BB4 - Where I'm Starting From Personally (Part II)

Now it's time to get a bit personal. Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side. This episode continues down the road of discussing the personal side. The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, head over to http://brandingblitz.com/4/ Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand. This is episode 4 – a continuation of episode 3 where I started discussing some of the aspects of my personal life which are going to significantly impact how this brand building story plays out. If you haven't listened to episode 3 yet, that might help some things make more sense in this episode. But just for a quick refresher summary: I started the story about a year and a half ago when we found out we were going to have a baby. The business I'd been working on wasn't growing fast enough, so I needed something else. After a ton of research and some shoestring marketing, I launched a Kickstarter project and blew away my expectations. I had a nice little sand castle staying just barely out of reach of the waves, when a big one came in and flattened the whole thing. My health completely fell apart. My lungs aren't functioning properly which kind of causes a cascade of other issues. I've got severe fatigue, my brain partially shuts down at times causing foggy thinking and memory issues. I get short of breath really easily and often find myself getting dizzy for no reason. I've listened to the recordings of the first couple of episodes of this podcast and thought to myself, “Wow... I don't come across as very high energy – I sound tired and out of breath at times.” Well, part of it is I have a pretty laid back personality – but part of it is because I actually am tired and out of breath. I'm also scripting these episodes out ahead of time – I don't plan to always do that, but with the mental issues I've been having, I don't think I could talk for 15 minutes without just getting completely lost. It's worked out much better to sit down and write for a couple minutes at a time throughout the day. Even that would have been pretty difficult a couple of weeks ago, but some of the meds they've got me on do seem to be helping somewhat. With all that going on, work has come to a screeching halt on my Kickstarted business. Even this new business which is way less demanding than the old one still has to move slower than it normally would because I have to find windows of time where I feel I'm thinking clearly and have the energy required to work. The Kickstarted business is not earning any income since I'm not working on it. There is still some money reserves in that bank account, but I also still have plenty of commitments to fulfill to my backers as well, so I don't really feel at liberty to invest that money in this venture. And the little reserves we had built up personally have been completely depleted... and actually have been for a while now. But I didn't see a way to get any more income coming in other than pressing forward with my Kickstarted business... at least until that wasn't an option anymore. It's gotten severe enough that our car is actually being processed for repossession and it doesn't look like there's much we could do to get it back. They want more money than we got on our tax return to stop the repossession process plus a commitment that I will resume payments – I can't give them either. I think even more than the loss of the car, it hurts my pride. I like to think of a man who stands by his word, but I can't find an option that allows me to fulfill my end of that contract. In the end though, when I signed the contract I had every reason to believe we would be able to make it work – and in fact we did for a couple years. In an odd way, there is a silver lining here – not having a car payment to make anymore does mean that I'll have less money that needs to be pulled out of the profits of the business when that time comes. We've also moved in with my parents, but interestingly enough we didn't do that because of all the things I just told you. We had begun preparation for that before the Kickstarter project actually launched. A big part of our motivation is that my dad had been diagnosed with a type of cancer that was described as inoperable and incurable with the best known treatment option having about as good odds of making it worse as it did making it better. Sure, the fact that they weren't going to charge us rent was a nice bonus, but really we wanted to be there as a support for my parents. It's interesting to look back at that decision now and know that his cancer is actually shrinking and that no rent thing has actually become a pretty big deal. The year since launching our Kickstarter project has easily been one of the roughest years of my life probably in large part because of the emotional extremes. From the ultra-high of the successful project and a new baby girl to the ultra-lows of defaulting on debt and not knowing why my body is shutting down. I'm not sure how much of a support we've actually been for my parents – I like to think we've helped some. If nothing else, I think the fact that we're all kind of going through hard things together has helped draw us closer. This all puts me in an interesting situation for launching a business though. Our monthly expenses are honestly VERY low right now which is going to be a really big help. Ideally, I'd like to launch this business without even considering pulling money out of it for at least 6 months. Honestly, it would be great to be able to go even longer than that, but I'm not sure we'll make it that far. Every little bit you take out is that much more you have to build up. If we get to the point where we're making $1,000 a month in profit and I pull that out to catch up on bills then it's almost like I have to start the building process over. That's not entirely true because we'll already have inventory and sales and reviews at that point, so we'll be starting over with momentum not from ground zero, but it will stunt the growth. At some point, I need to cycle back and fulfill my commitment to my Kickstarter backers as well – preferably as soon as possible. My hope is that I'll get on a treatment plan for my health that will allow me to begin devoting some energy toward that again, but I am not sure how long it will take to get there. If it is going to take a really long time or isn't realistic at all, then I may need to eventually look into taking even more profits out of this business to get that one running without me. It really all depends on what the pulmonologist's tests say I guess... I really don't know what the future looks like. Again, the normal advice is that in an ideal world you don't want to pull profits out of the business early on – but life rarely takes place in an ideal world... mine certainly isn't there right now. So if I have to practically start over growing the profits a couple times to get everything back on track, it may not be ideal, but that's what I'm going to do. All the more reason I need to act now, I need to act fast, and I need to act strategically. And if I can pull it off then it will be just one more way to show that there really is no excuse not to begin taking action towards getting your business up and running. Again, there are a ton more details I could go into with this, and I'm sure some of it will come up in future episodes, but for now I think that gives a nice broad overview of where I'm at personally and some of the effects that is going to have on this brand launch. I know that these last two episode got a bit more personal than a lot of podcasts tend to, but I really want to take you along for the ride as I launch this brand. And I feel like to truly do that you need to know not just the status of my business, but the status of myself and my family – because those things are going to shape every single decision I make as I move forward. I have to say, talking openly about health and financial problems is a lot harder than talking about plans to grow a business. But really that's just because we train ourselves not to talk about those things. We're not supposed to have problems, right? Well, here's a news flash – I do have problems. And I'd be willing to bet you do to. Maybe yours are worse than mine. Maybe they aren't, I don't know. The point is, we've all got them, but we can't let them stop us from pressing on. For a transcript of this episode, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/4 – I'd love to hear from you! And let me know too if you're reading the transcripts. It's easy to do right now since I'm typing it all up ahead of time, but let me know if it's valuable to you so I can decide if I should continue in the future. If you want to contact me but think it'd fit better in an email than a comment, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask If I haven't scared you off yet I'd really appreciate if you subscribed on iTunes and left a review. That'll help iTunes know that after four episodes of listening to me talk, you're still ready for more, and I'd really appreciate it! That's all for this episode, I'll catch you next time on episode 5 of the Branding Blitz podcast.