5 Powerful Lessons For High Performers To Close The Year

Are you ready to dominate 2025 by learning from your 2024 journey? How do you pivot, adapt, and keep winning when challenges hit HARD?

In this episode, we take you behind the scenes of our year—filled with BIG WINS, tough pivots, and game-changing lessons. From making the Inc. 5000 list to completely shifting our business focus, this episode is packed with insights on how to reflect, adjust, and stay ahead.

[00:00] - Introduction

[01:11] - 2024: A Year of Challenges and Wins

[02:07] - The Power of the Pivot

[09:49] - Launching New Offers

[17:49] - What Hitting the Inc. 5000 Taught Us

[20:47] - Playing the Long Game

[31:00] - Planning for Seasons: Winter is Coming

If you’re ready to dominate 2025, take a few lessons from our 2024 journey and apply them to your own business

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About The Hosts:

• Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

About PEMA.io:

• PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:11 2024: A Year of Challenges and Wins
• 2:07 The Power of the Pivot
• 9:49 Launching New Offers
• 17:49 What Hitting the Inc. 5000 Taught Us
• 20:47 Playing the Long Game
• 31:00 Planning for Seasons: Winter is Coming

Transcript

00:00
We hit the INC 5000 list this year. The first thing that our team said is, how do we hit the list again? What does it take to keep hitting the list, right? When you're playing the wrong game, your urgency of today becomes compounded or your procrastination of today becomes compounded. Yeah, I know I run into this where I'm like,

00:16
Trying to do it myself, I'm going to hustle, I'm going to get it done. But the smarter thing to do is like, I could have gotten it done faster or more efficiently if I just got a different perspective or had somebody to help. When he asked people that are performing at the highest level, what is winning feel like they use words like brutal, ugly. That's what winning was. And so you can have really difficult challenging times and be winning at the same time. It's just winning doesn't always feel like this constantly elated winning sometimes is.

00:43
Just enjoying those victories, taking the moment, but also just being in the middle of that brutal. If you're not facing those, it means that you're not setting your goals high enough. There is power in a pivot. Urgency and long-term, when you have both of those, you're gonna win. If you stick with it, you're absolutely gonna dominate your sector, period. Welcome to The Takeover, where we show you how to dominate every area of life and business. Let's get winning.

01:10
Welcome back to The Takeover with Tim and Cindy. Can you believe it is the end of 2024 already? It is crazy to think. And as you all know, if you've been rocking with us since the start of The Takeover 2023, you'll know that every year we do an annual reflection, annual retreat. We pretty much take some time to look back on the year to reflect on what our lessons learned were, just reflect on.

01:37
every good and bad experience of the year. And so in today's episode, we are going to take you behind the scenes into our 2024 reflection. We're going to lay out all the details of our wins, our losses and specifically what our lessons learned are. So I'm excited about today's episode. Let's go into our 2024 reflection. Overall, how are your feelings about this year?

02:03
This has been just a hectic year. I mean, we've had more challenges this year than we've had in a while. So this year was a lot of shifts, a lot of changes, but on the other side, I'm so thankful for what we accomplished this year. Me too. It definitely was one of our most challenging years. And I think it takes us really nicely into our first reflection point or lesson learned, which is that there is power in a pivot and I want you to walk our listeners through.

02:33
what we pivoted or rather how we pivoted this year and what some of those lessons learned were as we pivoted. I like the way that you intro that. It could be like a preacher on Sunday. There's power in a pivot. That could be like a sermon, but you know, you don't change the goal, right? Like I think too often people change the goal and or they compromise the goal or they say, I want this and then they they have troubles. There's there's difficulties. There's challenges. There's setbacks and they change their goal. They change where they want to go and pivoting is where you

03:01
keep the same goal, you keep the same destination, you keep the same, but you change the plan. You make a pivot in the plan based off of when you create a plan, there's no perfect plan. That's why people that are spend too much time planning, planning, playing and don't execute. It's such a waste of time because you set a good enough plan, you execute the plan and then you're going to find areas that that plan was bad or didn't work. And sometimes you need to pivot that plan completely. There's power in pivoting means it's just

03:30
You're adjusting along the way, you know, you're adjusting. I guess if I'm headed on in a GPS to somewhere that's like three hours away, there's a big wreck on the main highway. The GPS is going to take me around that main wreck. And so that's all pivoting is, is like we're still going to the same destination. But with new information where we say, OK, maybe the plan needs to be adjusted. We're taking that new information and creating a new or an adjusted plan. So good. I love that you mentioned the goal stays the same.

