Establish Your Relationships

Establish Your Relationships

K. Trevor Thompson
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
5/11/2021

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

establish boundaries around your time and make sure that you schedule your self-care time first because we can fill our calendars up with work not a problem that it's easily done but when we try to squeeze in self-care it's harder to find time you put that on your calendar first you don't move it don't worry the work is going to find the open slots it won't be a problem but schedule your self-care first and and color code it too use and i do this what i do with my calendar i use my favorite color to you know demonstrate self-care and things that are beneficial to me [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's built several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and today we have another great guest on the episode michael levitt and michael has a good story to tell and i'll give a quick intro so back in around 2009-2010 over the course of about a year he went from a heart attack that almost killed him losing a job in a recession getting a car repossessed having a house foreclosed on um everything in in between all the way till today where he's now doing his own thing and being successful and uh rebounded from that so and he'll fill in a lot of the gaps in between but with that as an intro welcome to the podcast michael great to be with you devon so i gave the the sad front to your story but maybe if you want we could start there but if you want to give a bit more details kind of how that all played out over the course of a year sure and when you're doing that story i i kind of want to play like sad trouble music in the background because it it's like oh wow you know you had all that stuff going on and you know i was like well why are you why are you bringing him on you know he is he where is he at no you know what it's all those things yeah they all happened over a period of year and they were all caused by me being completely burned out and not taking care of myself and really struggling with life in every aspect of it and ignoring the signs of burnout because they were all there i just ignored them and you know it led to what i like to call my year of worst case scenarios with all of those before you go to the worst case scenarios and we'll dive absolutely into that what were you doing that led to your i mean what was your job or what were you doing that led to the burnout i was a healthcare executive for a startup healthcare organization so i was responsible for recruiting physicians hiring staff educating the community on why our clinic was better than the other clinics that were in the area working with funding officials to get more funding for a clinic and navigating all the demands that healthcare has to it so it's in a way ironic that you know a healthcare role gave me a health scare in a way it's i guess although it was really good to be there to get tested to figure out that's exactly what had happened you know i had my when i had my heart attack i was you know the tests were done at my clinic so it was an interesting time for sure so you were working at with the startup in the healthcare industry just maybe summarizing and making clear on my end working uh it sounds like a whole bunch of hours you know and with a lot of startups that's kind of i don't know expected but certainly i'm not outside the norm you're at a startup you're hungry for business clients money investors products developing getting everything up and going everybody's wearing multiple hats and then the midst of that as you're doing all that then you as you indicated you started to go down the path of startup and over the course of a year kind of had that awakening so what was that kind of progression was it the heart attack that was first or which what was the progression or how did that play out for you yeah it was the heart attack was first and then i was off of work for 17 weeks recovering and then went back to work to find out that they didn't want me anymore so they let me go now let's rewind here so that time it was the fall of 2009 so we were still pretty much in the middle of the great recession uh and if we remember there was a lot of jobs being lost mortgages all that good stuff and i was outside of windsor ontario across the border from detroit and the auto sector was on its last leg the government had to bail the gov you know those businesses out otherwise gm and chrysler for sure and all likelihood would not be here today if it wasn't for the government assistance and ford was you know pretty close they had a lot of their own funding but they still needed a little bit of assistance here and there so when you're working in an area that was so heavily tied to the auto sector and there's no jobs it's really hard to find something so it did require a relocation for me and i moved to from from the windsor area up to toronto so leaving a community of roughly a quarter million to an area that has close to seven million people slight adjustment in traffic but so after the heart attack and the job loss i was able to find a role in toronto and then the family car was repossessed because when you lose your job and you're on unemployment and you're getting a little bit of money from unemployment it barely covers anything we all know that but the problem was for me i also had an additional thousand dollars a month in medical bills and the medications that i had to take so i was paying a thousand dollars a month for drugs and not the good not the good kind that make you legal drugs that aren't nearly as fun yeah exactly the legal ones aren't fun from what people tell me but anyway so a thousand dollars a month for that on top of food on top of mortgage payment on top of bills and all of that and i'd worked with my creditors and explained to them