We all like to celebrate entrepreneurs doing cool things and making lots of revenue annually. They become heroes and we idolise them.
However, what is the psychological price these entrepreneurs silently pay to achieve their dreams? Is it a constant burn out, loneliness, imposter syndrome, depression or anxiety?
In this episode, we speak with Josh Boone on the mental health crisis in entrepreneurship and simple steps entrepreneurs can take to improve their mental health. Josh has had his fair share of the mental health crisis as an entrepreneur.
Currently, Josh is the founder of Pure Web Results, a consultancy determined to empower businesses with a holistic, data-driven framework designed to sustainably scale.
The eCommerce A-Z Podcast is brought to you by Kudobuzz Reviews, the best way to collect and display client reviews on your website.
TRANSCRIPT
Dzifa Mensah
Hi there,
Welcome to the eCommerce A-Z podcast brought to you by Kudobuzz reviews. The eCommerce A-Z podcast is aimed at helping eCommerce merchants and entrepreneurs start, grow and scale their businesses.
In recent times, mental health has come to the forefront of issues. More people are talking about it and finding help. But can we say the same for entrepreneurs? We all like to celebrate entrepreneurs doing cool things and making lots of revenue annually. They become our heroes and we idolize them. However, what is the psychological price these entrepreneurs silently pay to achieve their dreams? Is it a constant state of loneliness, imposter syndrome, depression or anxiety?
In this episode, we speak with Josh Boone on the mental health crises in entrepreneurship and simple steps entrepreneurs can take to improve their mental health. Josh has had his own fair share of the mental health crisis as an entrepreneur. Currently, he is the founder of Pure Web Results, a consultancy determined to empower businesses with a holistic data driven framework designed to sustainably scale.
This episode is brought to you by Kudobuzz Reviews, the best way to collect and display kind reviews on your website. I am your host Dzifa Mensah, stay tuned.
Dzifa Mensah
Hi Josh,
Can you tell me about yourself?
Josh Boone
My name is Josh Boone. I am the founder and CEO of Pure Web Results. We are a boutique consulting firm. We work with founders and marketing directors of primarily eCommerce brands sometimes B2B as well, purpose driven brands that want to make a difference and help them primarily through marketing, have their business be sustainably healthy scaling and growth versus random acts of improvement and such from there. How I got started on this might be a good place to start.
With my background, I have been doing this for about 17 years now. I got started a long time ago. I grew up in a small business. My dad had a tree service so even when I was a kid like seven and eight, I would go out on estimates with him and his clients. I just learned how to talk with people. My dad always ran things to be very authentic and very truthfully upfront. Growing up with that small business mindset once I started working with clients, it was always kind of funny. With small business, it is cashflow - it is either a sound business model and it works or it doesn’t. I grew up with that mindset. I started building websites and I decided to build one for my dad’s tree service. I was like, “how can I get people to go to this website?“. Then I started getting into SEO. Back then we just put some keywords and boom, you are ranking and it was crazy. I saw that his phone was exploding and I saw the real impact it had had on my family and my dad’s small business. I was like,” wow there is a lot of power in that”.
His small business friends started asking me to build them websites and next thing I know is I am 13 and freelancing building websites. Then I started building my own websites for other stuff as well and I am like, “ well, how do I make money off this”. I started getting into affiliate marketing and eCommerce and I had a couple of eCommerce shops I was running. I ran a network for affiliate websites for a while, burnt out on that and decided that I wanted to work on more of the small businesses like my dad’s.
Taking some of the learnings that I had over the years working on my own project, I started an agency. I did that for about 6 years and we went from a handful of people to a group of 14. We were just exploding and things were really good. We won a bunch of awards. We got to work on some really cool projects. I was really happy with my team but I was also working 100 hours a week. I was burnt out and I developed an ulcer. I had a lot of health problems and I was like,” why am I even doing this”. I did some soul searching and I just decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore. I had this business but I felt like it was driving me rather than me driving the business. So I took a step back and I sold the business. I sold everything I owned, bought an RV and travelled the country for 2 years. That really was major for me. I never really had a lot of time off growing up. I was either working with my dad at his small business or working on my own projects when I was little. I took that time and really got to reflect. And after about 2 years of doing that, I was bored.
