Transcript: Getting Unstuck
Hi, my name’s Frank Bria. I’m the host of the podcast “Scale to Success” and I wanted to just take a couple of minutes and talk with you about the importance of scaling your business. To do that, I want to just illustrate a story, my story basically. A couple of years ago, I was a consultant for banks all across the globe so I was in 26 different countries, 4 continents all around the world, waking up every morning in a new city. It was really exciting, exciting business travel doing all this different stuff, but I had a moment where it became clear to me what exactly was happening with my business as well as with my life. That morning, I woke up in Kiev in the Ukraine, and I got a text message from my wife who said she was in the hospital and that she had had to go in the middle of the night and that our kids were home alone. Now, they were teenagers so they weren’t in any kind of danger but they were definitely going to be home by themselves, and the problem was that she was probably going to have to go into surgery and she might have to be there for a few days. There was really no one there to take care of my kids. I immediately wanted to get on a plane and fly home but it was going to take 36 hours to get there, and for those grueling 36 hours while my wife was in the hospital, I was flying home from halfway across the world. For those very long 36 hours, it became clear to me that I had created a business that wasn’t going to sustain the lifestyle I wanted because in order for me to make money, I had to be there, actually be there on-site. I thought about it, wondered if I could maybe deliver those services from home or not travel as much, and I talked with my clients about it, I talked with a lot of people about what we could do, and really the answer was no. There was really no way to do what I was doing as a banking consultant and not be on-site. That was a tough moment where I realized that something had to change. Change isn’t easy. Change is very complex and very difficult, and so we get worried about what’s going to happen and will the money keep coming in. Will I be able to support my family, the ones that I really spend time with? Will we be able to have a lifestyle that we wanted? Those were really tough questions and it actually kept me from making a decision to change my business for another six months. Six months where I could have been building something. Six months where I could have put something in place that would have allowed me to really do what I loved and have the life that I wanted as well. It’s interesting to think about the things that keep us from making those changes. There’s mental blocks that we have to get through and we’re actually going to be talking about that. In today’s podcast episode, we’ve interviewed Michael Miller, who’s a life coach and helps male entrepreneurs make change and fulfill their life’s vision, and he focuses specifically on those mental blocks that keep us in place, that keep us from doing the things that we really need to do. As my mentor Michael Port likes to say, business problems and life problems are really just the same problems. Business problems are really just life problems and looking like business problems. It’s important that if we have business problems, that we take a look at what’s going on in our own lives to see if there’s something that needs to change. In my case, it did. There was a lot of fear and anxiety about making a change, especially because I had to essentially give up a lot of things to build the life that I wanted. The thing that I wanted was much better than what I had at that moment but it was tough to see the path because I was going to have to take a step back and work and build something else, even though I had spent years and years developing an expertise in a particular area that I could only exercise if I was on-site all across the globe. Maybe there are things like that with you, so take a listen to our episode today with our interview with Michael Miller. It’s great insight into what it takes to actually scale your business, to get through the change that’s necessary so that you can live the life you want, and hopefully you learn a thing or two about yourself in the process. Again, my name’s Frank Bria, host of the podcast “Scale to Success.” I hope you enjoy
today’s episode.