the situation and they you know gave us a pretty lengthy grace period but that grace period ran out and then they exercised their right to take the family vehicle which you enter an agreement i give you money you give me a loan to buy a vehicle if i stop giving you money you get to take the vehicle so the exercises are right never i've never been mad at them at all um that was just the reality of it and then after moving up to toronto and moving the family up we forgot our bunk bed ladder at the old house so i was going back to that area to visit with family in a week or so and i was going to swing by the house and grab the ladder and when i went back to the house to grab the ladder and anything else we forgotten i opened up the screen door in the front of the house and i saw the largest padlock i've ever seen in my life you don't see these locks at home depot the only the only place that sells these locks are organizations that foreclose homes and that's what happened uh the home was foreclosed before we were able to put it on the market so it did save me some you know fees when it came to working with the realtor because the bank decided to sell it for me but still to have all of those losses and those losses are gigantic each one of them on their own are a big deal and they can really impact people from a mental state for sure and i had them all in a year and it was all because i was burned out and i wasn't taking care of myself so after all of those losses i had choices i could have said you know what i'm blaming everybody for doing this to me i could have blamed my bosses the fast food restaurants the banks i could have you know started pointing fingers and saying how dare you do this for me but i never i never played the victim because i was responsible for all those things happening it was me i was the only one that was common in all of those elements it was me i could have said hey you know what i survived all that i'm superman i'm just going to go about living my life the way i want to and everything's great or the choice that i did make was okay i'm very fortunate to be alive what do i need to do to make sure that this experience never happens again and that's the path that i took and it took me some time before when you make that they make it sound so easy in the sense of hey i'll just i i got two you know clear minded i got two pass before me i'll choose the path that doesn't lead me to a despair and anguish type of thing was it really that easy or was it a process a period of time self-reflection or how did you because you know certainly in you know you have startups that go under right and whether it's you know you you get burned out and you have a heart attack and then you get let go or you just have a startup that you put your blood sweat and tears in doesn't work out take out loans get foreclosed on whatever i mean other happens other people and you can start to say hey i'm going to slip into depression i'm otherwise going to start as you mentioned blame everybody or i'm going to you know start or lose all hope or you know any number of bad things so how did you you know over that period of time was it did you start out depressed and have to pull yourself out of depression was it a realization hey i've either got two choices i can go down a bad path or a good path or how did you make it you know it sounds really easy but i'm assuming it's not that easy so how did you kind of make that transition or have that realization yeah it took some time in that 17 weeks that i had between the heart attack and losing my job a lot of the framework was done there and of course at that point i didn't know anything about losing the job or the car or the home type of situation those weren't um those weren't in you know in the situation at that point but for those 17 weeks which is during the summer i did a lot of reflection and i i never had any depression or anxiety after uh the cardiac event actually of everybody involved with family friends and all that i was probably the calmest of everybody and a lot of people were like curious about that and even to this day i i can't necessarily say why i was but i it was just the state of mind that i was in i'm like okay that happened to me i don't want that to happen again okay what do i need to do so i just relaxed you know for that the first i would say four to six weeks i just was recuperating from it and getting used to the medications and going into life at a much slower pace because you got to remember i was going full tilt 6 a.m to 11 p.m seven days a week to not doing anything that is very very difficult for somebody that is a type a personality doer let's go do this and this to somebody that needs a nap at two o'clock in the afternoon and i was 40. okay saturday afternoons in the fall yes i'll take a nap because i'll have the college football game on and i'll just get comatose and i wake up in the afternoon and going you know why is ucla playing it's like oh it's it's it's in the afternoon late afternoon okay completely missed the first game all right you know so at least now we can rewind with our televisions back then that wasn't still wasn't around as much so so basically i just i took that time to just kind of reflect and go okay what do i need to do and it was just basically keeping track of my thoughts how i was feeling my energy interactions just going in a way just kind of observing life maybe just a little bit outside of myself and that's it wasn't easy to do that but it's just like okay why you know if i had an argument for example okay why was i upset about that situation what were all the ingredients beliefs patterns and and all of that and when i started doing that i started realizing okay a lot of this was programming that i had for a long time and just how i was my demeanor my personality my beliefs how i approached things and and i joke about facebook i some people love it