For the next step, I wanted to help businesses and help people who were in my former position, working as the agency and working with hundreds of businesses over the years in completely different industries. Some of the industries I didn’t even know existed before I started working with them. I got to see a lot of the consistent issues that they were dealing with. eCommerce businesses were dealing with the same issues that financial wealth management companies were dealing with and you would never think that. You would never think that they would deal with some of these specific problems. But there were solutions to some of these really obscure industries. What was common knowledge what the solutions were to one industry was completely alien to other industries. And so I saw that this is an interesting problem to fix. I wanted to work on taking a lot of these learnings from all of these different industries and from different teams and founders and CEOs I worked with, and see what we could do. From there I started working primarily with eCommerce brands over the last 2 years and helping them not only personally as leaders but as a team, being able to grow sustainably and expand what they are doing and make it more holistic in nature. The results have been crazy. That’s what I have been primarily working on with my team.
Just time and time again, I talk with these founders and they get two to eight years in and after getting to know them and developing a relationship with them, inevitably, at some point I have these conversations with them and they will be like “I don’t even know why I am doing this anymore”. They have all this outside pressure. Some of it is self-created and some of it is from their investors or people from their social groups. For a lot of them, their friends are entrepreneurs. You are kind of getting these echo chambers where everyone is like scale, scale, scale, grow, grow, grow, and everybody just wants to rush into the next thing but they don’t really ask themselves why. Why do you do what you are doing? Why is it that you need to 3X over the two years? What are you really trying to go after? That’s a question that a lot of times they are so busy going on to the next thing that they don’t take that step back and it is when I come in and my team comes in and we start working on these larger brand positioning conversations that we start asking why. We just keep asking the why’s and it usually leads down to them reexamining why they are even offering the business to begin with.
Dzifa Mensah
Interesting. In your talk you repeatedly mentioned growing sustainably. What does growing sustainably mean to you?
Josh Boone
There are two things I think. One, making your business as much as possible something that is disruption proof both systematically - in your strategies, your processes, your team, not making yourself overly reliant on certain market factors. For example, if you are someone who invested very heavily and has a bunch of AirBnB properties, you are hurting right now. You are hurting pretty bad. There are a lot of those kind of things.
How can you cap your downside? The founder of Virgin Mobile has this great story. I think he told it when he had a podcast with Tim Ferris. Richard Branson was talking about how when he decided to do Virgin Mobile, he made a deal with the airline company that, after 2 years if it didn’t work out, they would buy back the airplanes. It’s amazing he capped his downside. So how can you do that in your own business as much as possible? How can you make yourself less reliant on outside disruptions and forces hurting your business? That’s the more structural integrity.
But the other factor is more emotional and kind of why you do what you do. How can you make this something that you enjoy doing? How can you make this business something that grows with you and help accomplish your goals? Instead of this being a means to an end where you just want a three or four exit or part of an exit and grow, grow, grow and sell it in 5 years, how do you make it something that you want to keep working on and help power the lifestyle that you really want? Tim Ferris talks about this greatly. Lifestyle design, 4-hour workweek, that whole thing. It’s the same concept. How can you develop a business that actualizes your goals?
What that means on a more tactical level is, working on kind of a big picture is two things. But on a tactical level, I will use marketing as an example, how can you make all the different pieces of the puzzle fit together and holistically? So instead of thinking about social media, like SEO, and say paid search and organic search and social media and all the other things separate, what if they are all different outlets at the same thing? What if you can take the learnings from social media efforts and amplify the efforts of your search, your organic search and your paid search and vice versa? How can you, perhaps, test some of these assumptions with paid advertising and figure out what works and what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t, and then invest in the long-term organic efforts that take a lot more time?
If you are a small business owner, an eCommerce brand or even a sole preneur, everything you work on is super important and you really have to value your time. A lot of times instead of thinking about how you can make your efforts more evergreen and holistic, and hit many targets with a single stone, they are just running from thing to thing. If you are a sole preneur that’s really detrimental. I don’t need to tell you if you are listening and that’s basically where you are because you are juggling so many different plates at once. I have been there many times. That is what it's like being a business owner. But if you have a team and you are a leader, you also have to think about how that impacts your team as well and how that trickles down. Are you creating an atmosphere that is empowering them and their goals or are they just on your ride? If they are just on your ride, they are going to exit sooner rather than later and that is going to have real effects on the sustainability of your goals and your business as well. Those are things that don’t really get discussed a lot usually until it is too late unfortunately.
Dzifa Mensah
Yeah. But why do you think entrepreneurs focus on the short-term revenue instead of the long term sustainability?
Josh Boone
It is to innovate or die. It’s just the struggle of survival I think. I am a little acclimated to it. There are two factors for me.