03:59
So in our business, the goals stay the same. But let's talk about how we pivoted specifically and what that looked like. Yeah, the big pivot was moving into midmarket, selling midmarket, selling enterprise, because before we were working with very small businesses. And it did get to a point where we felt like we were trying to sell Rolls Royce to people that were looking for a Toyota. And I think when we really looked at the quality of our product and how freaking good we were.

04:26
we realized that we were just selling to the wrong marketplace. Yeah. And, you know, I had some mentors that I spoke with and they said, man, you're selling such a premium product to the wrong audience. And so our big pivot was, hey, we actually have a product that can scale big enterprise sales teams, can scale mid-market sales teams. You know, we could take a company that's doing a billion dollars and bring it to one point two billion with the same strategy that we would bring a ten thousand dollar a month business to twelve thousand dollars a month.

04:54
And so that the big pivot was, hey, we have a product that can work incredibly well for mid market and enterprise B2B sales teams. And so that's where we made a big shift. And we had some early we had some early wins. And so it kind of encouraged us to go down that route. Yes, absolutely. And for context, for our listeners too, we had I would say about 70 percent of our revenue came from what we call the smaller business. Right. So small to medium sized businesses.

05:20
And about 30%, I'd say, was in that mid-market enterprise sales or enterprise-sized teams. And we were getting great results for them, amazing clients to work with. But a lot of our time, effort, and energy was in that small to mid-sized business range. And as Tim is mentioning, some of those earlier wins that we saw, the successes that we were getting for those larger clients, it was a very clear open door. You guys should move to this section. And it's been phenomenal.

05:49
I think on so many levels, yes, there was the challenging aspect of it. And we will talk about specifically what was challenging about the pivot. But when you know in your gut, you know that, you know, that you have to make a shift, no matter how challenging it is, when you do pivot and you make that shift, it feels so good. And especially when you start to see the small winds and the momentum, it's so powerful. So I want to encourage anybody that's listening, there is power in a pivot.

06:17
And as Tim is mentioning, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're changing the goal, but you can change the plan of action or the plan of attack to get to that goal. You have to change. You have to adapt. I mean, you're not jumping. Let's be clear. You're not like pivoting, pivoting and constantly changing. You're sticking with something long enough to go, is this working? And then you're taking that data and making adjustments to the plan. And we're constantly doing that. But we're not making the big shift that we made with the mid-market was very intentional.

06:46
massive. Like, I don't think when we first made that pivot, I don't think we realized how big of an actual pivot it was. I don't think we realized it was almost like starting a brand new business where we had an understanding of the product and we know our product work and we had clients that were already serving in that realm. But it was

07:03
what we thought was going to be just a little shift and okay, we're going to start selling here. And a little bit of a shift in the product ended up being basically, I mean, we had to redo all of our operational SOPs. We had to redo all of our sales SOPs. So what initially felt like, oh, we'll make a couple of little shifts and now we're in mid-market enterprise, ended up becoming, you know, we brought in consultants and we revamped the whole freaking company. I mean, there was so much, there's so much data that we had. When I think about the pivot.

07:28
We were essentially the products still the same, right? What we were offering is still exactly the same. It's just a completely different audience. What changed the most was around marketing and sales, for sure. The way we marketed, right? The kind of businesses that we were going after. The sales process especially had to change. And we have a whole episode on B2B sales and specifically, like how do you tap into that mid-market enterprise level? But there was so much that changed in our business. And I mean, we took a hit on our revenue. Like, can we just be honest? We took a big...

07:58
big hit on our revenue, we could have kept selling to small businesses and kept growing and growing and growing, but we knew that that wasn't where we had to be. We knew in our gut that we had to make the pivot and with a pivot comes challenges. Our revenue is not where we wanted it to be at this point in the year, right? But we know projections and the new clients we have on that we're going to surpass or be able to surpass even what we were able to do in like the small business realm with this new direction that the company is going into and...