some people hate it i i'm hit or miss with it but the one thing that i do love about facebook is the memory section because it'll show you your posts that you did years ago and when i see posts that i posted prior to my cardiac event i recognized that person but it's not me i'm not i'm not that person anymore because i made changes and is it easy to do it it's not easy but you have to go at it from a very methodical okay how could i look at this situation in a different way could i approach this differently instead of ordering this food from this restaurant maybe i can order this instead or let's you know try a little bit more activity to start taking better care of myself so i wasn't dragging all the time and eating improperly and getting a proper amount of sleep and a variety of other things that i implement in my life which you know has made my life obviously much better than it was before so so you did that introspection you look and say okay what are the things that led me to this what can i do differently and how can i move forward now taking it you know kind of back to almost a journey of so now you made those kind of introspections you take that period of time how did you then pick yourself up and how did you decide okay i've still got to make a living i still have to have an income so i have a family to support so i got myself to support how can i you know what was the path to now getting new employment different employment was it hey i'm gonna go do a startup i'm gonna do my own thing take my control you know take things into my control i'm going to go work at walmart as a greeter it's a temporary thing to get some income or you know i'm going to go work for a big company or kind of what was that transition for you now trying to make that uh make that decision as to where is it where do you go from here yeah one after you know the house was uh repossessed or actually during that period of time i found a role a healthcare role ironically in toronto and my parents wanted to have me committed they're like are you crazy you're going back into healthcare it nearly killed you what the hell and basically i said you know what no i'm gonna go at this differently i need this was something that i had to prove to myself like can i go back into the sector that i failed miserably at and actually come out of it successful and i did and what i did is i used it as a healing mechanism to again do the work that i was doing but really setting priorities and boundaries around my work and establishing when i was going to work when i wasn't going to work shutting down email not going onto the computer after hours not working nights and weekends really you know establishing those rules from the very beginning and it made the biggest difference for me and you can do it in a startup you can do it if you're working for somebody else it's easier to do it at the very beginning and it's just like any habit once you establish it and you practice it then it becomes more routine and you can do it so going through all the healing and reinventing myself and you know looking at life differently and living life with more boundaries and protecting myself and focusing on my self-care more life was going good i was becoming really successful in my healthcare roles doing a lot of great things working with funding agencies on strategic planning sessions i was on boards of directors you know making big decisions for organizations and while i was doing that and life was going really well and successful i started paying attention to my colleagues and i noticed that they were going down that burnout path that i did and it scared me and i'm like what in the world you know you just start it's all those things it's like you know if you're a smoker and then you quit smoking then you all suddenly start looking around you see everybody smoking it's like horus you buying a car everybody and now you start to notice everybody has a red car that same type of a thing exactly like you know i'm the only one in this neighborhood that owns this car and you look around and there's like six in the parking lot nearly okay i guess i was exactly exactly it's like someone's following me oh they're stalking me kind of thing but no i think what happened was in that situation i started talking to my colleagues and i didn't share my story so much with them other than look i've had bouts of of stress and burnout i know what it looks like with all due respect you're showing some signs and you should you know take some time and ease up and all that and i said i'm just gonna work through it it'll be fine later i knew that it wouldn't be because i know the work that they do and i know the demands that they had and the way that they were approaching it wasn't gonna be helpful so i thought okay i need to do something a little bit more so i started researching burnout a bit more because burnout's been around for a long long time i actually have a book that was published in 1980 titled burnout and so it's been around for a very long time but it's just more prevalent and there's more awareness of it now which is good and bad it's bad that exists but it's good that there's awareness and there's talk happening about it because once there's talk then eventually there's action and then there's movement and then some people are addressing it so doing all this research and finding all of these things like i should start sharing these with my colleagues and and then i realized i just started looking around and seeing other sectors outside of healthcare we're having similar challenges legal education manufacturing it was all over the place so i thought okay how what should i do about this and then the entrepreneurial spirit which i never thought i had although in my startup roles that i had in my life i actually did but you know what i i need to formalize this a little bit more instead of just having a blog why don't i