One I grew up again with the small business mindset, both my dad and my mom. My mom had a cleaning service and my dad had tree service. I grew up with that kind of feast and famine particularly with my dad. He has a tree business. It's seasonal. In the Spring, depending on the weather and everything, Spring, Summer and Fall, he would do very well, summer particularly, spring and fall depending on the weather. But in the winter all he could really do was sell firewood. If for whatever reason he didn’t have a lot of tree jobs that had firewood that was hard wood and burned really well, he could season enough of it. Sometimes he would run out of his firewood and he would have to survive on what he had saved. And what happens if, for example you have a not great Summer or Spring or Fall and you didn’t save a lot of money and because of that you also had a bad Winter, it gets really hard. And I think that is what a lot of these founders and sole preneurs or any sort of business owner deals with is that feast and famine.
And your double upon the fact that we are all dealing with the winter period and now instead of it being firewood and trees, it’s a pandemic that is having very real societal health and logistical issues. It’s affecting so many industries. So you are constantly having all these disruptions, big and small and it makes you just try to constantly stay afloat. I think some of that is very real, some of that is just the reality of a business. Some of it is self-contained and reinforced, it is self-created I should say. The other thing is incentive as well.
This is the insidious thing that a lot of people don’t really talk about as much is what is the incentive for your business for you per your team. But more than anything if you have investors, what are their incentives? And that is what we are seeing right now with a lot of VC backed companies. They are not sustainably built. If you are not aware of how the VC model works, they will invest in a company and typically they are looking to exit and have a balloon within about 5 to 10 years, usually it is about 7 and 8 years or so. And so what they are doing is they are investing as expecting 90 to 95 percent of all the businesses they invest in to basically fail, so they need to have that 5 to 10 percent unicorns that are 150x grow and that is how they make their money. So all of these businesses they are investing in, they don’t care about it being sustainable, they just want the hockey stick growth so that they can ride that way and cash out and be on their merry way.
But the people that we are talking about and I am sure that most of you that are listening, are founders that want to build a brand that they really believe in and they want to build a brand with integrity and look at it as their baby and typically that does not align with the VC model. Because the VCs are like hey we want you to just keep growing up to the point where we cash out and we wrote that you were valued at a million and now you are a hundred million, we got our money, we want out. Then the founders are kind of stuck dealing with the fall out having this very unsustainably built business and it is really insidious. They is so much mental health issues with founders where after 5 or 6 years, they are running a business and they feel like they are constantly being pressured to keep growing and they have to sacrifice the long term for just making their OKRs basically just making their revenue goals for the year and sometimes if they don’t meet those goals they just find themselves getting kicked out of their own company. It is so horrible.
Dzifa Mensah
Do you think that imposter syndrome plays a role in the mental health of founders?
Josh Boone
Absolutely, I mean a lot of founders are younger. They see how they usually just become like me and just tinker around and start something because they want to march to their own beat of their drum. Those are people who are mostly idealists and I am right there with them but they don’t want to conform. But because of that, they are just figuring out as they go. One of the biggest issues as I see a lot of founders is the lack of mentorship. They don’t really have a lot of guidance and they are trying to find it through the Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris and Gary Vees. Sometimes that can be really good and other times it can point them in the wrong direction. And because their mentors, typically if they don’t have real life mentors that emulate more realistic goals of what they really want, their mentors end up being these huge monolithic, the Gary Vees of the world. Not hating on Gary Vee but like he is a very type of person that has a very exaggerated life and lifestyle and a lot of money and big brands and all these other stuff and that kind of becomes the template.
But that doesn’t have to be the template. I think we idolize the big brands. We idolize the big huge followings. Honestly the people that are the most content that I have worked with are the one that are running a business they really believe in. It is consistent. It is stable. They are doing good work. The team loves working there. Everyone feels empowered. It’s not the people that are the huge case studies of explosive growth. Those are the people that when we are having a drink, it's just the two of us, they are opening up and saying, “hey I don’t know how much more I can do this”. They don’t feel like they can be open about it (to the world) because they are worried about hurting their brand or hurting themselves and their career prospects and everything else. There’s so much doubt. People feel like they can't be vulnerable and when you have that of lack of realistic or intentional Marcus Aurelius leaders and you have more of these big personalities that are just like everything is big and everything is huge, your goal post and inspiration ends up being something that you don’t even really want.
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Dzifa Mensah
When you sold your business out to travel, what was the reaction from the people in your circle?