08:27
It's really, really exciting. So I think part of a pivot is knowing that it's probably going to be harder than you anticipate. The thing I love about the new route we're going is we're really going to get a meetings. And I think that one of the big lessons learned with working with someone, I mean, we've worked with over a thousand clients and we've collected and we didn't just give them, we're not just selling a course, right? We literally would implement this for the clients. We would build their campaigns. We would do the outreach. And so a lot of the information that we got from doing all that work.

08:56
allows us to have more data information than really any of our competitors. And so now all those lessons learned definitely allowed us to come into this new realm and do extremely well. But like you said, on the sell side, there is, there is a lot that shifted there. I think that takes us also into the second, I'll say lesson learned or kind of experience this year was the launching of new offers.

09:19
And so we were approached quite a few times this year by really known people in our space and like the marketing, coaching, consulting type of space to launch or to do lead generation for some of their new products, new services and new offers. And a big lesson learned for us in that, of course, we said, yes, we jumped at the opportunity. There were amazing opportunities with really, really great companies, but we soon learned that.

09:42
Anytime you launch something new, like you're launching it from scratch, there is such a learning curve that happens no matter how established you are as a business. And we learned this internally as well with the pivot that we made, no matter how established you are as a business, when you are launching a new product or a new service from scratch, say to a new audience, there is a huge learning curve and it's going to take you longer to launch than you probably anticipate. So let's talk a little bit more about that product market fit and

10:11
What it's really like the reality of launching a new product or service from scratch. And what were some of our lessons learned working with these companies launching new products? We always told our clients because when new clients would come into us on the smaller businesses and they didn't know how to sell, you know, maybe they were they were doing this on the side. They were built on referrals, you know, the standard thing. They were they were working as an employee that they had some clients on the side and now they're trying to grow.

10:36
I would always teach them your sales process is going to be work and work and you're dialing a million pieces in. You're not going to see the results of that until you have enough of the mechanics of the sales process, the pre-call. What is the call? What's the fall? What are all those pieces? You'll put so much work into all those pieces and not see results until enough pieces in the sales process are dialed in. Then all of a sudden you see this exponential growth in your revenue. We would always preach that to clients and I didn't realize how right I was, right?

11:05
Because I have done that before. I've done it for other of my own companies before. I've helped other people do it before. But I think this year we just realized how true that is. No matter how famous the person is. Yes, correct. No matter how famous that person is. No matter how established the company. How established the company is. If they are launching a new division, a new product, a new offer, any of that. And we face this internally. You're going to have to rebuild that sales process from the beginning. You're going to have to dial all those pieces in.

11:34
Unless you have a ton of resources to throw at it to speed up that process, there's always a delay. It's worth it. Obviously, once you get all those pieces in place and you've got all the right processes, what questions do you ask? What's the framework? When they say this, what do you say? You know, all of those pieces, once they're dialed in, now you have an asset, which is your sales funnel that can convert leads, but it takes more time energy than anybody anticipates. That's for sure. Absolutely. So anybody listening, if you are.

12:02
in the place where you want to launch a new product, you want to launch a new service, potentially even pivot to a different audience, right? Cause that can also, it's a big pivot. You are essentially testing product market fit. You're testing in the new sales process. Does my marketing resonate? There's so many little pieces in that that you have to dial in. So I think don't mistake success in one service or in one area or one target market to success in another.

12:29
It's going to look completely different. So just keep that in mind. The time delay, as Tim is mentioning, when you are launching something new. That was a big, big lesson learned for us this year. Yeah. And it was because when we went from the small businesses to the mid market, what there was skill sets and there was processes that translated. In fact, the way that you sell in a transactional sell on a, you know, 10 or 20 or even a $50,000 program.

12:55
to now you're doing bids on quarter million, half million, million dollar contracts to do their lead generation. And you have, you're talking to the CMO or the CRO or the VP of sales, it's a completely what works to sell that small business owner in one or two calls. Those techniques will kill you if you're trying to use those techniques on this different level of company and vice versa. If you're going from selling enterprise, and we've seen our clients where they're.

13:22
they're selling enterprise and then they go in and they try to start their own business selling to small businesses. There's skills that translates. But if you try to use the techniques that work in some for small businesses with mid-market and enterprise in the complex cell, you're going to get slaughtered. And I think that was a big, big shift that we had to make. We were selling the same product to a different audience and we were confident in the product. Like we knew that it would absolutely work. And we knew that we have like, there's no doubt if they're talking to 10 other companies.

