(got this text from a friend today, but I haven’t responded yet because I don’t think I can accurately answer via text)

It’s such an innocent question, but yet can be so loaded based on the depth of my desire to answer.

Running a business really is a non-stop roller coaster of emotions. One day the sun is out and unicorns are marching along to a happy tune. The next day the world might as well come to an end as everything is ruined. It seems a bit dramatic, but really the swings are crazy in growing a business and can happen over the span of a few weeks, a few days, or sometimes even within the same day. I feel like I’m in a constant sensory overload.

One of the most valuable skills I learned over the years is the ability to manage my emotions and not get wrapped up in the swings. I’m also really good at putting things in perspective, because really at the end of the day, I still have my mental and physical health, with a great wife, and a roof over my head…see, now everything is better again .

On the worst days, all I want to do is rant about it to people (employees, customers, investors, Annie, etc), but many times that’s not possible because I have to keep the positive image for the sake of the company. Also, not everyone is built to deal with such swings and thus it’s not fair to dump on them because they might deal with it in a much worse way than me.

Today I walked to pick up Annie and thought about listening to a podcast on the way, but there was so much noise in my head that I needed to sort out, that I opted to walk in silence. I needed the walk to help me sort through my own thoughts. Taking walks really puts me at peace which explains why, rain or shine, I try and walk every day.

I wish I could say that such situations aren’t normal, but really I think every day I need some time, usually at the end of the day, to just white balance myself. Writing on this blog and mediation in the morning both help, but on the bad days, even all the skills I’ve built up over the years of being an entrepreneur aren’t able to help me cope. The stress is constant and usually coming at me from five different directions. It’s like I’m in a state of perpetual growth and challenge.

Today, one of my EO Forum mates toured a group of us around his newly purchased storage facility here in Atlanta. It was fun to see how excited he was to show us each floor of the place…even though every floor pretty much looked alike. It’s a storage space after all .

I don’t think it was the actual storage units that he was excited about though, I think he was excited about the fact that a dream that he had and worked really hard on, came to life and he got to show it off to us.

Owning and operating a physical location really does make a business feel so much more real than a virtual one. We got to touch the walls and smell the fresh paint. That’s real.

Student Launcher is very much real and we have “customers” coming through our “doors” every day, but it’s not something I can touch or smell. Instead I have to appreciate moments like this…

@tomkrieglstein I have to thank you for the @StudentLauncher tool… It’s been extremely helpful in raising money & support for our trip!

February 28, 2013 10:51 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@beekayroot

Brian K. Root

We both worked hard to make our dreams a reality, but after touring, and touching, his building today, I see a difference between being able to watch people walk in and out of your physical store verse looking at site traffic on google analytics.

Six weeks ago the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board sent me a letter stating that I was in violation of their employee worker comp laws and thus fined a $10,000 penalty. I didn’t think I was in violation, but worried that I just forgot to file/pay for something and was thus actually in violation.

The Board gives you the option to petition the penalty in writing, but they warn you that the decision after the petition is final and can’t be changed. So I submitted and waited…and waited….and waited. Then finally received this letter from them a couple days ago:

Seeing the $10,000 fine go down to $0 was/is a great feeling. But this isn’t the first time I’ve dodged a business legal bullet. It’s not that I’m not on top of things, it’s just that there are SO many things to be on top of that, undoubtedly, something unintentionally slips through the cracks. My hope is that it’s a $10 mistake vs a $10,000 mistake.

Building something that people are willing to pay for is hard enough, but adding on layers and layers of legal stuff (State, Federal, IRS, Workers’ Comp, Insurance, etc) makes the job that much harder. Sure it can be outsourced (which for some I do), but that involves extra money that often times isn’t around, so you end up having to do it yourself.

My first business was selling old edition textbooks online through a company called DiscountedDepot. It was very lucerative for me until the bookstores, I contracted with, realized they could do the same thing and cut me out. I really enjoyed growing the business, but I also really enjoyed growing my knowledge about how to grow a business. This was the first time I realized I had a love for not only the team (DiscountedDepot), but also for the game (business).

When Kevin and I started Swift Kick to do college leadership trainings, we got excited every time a new school booked us. In four years, we grew Swift Kick to be one of the top leadership training programs in the country and were voted top speakers on the college market for three years in a row. We loved seeing Swift Kick (the team) grow, but we also loved dissecting the game (college speaking).

My love for the team and game spreads beyond just business.

When I got engaged to ACbert, I started asking everyone around me, with marriage experience, what advice they’d give me as a male going into a marriage. Then, when we actually got married on Feb 5th, 2009, I continued to ask that question. In love, just like my textbook selling business, I’m extremely passionate about not only increasing the success of our marriage, but also about growing my understanding of what ‘love’ is. Once again I have a love for the team (me and ACbert) and for the game (love).

My knowledge hungry approach for the team and the game continues to stay with me as I ramp up Student Launcher. The better I understand the game, the more successful I can make the team.

Borrowed this from my friend Jamison Kingfield because it speaks a lot to my views on success in business and life.

As part of ACbert’s 4-day birthday celebration, we went tonight to an open mic night at the Bowery Poetry Club. Anyone could submit to perform which means the talent was all over the place making the night a bit of a hot mess. But I appreciated that everyone was wiling to take a risk and try something new whether a joke, song, skit, or story. While I watched person after person get on stage and create something from nothing, it reminded me of a blog post my former business partner, Kevin Prentiss, wrote a while ago comparing entrepreneurs to artists…

For an entrepreneur, there is nothing that feels as good as creating something amazing from nothing. This is the hope.