Josh Boone
It was very interesting because I really expected it to be fairly negative. Like “hey man, you’ve arrived. What are you doing? You are making over a million a year. What are you doing? Most startups fail and you have been able to make it, why are you leaving? You are just leaving to go travel in an RV, like what will you do after that and I am like I don’t know, it is an adventure and they are like what are you doing.” I thought that that was going to be their reaction. It wasn’t at all. It was the exact opposite. I actually didn’t have one. I can not recall a single person that was saying anything negative because they could hear in my voice and see everything in me change. I went from being stressed out forever to feeling light. Because even though that year when I decided to leave was the hardest year of my life. The year prior to that was really hard. I mean I had an ulcer. I couldn’t. I was on the brat diet. It was eating bananas, apple sauce, rice and toast for a year. It was horrible! I thought that was the hardest year but it was actually leaving. which was the hardest just doing everything. Because I had to juggle so many different things, like I had to exit the business, make myself an essential deal with the division, there were legal aspects of doing that, get rid of all my things, my car, learn about RVs buying an RV and then learn how to travel. But what it came down to was that even though it was very hard, I felt so passionate again that I hadn’t since I started the business. I was doing something I really believed in. People felt that and I think they envied it. So I expected everybody to be, “I cant believe you are doing this. You are making a mistake.” But instead it was like “man I wish I could do that.” Everybody was like, “I wish I could do that”. Some of them had real personal commitments. They had their family, significant others among other things going on. But some of them totally could have just done it if they wanted to. But they were trapped with the same exact mindset that I was in. So everywhere I went when I was on the road, I spent a month down in the Keys. I spent 2 months actually. The first time I spent a month down in the Keys, I was in Key West. I was in this little neighborhood bar and there were just a bunch of rich retirees and I am sitting there talking with them and I am telling them what I am doing and they are just like “that is it man. You are spot on. And they would tell me that same thing over and over again. “I work my entire life and I sacrificed so much to get to where I am”, and a lot of them, their family doesn’t even talk to them anymore. They have all this money and they are just sitting down there and they are miserable because they have no purpose. So I really expected everyone to be thinking that I was making a mistake but instead it was quite the opposite. I actually lead with that conversation now. Whenever I meet somebody or like a new client, I tell them about the burn out and the transition and it makes people open up immediately. It completely changes the course of the conversation for a couple of reasons.
One, I want to get to really know them on a real level and I want to cut through things. The second thing is, it lets them know that I know what I am doing because I believe in it. I am doing it because I really want to. I am not doing it for money because I already have that experience. I have learnt that lesson and I am never going to do that again and that really resonates with people. People that resonate with it are the people who I want to work with and I want to invest my time into it. It can be so impactful for people when they kind of take that step back and they ask themselves why am I doing what I am doing, what am I optimizing for and is this life and this business serving me. And at the end if the answer is no, my recommendation will be take a break and go out of town. You need to be in a place preferably a place you have never been before so that you have no attachment to it. And just bring a notebook and some headphones and just adventure and just ask yourself what is it about what you are doing right now that is not serving you and can you course correct that with the life that you have and flip it so that your business now starts serving your goals. Is it something you enjoy or is it time to exit and do something else? You have to do one of those two because ignoring the problem is just going to get worse and it is not going to only affect you but everyone else around you.
Dzifa Mensah
Talking about affecting everybody else around you, I am wondering, how can founders approach burnout with regards to their team? When the team is burnt out and it is clear they are really having a bad time working with you or they just clearly have lost it, what can a founder do to get them back on track or to keep the vision running with the team?
Josh Boone
Yeah it is such a great question. It really pains me to see how many founders really truly mean well. they really want to help their team but they are so caught up in their own just keeping everything running that they don’t take that step to ask themselves what you just asked me. What I see time and time again is that even if they are aware there is a problem, they think that they just have to do what they are doing because they have to meet these goals and they have to meet these OKRs or whatever else. I will say just put that all on pause for a second because that is what you are optimizing for, but that can usually change. If you are the CEO or you are the founder, you can change that. Even if you think you can’t, there is always a way. I mean you are leading the ship, you can navigate that however you choose. It doesn’t matter how difficult it is usually there is a way.
So it is taking a step back and having a real conversation with all of your core team and just saying, “ Hey are you happy right now? Do you enjoy doing what you are doing? What would you enjoy more? I can tell you are really stressed out right now, what are the bottlenecks here? What seems to be truly the bottleneck for you being able to do the work that you want to do and how can we align that? Let's say you have a team member and they are crucial to the organization, and there is a lack of alignment between what they are doing and their job and what they want to be personally doing, you are on a ticking time bomb. You only have so much time. So inevitably they are going to continue to burn out. They are going to be so burnt out and they are going to be demoralized.