13:51
we're going to get the best delivery, but that doesn't matter if you have the best product. He who has the best sales process and the best offer is going to win the deal. And that was a big shift that we had to make. We did a lot of competitive analysis. We did a lot of just getting in there, getting on the front lines, you know, me getting back in sales, being willing just to get on that front line and just do calls, do calls. And every single call that I would take, it'd be like, okay, what did I do well? Did not go well?

14:15
It was like a constant. Every call was 1%, 1% better. And now we're at the point where it's really resonating. It's really hitting. But that takes work to get there. And it takes a lot of intentionality of looking at all the areas and like literally dialing in every little piece, every friction point removing and then testing, testing, testing. One of the reflections that we had, I want to say a year or two ago in our annual reflection, was to hire help or to ask for help when we needed it, when we were launching something new.

14:44
getting an outside perspective, hiring a consultant. What we did this year, which I think is a huge win, is when we did make that pivot and the transition, yes, we started it from scratch and we had to be in the trenches, but we also got outside help, right? We hired consultants, we hired people to give us that other perspective, which accelerated our learning and our growth. And so it's also realizing that, yes, it's gonna be a grind, it can be hard, and there is gonna be that learning curve, but.

15:11
be smart enough and wise enough as a business owner, as an entrepreneur to ask for help, to hire help, to get people to come alongside you and provide a different perspective because that's going to accelerate your growth. I think far too often, I know I run into this way, I'm like trying to do it myself, do it myself, I'm going to hustle, I'm going to get it done. But the smarter thing to do is I could have gotten it done a lot faster or more efficiently if I just got a different perspective or had somebody to help. So I think that was something that we actually implemented this year in this pivot, that was a huge one.

15:41
Yeah, it was, I think we tried selling a couple and then it was, okay, this is a different cell. We need some experts on this. So we went out and we just, we found a handful of really good people in the enterprise cell space that do training. They're really well known. And yeah, we found people that were incredibly good at enterprise and complex cells. And we just.

16:02
we became white belts again, right? Like, let me just start as a white belt. And I think that's a really challenging thing for people to do, especially the more successful you've been in one arena, you know, where I absolutely could just, you know, dominate one, two call closes in the small business market. But if that's not gonna translate to this new skill set, like, let me just start from zero. Like, let me get coached, let me get consulting, like, let me get training. And I think that was very, very important part of this pivot actually being as successful as it is.

16:31
and will continue to be is being humble, getting the teaching and defining people that are really good at that and being willing to invest that money. You know, so what wasn't cheap, like what we're spinning on to get the right consultants in wasn't cheap. But, you know, how much is my time worth? How much is opportunity cost worth? You know, if we were to delay how fast it even if I could get to the same skill set in six months that, you know, without them, then I could with them. I'd rather even if it cost me all that extra money, I'd rather just get to where I'm trying to go.

16:59
Six months faster. Faster. Absolutely. So good.

17:19
Let's talk about Inc 5000. So if you all don't know, we hit the Inc 5000 list this year, number 526 in the United States, fastest growing company, and then number 40 in marketing and advertising category. So that was a huge win. I want us to reflect on what that experience was like, and then just a lesson learned around hitting that list. I think what was interesting is we hit that list when we

17:48
we're also taking the revenue hit by making the pivot. Correct. So I think one huge lesson to learn is external victories and wins, just their historical validations of things that you did in the past were the right activities. Because we were in the midst of what felt like challenge, difficulty, and we kind of popped our heads up. And we're like, well,

18:09
Let's submit. Let's see if we get the list. And then we got back like, oh, five twenty six, oh, forty is fastest growing marketing agency in the United States. Like, that's pretty cool for me. When we hit that, I'm like, I had a oh, cool, this is a great celebration. But an immediate sobriety of I don't want to not hit the list next time. I don't I don't want to be we hit it once and talk about this forever. It made me motivated to want to hit that next list to keep these things going because it's it was so the work that we put in in 2020.