Like artists, we create. But we are artists that must sell. There’s no chance to be discovered after death. Our creation lives or dies in the present.

Imagine if a crowd of museum goers could make a sculpture disappear forever with their disapproval, or far worse, their simple misunderstanding. How many artists would stop showing work? How many artists would stop creating altogether? How many would create cheap crap, that was simply a quick get?

I come from a pretty artistic family where everyone at some point was involved in a musical, play, or band. The need to be artistic is kinda engrained in me. Two things on my bucket list are to perform in a musical and rock a concert with me singing solo while playing piano. Someday I’ll get to them, but for now most of my work is outside the theater world, so when my friend Kevin Daum asked if ACbert and I wanted to help him put together a film for the 48 hour NYC Film Festival, we excitedly said yes.

Since ACbert and I have minimal professional acting experience, our role in the film involved us playing a “hollywood power couple” without any actual lines. There’s a twist to our part, but you’ll just have to wait for the release to see .

After watching the skill level of the other actors, it was probably a good thing we didn’t have any lines, because our inexperience would have easily shown through.

It only took 15 minutes to film our part, but we stuck around the entire day because it was interesting to watch the whole process of putting a film together.

Film making shares a lot of similarities to running a business…

• One person needs to have the clear vision in mind at all times.
• It takes a whole team to actually achieve the vision.
• The last 20% of perfection will kill you, and the clock.
• Consistency matters.
• Too many creative cooks is counter productive.
• Everyone has to have clear tasks.
• Free food goes a long way.
• Someone, besides just the main person, should be watching for quality control.
• Most of the hard work happens before and after.
• Success often involves long nights and early mornings.
• It’s not all creative work all the time.
• Technology levels the playing field.
• Good talent is the real competitive advantage.

If you’ve been involved in making a film or theater production, what else would you add to this list?

A common street scene in NYC is young hip guys trying to sell a signed copy of their newly released music CD to pedestrians walking by. By telling you a sob story about how hard it was to produce and how they spent their life savings to produce it, your empathy button is triggered and some people actually buy one. The trick is the CD is often blank, or the recording is one of a million copies being sold by similar people with similar stories all over NYC.

Today I watched as one peddler upped the game.

It started out as usual by him handing out his CD as if he were giving it away. Then once it was in someone’s hand, he started into his story. Then the twist. Another guy walked by, took a CD, and within a few seconds of hearing the story reached for his wallet and handed over some money. Now, not only is the first person grappling to counter her own empathy button, but now she has to also overcome social proof and go against what the other person is doing and saying. It was fascinating to watch as the CD seller intuitively rattled through the same sales themes I was taught in business school. They also do it better than most sales people I know. Makes me want to write a book titled “The Art of Street Selling.” Someone put that on my list of books to write…

Tonight I attended an EO Huddle about creating great teams featuring uber successful entrepreneur Amilya Antonetti.

Right out of the gates, Amilya’s strength and conviction around what she does and how she does it showed through. Below are some of the highlights I scribbled in my moleskine:

• Her green cleaning business arose from a personal experience with her son almost dying after birth which gave her a very clear sense of WHY her business mattered. Her company’s narrative, or backstory, is so strong, it’s impossible not to get emotionally connected as an employee or consumer.
• The team is the light, energy, and heart of a company. Treat them as such.
• Companies that are…
  • $0-5mm > can operate with just one hero
  • 5-30mm > the hero needs to die
  • 30-50mm > the team makes this happen
  • 50-100mm > all about cultivating/maintaining multiple teams
• A CEO can only go so far on their own, everything after that is up to the team.
• Key person to the CEO’s right should always be a “yeah maybe” person that can challenge the assumptions and ambitions of the CEO’s.
• Real learning and growing should hurt and each person should have someone around them (boss, board, mentor, advisor) that pushes them to a greatness they don’t know they don’t know yet. However, this person should be only a few steps ahead of you on the success wall.
• She works her team like dogs. But on the flip side, she takes care of everything outside of work for them so when they aren’t at work they are 100% dedicated to their families. Everything? Yes everything. She takes care of food shopping, laundry, car care, lawn care, house repairs, etc. 
• She doesn’t give raises but instead raises lifestyles. 
• Above each desk are two clocks, one that is the real time and one that is where they want to go on vacation next. Vacations are mandatory.
• The people on your team and around you want to be the heros in your life, you just have to let them by setting them up for success.
• The hardest thing she’s had to do in growing a business is letting go of her Round 1 hires to make way for her Round 4 hires.
• She once flew to one of her offices just to have dinner with a key executive and his wife in an attempt to save their marriage. She asked the wife for 90 more days in the marriage and in the end she saved the marriage by paying for them to go away together and re-connect outside of work. In her words, “oh hell no were they going to get divorced. Do you know how much that would have cost me to loose a key executive?”
• Employees want to be part of the business not BE the business. 
• Each department sets the salaries for the other departments and the whole company sets her salary which always ends up being more than what she would’ve paid herself.
• All her hires come from referrals from key employees from within the company
• If someone comes into your world with a great attitude and gusto, make a position for them with their name on it so you can hire and keep them.
• Everyone shares equally in bonuses. She wants the receptionist to work as hard as her sales team.

Every EO Huddle also includes an experiential component, so after Amilya was finished we were treated to tequila tasting from Gabriela’s Resturante. My two favorite take aways from the tasting were

1. Wet your month with a little tequila before you try and down the whole thing (which isn’t recommended anyways).
2. Sniffing tequila from the top of the glass vs the bottom will give you a truer sense of its ingredients instead of just the liquor smell.

USO’s vision statement is amazing because it starts with the emotional ‘why.’ It’s also powerful and clear as to its intention.