At best they will be like hey this job, this company is just not for me. At worst they will feel personal like you are taking advantage of them or ignoring their needs or not listening to them and you are the problem personally. That can not be good particularly depending on what kind of industry, how big it is and all that stuff. But more so than anything it is just listening. Asking some of the questions and listening and seeing how you can help align your team with what you guys are doing. A lot of times when I come in and I am working with brands, everybody has a different idea of what the mission or what the company is. It is almost kind of comical sometimes where there is so many brands that are 100,200, 300 million dollar companies and I come in and I will ask them, “What is this brand to you?” and I will have every single person give me a different version. It is crazy to me and there are easy ways of testing that and there are easy ways of getting everyone together. If people give me different answers, then there is a massive issue of alignment and you’re not all on the same page. That is just one issue right there. Because if you get everybody on the same page and everyone is connected it feels like all their efforts are going toward one thing. But if everybody feels like the company is going in a different direction and they have their own idea of where the business is going, they are inevitably going to feel demoralized when somebody else’s idea of the company starts taking over and leading in a different direction. That is when you have these random acts of improvements. That is when you start to have high turnovers, high burnouts and a lot of demoralization and everything starts collapsing.
When you start having high turnover, then that just compounds, because then you lost all the learnings, you lose all their expertise and you have to hire somebody else. There is going to be huge gaps and everything just starts breaking down. That’s when you have this really bad rapidly accelerating negative feedback loop. It's like a downward spiral. The way to get out of that and the course correct I found is just having conversations with people and hearing everyone. What does everybody think the direction and the mission is? Get that unified. That’s the first thing so that working towards the common goal. It sounds really simple and it sounds really obvious. You get so caught up in the day to day often that just gets put on the way side because it seems too simple.
And then the second thing is how can you have all these different people that are working on seemingly disconnected goals and having them work collaboratively and having them work together. So again going back to social media and SEO as one example, everything kind of works into the next. And you have these teams cross talking about their findings and they are collaborating and now you have five or six different people or departments, however big your organization is, and they are all collaborating on the same thing. They are just different offshoots at the same goal. The part of the problem with that is usually once you start growing you hire agencies, you hire outside people and you have more and more people working in silos you lose that collaboration. So how can we get back to the principles and have everybody openly collaborate and share data.
The third thing boils down to how can you test any of these assumptions. This is where you try to remove as much drama from opinion as possible and create an environment where people feel like they can speak up and have a voice and throw ideas out there and not going to get nailed in the wall for it. So what we try to do is we are going to do this assumption testing. Find ways in your organization, and there is a lot of tactical really simple ways you can do this and I am happy to go into some examples if you want of how people can test some of these assumptions but everybody gets the opportunity to throw these ideas out there and we come up with the assumptions that we are going the test and we collect some data on them. Ask if it is this working and if it is not it gets let go and if it is then we move forward and we iterate on it. It is just simple, basically CRO, conversion optimization. It is split testing. It is looking at how we can iterate and grow. That does not happen most of the time in an organization. It’s usually, “I am the boss, I am the founder, I am the director, I want to do this let's go”. They might hear some opinions but when that person feels like this is the way to go, they go. And people feel like they can't speak up. That causes so much resentment and demoralization and that is typically what starts that negative feedback loop. Then further segregation of efforts and the fragmentation of efforts. Everything kind of just gets worse from there.
Often when you course correct this, and you get everyone working on a wholistic strategy, they are all working together not only does the turnover decrease because people feel like all of their efforts are coming together towards a common goal. They also feel like they are able to speak up more and have an opinion because everyone’s opinion is democratized and put out there and we test the ideas and see what works and doesn’t and it is not about what I feel, it's about what the data direct. It makes it a lot more ego based. Usually what that also does is make everything a lot more effective. What happens is everyone will be a lot more happier. The mental health of everyone will be better. The atmosphere will be much better in these teams and things are a lot more productive. Growth actually happens faster and you make more money.
It's crazy to me how people think that by just doing this randomise improvements and chasing these quick wins that’s how you have rapid growth. But it's actually quite the opposite most of the time. You might have quicker growth in the very short term but in the mid and long term you suffer dramatically. If you look at it over time, for over a year, that difference is huge. It’s a massive gap there. So those will be a lot of the ways in which I see how it manifests in a lot of the organizations I have worked with.
