my ego had been driving the bus and calling the shots.
All of those goals… driven by my hungry, desperate little ego.
The second gift was a workshop I attended at an event called Mastermind Talks in Carmel, California, put on by my friend Jayson Gaignard.
The session, on ‘clarity’, was led by a man named Philip McKernan (McKernan holds transformational retreats in various locations around the world. He also has one of the best business taglines I’ve ever read: “90% of people die with regret. I work with the other 10%.)
Philip’s workshop was short, only an hour, but it too hit me like a brick.
It involved a ruthless examination of our lives via self-questioning, and one of the questions he asked the room was "Where do you seek validation?”
As I reflected on the answer, I realized that so many of my entrepreneurial goals were, in effect, a desperate quest for validation, perhaps validation that I never received when I was younger, or that I developed a deep want for in my adulthood.
I’d been on a mad quest to scale my business, never once pausing to reflect on whether biggering and biggering, like the protagonist in Dr. Seuss’ seminal book The Lorax, was really what I needed or wanted.
Over the ensuing weeks, I began to reflect on and cross-examine my goals.
I’d set a BHAG (Big, Hairy Audacious Goal, from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’ book Built To Last) of operating in 150 countries by 2021, yet I’d never stopped to ask why that was meaningful or even desirable.
Would that make me happy?
Would it make the company better?
Would it make a positive impact on the world?
The answers might very well have been yes, but I’d never bothered to ask the questions.
I’d also never stopped to consider the cost.
Expanding to 150 countries was a monumental goal (for reference, there are 198 countries in the world - 195 member states and 2 observer states in the United Nations, plus Taiwan, which meets the requirements for independent country status).
No other travel company in the world - even the billion-dollar behemoths - operates in that many countries. Achieving that goal would require of me a colossal effort and, consequently, a colossal sacrifice.
Yet I hadn’t ever paused to consider what those sacrifices might be and whether I was prepared to pay them.
Of course, the biggest sacrifice would be my time: I would need to devote the bulk of my waking hours, Elon Musk-style, to achieving this goal. And with that sacrifice of time would come a bigger sacrifice: my relationships to the most important people in my life.
I would be sacrificing, at the altar of ‘success’, my relationships with my wife, my children, my closest friends, and other important people in my life.
I’d somehow convinced myself that those sacrifices wouldn’t need to paid, that I could achieve this crazy goal without them. Perhaps I’d convinced myself that I was superhuman or super-intelligent and could achieve the impossible with only moderate levels of effort.
After a year of doggedly pursuing the goal, it was becoming clear that I wasn’t superhuman or even super-intelligent and that I and the people around me were suffering as a result.
My relationship with my wife was strained by my lack of presence at home; I wasn’t giving my marriage its proper due and care and attention. I was feeling disconnected from my kids, who were certainly picking up on my having prioritized my business over them. And I was feeling disconnected from my friends, whom I didn’t have enough time for.
I reflected on some of the other goals I’d set for myself…
Would getting on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine (another goal I’d documented) really make me happy?
Would achieving triple-digit growth?
Would flying halfway around the world to speak on a stage for 40 minutes?
I went down the deep rabbit hole of self-examination, and self-doubt.
And as I pondered these questions, I began to realize that these were not my goals - they were my ego's. They were a child's anguished cry for validation.
My hungry little ego, hungry for acceptance and validation, was desperately seeking attention. It had convinced me that these vain attempts at recognition would deliver me the fulfilment and happiness I was seeking.
The more I pondered and the more I self-examined, the more detached I became from these goals and the less excited I became about them.
As the weeks passed, I reflected on the things that brought and had brought me joy:
My family.
My wife.
My children.
Reading with my daughters, throwing a baseball with my son.
Being a role model for them.
Laughing and adventuring with my friends.
Playing my guitar.
Writing music and playing with my band.
None of these things were compatible with the ego-driven goals I had previously set for myself. They didn’t meet traditional markers of success.
Setting crazy growth targets invariably led to more stress and more headaches (and less profit - more on that later).
Pursuing a speaking career meant more time away from these joy-inducing moments.
Like a fish suddenly aware of the water it swims in (if one were to imagine a fish suddenly aware of water), I began to observe the entrepreneurial environment I was deeply immersed in.
And the water began to stink.
PRESCRIPTION: GET ALIGNED
This is the first of the ‘prescriptions’ that will go along with subsequent posts, with tips and tools to help you build a structure that will allow yourself to remove yourself from your company.
This first one is more of an intellectual/emotional exercise than a tip or a tool, but if you give it proper attention I promise it will provide you a lot of value.
The first step in earning more freedom from your company is to get aligned on what your goals are for it. If you’re putting in 80-hour weeks because your goal is to create the next Tesla, then you will probably need to continue putting in more 80-hour weeks.
(Note: even if you are incredibly aligned with your mission, and you want to change the world for all the noblest reasons, you can still follow the prescriptions in this series to make yourself and your company more effective, and gain crucial hours of your freedom in the process. Plus, unless you’re Elon Musk working 80-hour weeks is generally just a recipe for burnout.)
OK. Grab a pen and paper (or computer and note-taking app).
Ask yourself the following questions and give yourself the time and space to answer them honestly. Reflect on each answer before moving on.
What are my goals for this company? In 1 year? 3 years? 10 years?
Why are those goals important? (Answer this as frankly as possible).
Why is that important? (For instance, if your goal is to create a $100MM company that is at the top of its industry, and you said that’s important because it will give you a sense of financial security, then ask yourself why financial security is so important).
If you need to... ask why again until you peel back the onion and arrive at some sort of truth that resonates with you.
Ask yourself… is your company the only way to achieve the answer to these questions?
Take the time to properly reflect on and answer these questions. Then revisit your answers a day or two later. What comes up?
-Mike
<< PREVIOUS: In Praise of Small
WHAT’S NEXT?
Read the next post in the series, Stillness: An Entrepreneurial Superpower
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Check out the Table of Contents for previous posts in the series you may have missed.
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