18:38
2021, 2022, 2023. That was what gave us the validation for those numbers. And here we are in 2024. Making a huge pivot. Making that huge pivot. Yeah. And so that was that was a big thing is the victories are like just this external validation that is you could just be being a loser with your company right now and still get that external validation because past work you put in. And so for me it was I want to make sure that.

19:04
My future self is thankful for what we did in 2024 and 2025, even though it did cost us a lot of money. But that's, you know, entrepreneurs where we see the future and we see the vision and we're willing to make the sacrifices for it. I think for me it was that that validation, right? I think we need those sometimes as entrepreneurs. I think we need them, period, right? That when you are grinding.

19:25
so hard. We've just been head down focused literally since 2020, non-stop grinding. And when you lift your head up and you're like, wow, we made the list. It's overwhelming. We did just take time to like sit in that win and just be like, this is what we accomplished as a team. Our whole company came together, we celebrated. And the first thing that our team said is, how do we hit the list again? What does it take to keep hitting the list? Right? So as you mentioned, it's not that one time.

19:51
success that validates, it's that ongoing, that relentless pursuit of growth, which is one of our values. And so it was both validating for our team to see our tribe come together and like, because of you all, we hit this list, right? Like this is your win. This is just a stepping stone in what we can accomplish. And I think to other entrepreneurs, it's being willing to bet on yourself. I think sometimes we think also that we're doing worse than we actually are, right? Comparison is the thief of joy. We can look at like what other people are doing

20:20
We compare ourselves all the time and think we're doing worse than we are. But like, take that time to bet on yourself, to look at yourself, compare yourself to that past version of Cindy, right? What does previous Cindy look like compared to now? And I think that is so validating. And like, the more you bet on yourself being willing to take the steps, to apply for the lists, to get yourself in front of the right people, it really does pay off and it makes the journey so worth it. Not too long, right? But you got to celebrate them. And I would say for sure.

20:50
The two biggest benefits of those external validations, when you get it from a source like, you know, you're on the ING 5000 list, those external validations, some of the biggest benefits that I didn't realize until we hit that list was the culture for our team. You know, for the team to say, hey, we're part of one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, and I was a part of doing that. I think the culture that we saw, the culture lift in the company.

21:16
It's a nice validation going into mid-market and enterprise companies. It gives that not that it's closing the deal for us by any means, but it gives a validation of trust. Like there's never, Oh, can I trust these people? Are they established? They see that, you know, we're in success magazine, we're an entrepreneur, we're on the Inc 5000 list. Those kind of validations do help getting in that mid-market and enterprise big time. And I think for our listeners too, if any of you are like seeing other people like hit success and.

21:42
win awards and things like that. Also know that there's challenges behind it. And that's why we want to share with you all the challenges that we've gone through in business specifically this year is so that you know one challenges will happen in business. You're not alone. It's brutal. If you're not getting challenged, you're probably are not, you're not setting your goals high enough. That's number one. Challenges are going to happen. And then just to not to compare yourself because we see the highlights, we see the wins, we see the successes, but we don't actually know what people are going through. So.

22:11
Don't compare yourself. And that's a big lesson learned even just for me. And I have to remind myself, don't compare yourself. Because you do not know what people are going through. I mean, this was a brutal year, right? It was really tough. It was. And externally, people are seeing us. You guys hit the ink and you guys hit this. We're doing all these business travels. We're going to all these different places. And there were great experiences and fun experiences. But this year was a grind. There was a lot of work we put in. There's a lot of setbacks. We had a lot of just...

22:39
It things that were just tough like in Tim Grover's book when he, you know, who, who is, he was the coach for Michael Jordan and he's incredible book. But he said that that was the one common thing when he asked like real true champions, people that are performing at the highest level. What is winning feel like? They use words like brutal, like tough, ugly, you know, rough. That's what winning was. And so.

23:03
just to realize like you can have really difficult challenging times and be winning at the same time. It's this weird dichotomy. I think for us this year was like that realization of like, oh, winning doesn't always feel like this constantly elated. Winning sometimes is just enjoying those victories, taking the moment, but also just being in the middle of that brutal. And you kind of said it before, if you're not facing those, it means that you're not setting your goals high enough. Like if somebody's listening, like, I'm doing pretty good.