Dzifa Mensah
People are gradually warming up to going for therapy. Do you think that every founder should have regular therapy sessions to discuss his or her business?
Josh Boone
Personally yeah absolutely. There is value in doing it both in a traditional; seeing a PhD, seeing a psychologist, and doing that for yourself. I also think there is a tremendous amount of value in having an advisor, a mentor, however you want to do it. This is a lot of what I do. I didn’t intend on going down this route. But it is just because it naturally occurs.
We start working with an organization on this and over time, I typically form relationships with these founders. Sometimes I am one of the only people that they feel like they can actually freely open up to. Because maybe they have partners and there is something that they feel like they can't really communicate all the time because of frustrations and whatever. They can't really talk with their partners about it. Sometimes they need an outside opinion. Depending on what their relationship circle looks like, their friend group, they might actually have people that are pushing them in not exactly the right direction.
If you are in Silicon Valley, everyone is like scale, scale, scale, grow, grow, grow. That might not be the best group of people to get your thinking about ‘I don’t know, is this still serving me?’. And the echo chamber can be very strong. Then you talk with your friends and family and sure a lot, depending on your background and family. They might not have the business background that makes them understand what you are going through. I mean I have talked to a lot of therapists you know myself over the years and the biggest thing that I struggled with was they were great for talking about relationships but when it came to my business and making these big decisions. They just didn’t have the experience themselves. And it is when I started connecting with me personally, a lot of consultants that were more older in their career and they started being mentors to me. I realised I had been missing this. I grew up in Ohio and I am still here. I moved back after I took the trip. We have a lot of successful businesses here. But it wasn’t a huge wealth of people that I thought they could mentor me. I don’t really regret anything but if I had to do it all over again I think I would have reached out to some people and cultivate some of those relationships. It gets really hard though because you don’t want to be like, “ hey mentor me”. It gets really difficult but I think that there is a lot of value in that. I would hesitate though and just say that try and find somebody who you feel like if you are going to go the consulting advisor route, truly find someone you click with on a personal level. Who is an older you or somebody that has kind of the same world view. The person doesn’t have to have the same personality, but the same world view and purpose-driven approach, who is not just doing it for money. A lot of the time, it is when you get those guru types that just look at their clocks and that can be really insidious as well because sometimes it is kind of like the chiropractor thing.
I had a sports injury. I went to a good chiropractor and he was really trying to always get me the ‘look at the core issue and get better and my goal is that you make it so you never have to come to me again’. However, there are a lot of chiropractors that are not like that. They just want to get you coming back to them time and time again. That’s unfortunately an issue with the industry. But I absolutely think that if you are a founder you should look at it. A lot of founders want to march to the beat of their own drum. I am totally that way, 120% and they feel like “I don’t need that and whatever else”. I would say it is quite the opposite. You are doing yourself a disservice by not having an outside opinion. Like the kings and leaders would have their counsel, they would have their advisers, you should too. By not doing that I think you are really handicapping your perspective.
I just hope that people that are listening, one of the takeaways I guess is that you take a step back and ask yourself how can you truly optimize. What are you optimizing for? How can you make sure that everything you are doing in your life is optimizing for the right thing for you and your team?
And the second thing is perhaps just being more open to more vulnerability. I can tell you, I wear my hat on my sleeve now and I am extremely vulnerable. I used to not be that way. I used to be very guarded and to be honest it handicapped my business and my success and also my relationships. When I really got close to people I just warmed up and I was very warm and people liked me. But if people just knew me like casually, they wouldn’t have much of an opinion of me. They wouldn’t care of it because I just didn’t open up and now I am just more vulnerable about where I am at. Everybody respects it and I have had untold amount of business opportunities come out of it because people come are just like I trust you. Like I know that you are authentic and I don’t have to worry about that and I just want to work with you because of that so just do not be afraid to be vulnerable. I hope that as more and more of these conversations happen and more and more people start with that vulnerability, that kind of changes the culture and that we all feel like we can all feel more vulnerable and more closer and just live happy and better lives because that is what we all should be doing. So thank you very much, it has been a pleasure
Dzifa Mensah
Thank you so much Josh.
Conclusion
Thank you for listening to our podcast, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Please subscribe to our podcast. Leave a review and tell your friends about it on social media. As always, take care of yourself and stay safe. My name is Dzifa Mensah.