launch my own company i'll keep my health care roll launch it um so that way if it takes time to build it up i can do it and run both simultaneously and of course with caution because you know it's not good for the burnout guy to burn out it's not good for pr so i just thought i need you i was like the healthcare professional having a heart attack right now but no yeah exactly but exactly exactly you guys should do this well look what you guys did to your director i'm not listening to you doc yeah yeah i'm sure the patient results for that community weren't that great after they heard that but anyway no actually the the physician there um that caught my cardiac event it's a really good doc so uh but end of day i thought okay let me launch a business let's start writing about this and you started out as kind of as almost a side hustle right if i remember kind of we talked a little bit before it wasn't just hey i've got this idea for a consulting business of how to do burnout you know avoid burnout but i'm going to keep my job that i'm doing now and get this started to kind of decide hassle on the site is that right that's correct yeah i started as a side hustle with the eventual goal to migrate to it full time which i did several years ago and because the work was there and is there and during the time of this recording in the middle of this pandemic it's really there um i'm and we'll jump into some of the things they do but after you know writing about it you know somebody said you know you should probably do a podcast about this because podcasts are starting to get popular and you could you know give some quick tidbits of advice so i did and that the original premise of my show was i was just gonna yap for about five minutes here do this you know triage your calendar you know prioritize and here's some things that i do to help and that's what it started off as and then uh the person that told me to do the podcast said you need to start interviewing people and talk to them about burnout or whatever comes up and been doing that ever since then you know we're three and a half years into it so it's been a blast for doing that but what ended up happening was the organization that i launched my initial thought in the plan and the structure of the startup was i was going to be consulting with c-suite executives and senior level management people because that's the types of roles that i was in i know those people burn out and i know they do their best not to talk about it publicly especially if they're fortune 500 executive and they're burning out if that gets in the news that stock is tanking and it's tanking fast and so the people that i talk with you know a lot of times and entrepreneurs all know this many sites you for businesses i work with coca-cola and fedex and you know they list all the logos of all the great companies to do that i can't do that because if i put the name of a company on there or an individual you know again they could take their stock and cost people billions uh my insurance does not cover that um so my my limit is not that high so for me even if you're to take the smaller businesses you know and i and i said i and mentioned in this podcast and others i run several businesses and if i were to go if if the people that worked under me that you know that were my employees and i don't like to say under me but you know work that are the employees that i employ if i were to go and say hey i'm burning out and i'm worn out and there then they would start to worry about their job security as well if hey if the boss the person that's running things isn't going to be able to keep you know getting everything done what are we going to do and then they start so i think that even across the stage whether you start up small business all the way up to the huge businesses it's it certainly is a worry for everybody that's on the management level c-level type of people because they have a perception that they have to exude confidence they have to let you know whether it's a market or whether it's the employees whether it's clients you want to make sure that you look like you appear to have you're on top of everything and you've got everything handled otherwise some people start to lose that confidence so now jumping to it so you did all this you started you know you i think you said in 2018 you kind of went all in full-time you're going to do all of this you're going to switch from you know doing this as a side hustle to now building a podcast doing speaking doing consulting and really helping people address burnout so you take that 2018 so you've had it the last couple years has it how's it going as far and i'm sure you know covet has also been a a factor in it maybe that's helpful maybe it's not in a sense it probably creates you know different types of burnout and other things to factor into it but as a business you know taking that as a business has it gone well gone upwards has it kind of gone those ups and downs or has it gone for you uh it started off kind of a slow climb and then the pandemic hit and i shifted things because i was speaking and i had several events this year booked already that i was going to be speaking about burnout because burnout was and has been pretty prevalent the pandemic hit and it took off um and and what we see is monster.com did a recent survey and those surveyed indicated that 69 of people surveyed are identifying as being burned out so in an organization if those statistics are accurate seven out of ten people in your organization are burning out we have a pandemic within a pandemic that's huge insurance claims for mental health claims and mental illness and sick leave are skyrocketing a colleague of mine works in the insurance industry and he says yeah the claims this year are astronomical so what's going to happen and the challenges mental is issues and stress and burnout a lot of organizations have been