23:31
Well, you know, it means you're not pushing yourself. I remember growing up snowboarding. I always told people if you came home, you don't have a few bruises. It means you didn't push yourself to the edge of your potential. Right. Like you came home, you didn't fall down. That means you didn't find where that edge of your potential was. You didn't push past that. And, you know, maybe that's why we've been able to win is because we're willing to have that kind of pain tolerance working towards our goals. Absolutely. That's so good. So good. Talking on the topic of goals. Another thing that we reflected on this year was

24:01
the act of setting a long term vision and playing the long game. In the space that we were in, like the high, we call it the high ticket space, where you are kind of dealing with the smaller businesses, the more transactional. It is very easy to be in like that hand to mouth type of process, right? What do we make this year? How much money do we make this week? How many deals did we close? And it becomes so transactional that you're like living week to week, month to month in this pivot as transitioning towards the mid-market enterprise sales.

24:31
One thing that we resolved this year was we want to play the long game. We want to be more long-term focused and especially in the culture that we have today, like the social media culture and just the way that like society is. We focus so much on today and like, what are you accomplishing today and right now? And I think we lose sight of that long-term vision. And I think we were so sober this year about what is a five to 10 year company look like? How do we build?

24:58
Pima into a company that can stand the next 15, 20 years. What does that long-term vision look like? And then us resolving to play the long game, like resolving to the kind of people that we wanna become is the kind of people that can build that generational wealth and that doesn't happen overnight. It happens through the consistent day in and day out for extended periods of time. The businesses that succeed today, both have that long-term mentality, right? They're playing the long game.

25:28
but they're also adaptable to like the small movements and changes that need to happen in the instant to be able to keep up, right? With like changing technologies and things like that. So why don't you talk a little bit more about just that what that playing the long game has looked like for us in the business? I think a lot of times when people think about playing the long game, they think about the tortoise and the hare. And I don't think about the tortoise and the hare at all. I think about I want to be the rabbit running.

25:52
and playing the long game, right? So when we talk about playing the long game, we have a daily sense of urgency. Like when I wake up, when I'm playing the long game, I'm thinking about, okay, how do I build a company that endures through all the different technologies? How do I build a company that is, you know, worth 100 million, worth 200 million, worth $500 million, like long-term? What does that company look like where I'm not dependent on, okay, are my Facebook ads getting me the right KPIs this week so that my offer is profitable

26:22
up and down and up and down of trying to make all your razor thin margins work so you can sell you know however many money this much money this month and then you know brag about that. I'm thinking how do I build a company that's long term but also building that long term requires two-day urgency because when you're playing the long game your urgency of today becomes compounded or your procrastination of today becomes compounded. So when we're thinking the long game I'm thinking

26:51
mid-market enterprise, this could be, you know, some of these clients are a six-month sell cycle. Some of them are two calls, very rarely, but I might do two calls and I convert somebody. But it might be a six, seven call and it's three months and next quarter. And it might take me three to six months to build a true pipeline. So I'm thinking long-term, but guess what happens when I land a quarter million dollar contract and then in six months, they're going to double that. Well, okay. And then 12 months from there, they're going to double

27:20
in the company that I've built a pipeline long enough. And these kind of are the kind of clients and we know we deliver for them that are going to just keep spending money month over month over month for years to come. That's what I think about that long game is what is the product I have right now that if I can bring it to an audience will be able to get more value for my product in the audience I'm selling right now. So the small business where the same amount of work by the way same amount of work to get a small business up and going and bring them from 10,000.

27:49
20,000 a month. Same amount of work as a little bit more execution for the bigger clients because there's more mechanics to it. But, you know, bringing a company from a billion dollar to one point two billion to add 200 million of the revenue is the same strategic moves that are required to bring a business from 10 to 20,000 with our product, with the lead generation. So that's where we like thinking that long term is who gets more value over the long term for my product.

28:15
and being willing to take that big hit on the money, which people are generally not. Once you get comfortable with a certain level of income and a certain level of money, people aren't willing to go backwards. And that was the long term play for us was being willing to go backwards to build that long term game. But you have to have daily urgency because if we'd say, well, we're playing the long term game and then six months comes and I haven't worked my tail off to stuff that pipeline full of great

28:42
great prospects that I've been working for the last six months. Then in six months, I'm playing the long game, but I've been procrastinating. There's no exponential. And so that's playing long game does not mean not being urgent. Like every day you have to be urgent. That what I do today is going to have a compounding effect. One month, two months, three months, six months down the road. I love that. It's both that long term vision and the daily actions and activities that you're taking today to accelerate that. Right. And I love that you mentioned it. It isn't that delay. There isn't procrastination.