reluctant to do anything about it because it's it's difficult in a way to do it and they say well you know it's not really impacting their bottom line well it's going to because your insurance premiums are going to go sky high next year and you're going to also have a ton of absenteeism and people leaving your organization and we know it takes you know depending on the role 18 months to two years to get fully back up to speed if you lose the key individual yeah well you start losing five to seven you know out of ten people in your organization and you're not a mcdonald's that's a problem and it's going to impact your deliverables to your clients your clients are going to get upset they're going to leave believe me it's going to impact the bottom line so you need to get ahead of this at whatever level in and create opportunities for people to bring to light the challenges that they're facing because the working from home burnout situation is a huge problem because one you know so many people working from home their homes aren't set up like an office or they weren't they might be now hopefully but they weren't before and for many people they've never worked remotely before and all of a sudden they're like what's zoom you know how do i use this what what's this and i think everyone knows what it is now and we're all kicking ourselves for not buying the stock in march but that's another story sure but i think at the end of the day we have work and home are now the same place and so many of us that's a good point even to the point of you know and i think a lot of people think that they work well from home or they always dreamed of working from home and you know they don't you don't realize so i work from home i don't work at home anymore i have my office i haven't played but for beginning and for quite a bit of my career i worked several years from home and i worked for remotely and you know it was everything and i'm an introvert so i tended to be fine i didn't i didn't need the social interaction but what i did even for me doing it all those years it took me a while to figure out how do you balance so if your wife comes in and wants to have a question for the kids to get home from school and you're on a call how do you balance that or how do you not you know get distracted well i've got these couple things i just need to get done at home and so i'll make up the time for work later on and then it creates those issues of missing deadlines and it it creates a lot new a lot of stress that if you haven't done that or you're not used to it makes it you know a much different dynamic than you're not used to so i completely get that and i think there's a lot of issues with or you know a lot of things are addressed there we don't have as much time to address at all here but my question would be i'll give you two opera or two things and then i'll always hit my last two questions first is you mentioned you have a podcast and addresses a lot of this people want to find out more want to listen to your podcast get to get more information what's the podcast that you that you do it's called the breakfast leadership show and it's on all the major platforms and some that i've never heard of and so yeah i listened to your show on this i'm like on what like so yeah it's it gets replicated everywhere so uh itunes spotify i heart radio all of them so breakfast leadership show okay well that's so that would be the first thing so people want to find out more about um how to avoid burnout how to deal with it and other people's experiences i think that sounds like it's a good resource to go to with the one other thing so people want what would be the one and i know that it's always hard because there's a lot of things what would be the one tip or piece of advice you'd give people to avoid burnout or at least to address it or to you know guard against that limit your screen time on your smartphone um it's you don't understand how many times you're interrupted in a day just in normal things for your smartphone great devices but my goodness we pick these things up so often and they eat up a bunch of our time and take us away from the deep work that we really need to do and even during this pandemic we're we're consuming a lot of content and unfortunately a lot of it is negative and that can impact your mental state which impacts your physical state which lowers your immunity and you don't want to have a low immunity right now no i think that that's a good advice i mean it's always one that we hear it a lot it's a simple one and yet how often do we either oh you know and i thought it was interesting this is inside you know you see a lot of the studies and that of people think you know how often do they people think they're on their smart device or on a screen versus how often are they actually and people like oh i'm on my phone maybe an hour a day and then you do the you know the trackers and everything else and people are on for two and a half three hours or plus and you know then it's you know it's a has a much bigger impact that oftentimes people disregard it is and you know for mine i use mine often as a computer so it it piles up on on the time and you look at you go like yikes so you know i try to do different things and and build in breaks and not use it as much but yeah i keep the time of the track and i go wow that's that's not good okay yeah because when people say i don't have any time it's like according to your smartphone you you're spending about five hours a day so you think you could carve out maybe 30 minutes away from um tick tock and and and maybe do something else although tick-tock if you're dancing and you're moving you're getting action and activity that's true that's you know well as long as it doesn't get banned we'll be good yeah who knows what will happen there that's a whole longer conversation so yeah all right so as we start to wrap up the the podcast i always ask two questions at the end of the podcast we'll jump to those now so first question maybe it's already all you know within all the things that we've covered but what was the worst business decision you have ever made worst business decision was not starting this organization sooner center it is funny because i think we're you may be 100 if not we're getting close to the number of episodes 100 i don't have the exact number but we'll call this 100 it may be what a couple off but of the 100 ish episodes i've done i would say the number one thing is that people say their biggest mistake is is just that they should have got started earlier i love this it's a it's been a life-changing all of the above and so i think that it's just interesting how many people have so many different journeys and yet that's probably the number one answer is the thing that they wish they'd done earlier okay second question is if you were to take someone that's now just getting the startups just getting into small businesses just starting out or wanting it started out what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them establish boundaries surround your time and make sure that you schedule your self-care time first because we can fill our calendars up with work not a problem that it's easily done but when we try to squeeze in self-care it's harder to find time you put that on your calendar first you don't move it don't worry the work is going to find the open slots it won't be a problem but schedule your self-care first and and color code it too use and i do this what i do with my calendar um i use my favorite color to re you know demonstrate self-care and things that are beneficial to me then that way i can look back at yesterday or last week or last month and if i don't see enough of my favorite color i know there's a problem and i need to make an adjustment with my time in my schedule so you it's your favorite color and it doesn't have to be an electronic you can use paper one too just use a highlighter um and and highlight uh the self-care uh with your favorite color then that way you can look back and go okay yeah i'm getting enough and you can tell it's just you ask yourself you do a check in with yourself how am i feeling and you know both physically mentally you know does my outlook on life look good do i feel dejected and i feel kind of down am i anxious about something do those check-ins and keeping track of your calendar is is one good way to make sure that you keep in check uh with what's going on in your life no and i completely agree and i always there's always more fires to put out more things to do than you ever have time to and i'd put that in there that's just kind of the same perspective i have with family time too is you know having those boundaries because you know in self-care and i'd put family is both very important things and you they're always ones that are easy to push off right oh i can work start running or working out tomorrow i can start taking a break or medication oh we're back sorry dropped off there for just a second yeah i looked i i looked down at the thing and i was like do i okay sometimes it's me but i look down it's like no all all white bars on this and i'm like i'm like all right for the listening audience we had a temporary break so i'm going to back up and if you if i repeat myself you'll just get an extra thing but what i was saying is you know for me i look at it just to your point taking time for yourself you almost have both family and self-care kind of fall in the categories uh it's easy to push off in the sense that you always have fires to put out at work you always have things to get done especially if you're a startup small business or a c level is you're always going to have more things to do than time to do it and so family always say oh you know all i can get that tomorrow i can go to that game or that practice or i can spend time reading the book to the kid same thing i can always start running tomorrow i can eat healthier you know next week and i'll just get through this week type of a thing and yet if you're not intentional if you don't do it you're never going to have that you never if you're you're always going to have things that will fill up your time and if you don't be intentional about it you're always going to have to fill it up and never have that self-care and you're never going to have that family time so well as we wrap up as we finish up the podcast people want to reach out to you they want to learn more about you learn about your find your podcast read your book schedule you for an event uh they want to work for you they want to pick your brain any or all of the above what's the best way to connect with you best ways go to breakfastleadership.com at you know the bottom there's a thing where they can enter some information and i can um you know reach out to them social media under be fast leadership so the letter b and then fast leadership on all the major social media platforms so interact with me there as well i'm happy to help or guide you on you know whatever you're facing when it comes to this burnout awesome well i appreciate you coming on it's been fun to hear about your journey about how you've overcome burnout and how you're now helping other people with it now for any of you that uh have your own journey to tell love to have you on the podcast and feel free to go to inventivejourneyguest.com and apply to be on the podcast and come on and tell your journey if you're a listener make sure to click subscribe so you can get a notification of this and all the new or all the new episodes as they come out and lastly if you ever need help with patents or trademarks feel free to reach out to us at miller ip law always here to help thanks again michael for coming on it's been a pleasure and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you you English (auto-generated)