29:11
You can have both and you actually must have both. And I think today just with the way society is and how fast things are changing, especially with AI as a business, in order to keep up, you have to be able to make those pivots really fast, those micro, like the small increments, the small changes that you make to be able to sustain, you have to have both perspectives, I think, to be able to sustain in business today. It's like the economy, like, oh,

29:35
You know, work smart, not harm. Like you got to do both. You got to move fast and play the long game. By the way, there's people that are that are sprinting the entire marathon. So like I said, no life, no business is a marathon, not a sprint. Well, there's people sprinting entire marathon. So, you know, they're going to beat you in that marathon. So you better kind of step that game up a little bit. So I think, yeah, urgency and long term, when you have both of those, you're you're going to win, like you're with persistence, with a relentless, never willing to give up no matter how much it takes.

30:04
you're going to win. Absolutely. Because most people don't have urgency. Most people don't have long term thinking and most people don't have persistence and resilience to stick with it as long as it takes to win. So if you can have those three things, you're going to dominate. Might not be tomorrow, but if you stick with it, you're absolutely going to dominate your sector. Period. And our last reflection point, our 2024 reflection is around the concept of everything happens in seasons. And as a business owner, as a high performer,

30:33
always thinking about your next. What does that next season look like? We can get caught up in today's successes and be celebrating today and like all the good things that are happening today. We've caught it like the spring or the summer, not knowing or not realizing that winter's always coming. And for us this year in celebrating like the INC 5000 and some of the great successes that we had, we were also very intentional about the seasons and specifically.

31:01
We were very intentional about our six months business savings. We put away profits. We have six months of like emergency fund or business savings in the event that winter comes because it always will. That's just how the cycles of business work. So we were very intentional and smart about making sure that we had savings in place in the business for just in case, right? Winter is always coming. And it was so good this year because that business savings that we had the six months of emergency fund of savings actually helped us in the big...

31:30
pivot and the transition that we made. It helped us retain our team, it helped us keep operationally keep running, it helped us reinvest back into growth, right? Even through the pivot. So let's talk about how important it is to always be thinking about the next, right? And not to be focused on just today's season and what we're going through. I think again, it's one of the dichotomies of you have to be thinking about the now activities, but you also have to be thinking about what's next, both in playing defense and...

31:59
playing offense, right? For instance, with what Citi's saying with us, making sure we're diligent with our profits and stashing money, you know, stashing money for emergency and having that business, then that allowed us to make that shift in the mid market. And we literally just cut off.

32:16
working with small businesses and it allowed us to make that shift and go all in while also still, you know, having the funds to travel, to do events, to go to important places that we want to go to do the five, to do all that and keep investing in the business. And so, yes, you absolutely, I think mistake that I see a lot of people make is, and I made this early on, when I had my early successes in entrepreneurship is, you know, you start making all that money and you see all the profit coming in and you upgrade the car, you upgrade the condo, you upgrade the house and

32:45
I'm all about like getting getting nice things, especially putting yourself in a good environment. But we were very disciplined on stashing that money away when we could have done a lot of luxuries. We could have done a lot of we stashed that money away and it allowed us to make this big pivot. So it wasn't as much that we use the emergency savings for an emergency as much as we were able to use that money saved for a pivot. And that was incredible. I couldn't imagine this year if we hadn't done that we would have still been trying to.

33:13
play the old game with the small businesses and the new one, which we did for a few months and it was brutal. It was very tough to try to do, you know, so that made us be able to plan just incredibly well and not be in a stress situation. Cause when you're in a financially stressed situation and you're trying to make a pivot, like you're in like survival mode. And I think having that allowed us to make a big pivot that took us way longer than we thought.

33:39
and not ever get to a place where we're in survival mode. Like to always be good with money was, that was a huge part. For sure, and that's a big lesson learned. We wanna keep doing that. It's a lesson that we learned early on and that we wanna keep doing because we've seen just in the way this year went for us, it was just so beneficial having that. So for those listening, making sure that you are diligent about both today and tomorrow, thinking about what that upcoming season looks like, what does that next season look like?

34:08
And always preparing for like worst case scenario, making sure that your business is in a good place. Because I mean, even 2020, right? How many businesses went under because they didn't have business savings or they weren't financially equipped. They weren't thinking about that winter is coming. Think about that with regards to your business when you're planning for 2025 and beyond, what does it look like to set your business up for success when winter will come because it's always coming. And always be thinking about seasons and cycles and the way like.

34:37
business cycles work. There's going to be times where things are going great and it's amazing and you are storing, like you have maybe making an overabundance of profit that you have to be diligent to store so that when winter is there and you're thinking, okay, like maybe we have less clients or the economy is down or maybe we have to make a pivot, you are still set up for success so that your business can sustain. Thinking about that long game, playing the long game with your business versus the.

35:01
hand to mouth here today, gone tomorrow type of transactions. It may not even be a winter's coming. It may be, hey, we're having a really good harvest this year. And if you have those extra funds, maybe you get an acquire a business. You know, like for us, where we're going with our company, there's going to be a point where we're going to start acquiring businesses versus trying to develop certain technologies in-house. You know, we're going to talk more about this in the future. But we've been developing our own SaaS product for a while. It's not some...

35:28
idea we made that we think is going to solve a problem. It's like literally to make our own internal systems and processes way more efficient. And it is incredibly powerful. Like also having money for when those kind of things come about. You know, hey, we want to develop this new product. Okay, well, we've got cash for that. Or hey, instead of developing a new product, we want to acquire a company that has already developing that are already working on that. I think that's kind of where our next mindset is, is over the next few years is probably more so in the acquiring. So it can be a winter's coming.

35:57
and you want to have the cash there for that. But it can also be like, hey, there's going to be really good opportunities that if you have cash, that cash power is going to allow you to do some really cool moves. And so I think that's a big one too, as well as remembering when you're looking forward and marketing has its seasons, like different things like that. And what we're really good at with our product is delivering a consistent product to the client, despite all the changes and all the variables.

36:23
and lead generation that happened and there's constant product changes and platform changes and technology changes and people get burned out with certain types of messages. We're great at being able to deliver a consistent volume and quality to our clients because we're always looking at that next thing because we're always we need to implement AI for personalization. We need to do these different okay we got to make these pivots and adjustments so always think too not just for yourself but for your client.

36:49
What are the future things I got to look forward to to make sure that my like I can still deliver an exceptional product for my client, you know, in next quarter and next year and moving forward and innovating to how can I make my product better for my clients? Because everything in life by nature gets worse and worse and worse and worse unless you put energy into it.

37:08
So yeah, that's it. That's our 2024 Yearly Reflections. So we do that with each other. You know, Sydney and I will do that together. But we also bring it to our team and we say, hey, what are lessons learned? Because the biggest failure that you're going to have in a failure is a failure to learn the lesson. The bigger your goals are, the faster you're pushing, the more aggressive you are, the more challenges, roadblocks, difficulties, and ultimately failures you're going to run into. Was it John Maxwell that said it's not experience that you've learned from, but it is?

37:38
Reflected, reflected experience that you learn from. And so do this, do this, you know, with your partner, with yourself, with your, and then bring it to your team. You know, you and I always do it first. So we have clarity on the overall reflections, but then we bring the team in and we bring their ideas because they're on the front lines. They're doing a lot of stuff that we get a lot of help from. And this is what allows you to make those pivots. It allows you to go, okay, where are we putting energy and time and resources that we shouldn't be and where.

38:05
Where's bigger opportunities that we should be out reallocating those resources to? And we always do Word for the year. And so that's always cool to look back on the word that we had for this year. Yes. And it was incredibly accurate. It was spot on. It was incredibly accurate, but it was more brutal than we were expecting. Yes, but it was accurate. Yeah, but it was, but it was accurate. So yeah, that's it. Hope you enjoyed this episode. The biggest thing is I want you to walk away from this episode with what are one or two things that you could do right now to make.

38:33
your business better, to make sure that your strategy's better, to make sure that you're leveling up. So make sure you're going to walk away from this with at least one or two things that you're going to do to level up your business. Now just remember, domination is not a destination, it's a way of life. Stay winning.