HN Haus Podcast

When to Let Go of a Business | Lessons from Necker Island, Realigning Your Vision, and Embracing Blue Ocean Opportunities to Scale

• Hannah Nieves • Episode 77

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The trend of founders leaving their businesses or taking sabbatical leave continues to rise, but there’s a way to address burnout and recalibrate your business before that happens. In this episode, we break down areas where you might be lacking the integration between business and lifestyle and ways to get back in alignment with your vision. We highlight strategies for getting your time back and making decisions with confidence. Plus, we share an exciting announcement about the private community and app we’ve been working on! 


IN THIS EPISODE, WE TALK ABOUT:

(2:42) Getting paid for your ideas instead of your output 

(5:48) The power of vision forecasting 

(7:28) Why personal development and emotional healing are crucial for business owners 

(9:03) How to give yourself an honest time audit 

(11:24) Finding your ‘blue ocean opportunity’

(14:35) Embracing AI and new technologies


RESOURCES

- Learn more about HN Haus services: hnhaus.com 

- Dr. Joe Dispenza

- Manifestation Babe 

- Gabrielle Laura

- Rob Dyrdek's Podcast: Build With Rob     

- Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

- Finding My Virginity By Richard Branson  

- Episode 20. CEO Mindset Shifts For Rapid Growth with Natanya Bravo

- Episode 4. Money Mindset and Productivity Hacks with Chelsea Wessman

- Episode 71. Shifting Our Mindset From Pivot To Evolution   


CONNECT WITH HANNAH:

Follow the Founder: @hannahmnieves 

Follow HN Haus: @hnhaus 

Join our Email Community for monthly resources, tips and exclusive content!

Speaker 1:

All right, we are back for another episode at the Agent House podcast. I'm your host, hannah Nieves, and I am so excited today to talk a little bit about, you know, shifts in the industry and things that I am seeing. Right, we have been seeing founders leave their businesses left and right and I say this not to scare anyone, not to cause any hesitation in your business, but this is a real thing. Founders who are leaving their businesses because they're burnt out, founders who are going on sabbaticals and I just want to preface that there's nothing wrong with this. And one of the things that I took away when I went to Necker Island last year with Richard Branson was that he said businesses are like buses and there's always going to be another one. And at first it hit me when I heard that quote and we were sitting at dinner and I was like no, that can't be. You know, if you love something, why would you leave it? And then I quickly realized after the fact, after it really sunk in, that as business owners, this is the lifestyle. We are not tied to the one vehicle of making money. There might be other things that come down the line. So for the people that are leaving their businesses, for the people that are going on sabbaticals or they're selling their businesses, I think it's a beautiful thing because their time is now up in their current season and now they're making space for new things. So the whole theme of today's episode is all about recalibration. And I don't know about you, but the last few years have been wild. We started this business in the summer of 2019 and went full time in March of 2020, which is the thick of the pandemic, and you know, that year, every single person was running on adrenaline. Every business owner was running on adrenaline. We were just trying to survive, and so that's what happened. So 2020, to fast forward to now 2023, a lot of business owners are now realizing, hey, the speed of which I am going at now is not the speed that I want to continue, and I think you know there's a lot of statistics out there that talk about businesses and failure rates and like, the higher you go you know three, five, 10 years the larger that number gets, and that's a real thing. But I want to encourage all of you that you can recalibrate what you're doing, and we've been going through that ourselves over the last six months. I want to dive in. So the first thing is your mindset, and this is one thing I want to share.

Speaker 1:

I went through this several times in business, so so much those people who are leaving their businesses right now. I went through seasons in running these businesses where I hated part of my business. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel. At one point we had a full agency we're doing done for UPR and marketing and branding. I was doing the coaching side with the community and the masterminds and I quickly realized that I did not want to build the big agency. When I first started my business, I had the vision of having the 30 employees and this beautiful office in the city and having the corner office and I quickly realized that wasn't what I wanted. I actually desired a smaller team and I didn't want a big agency. And that took a recalibration of who I was because, coming from corporate America, all that I knew was my skill set. All that I knew was the trade that I had. So for me to say you know what? No, actually this is not what I want to do and I need to shift the mindset from getting paid to have a deliverable and an action to getting paid for being me and having my thoughts and ideas, and that was a big mindset shift. So when it comes to your mindset alone, I think the biggest thing that I always recommend to founders is always go back to your vision.

Speaker 1:

Whenever I have felt out of alignment in the business and usually when you feel out of alignment, you either a despise waking up to do your work right. I used to get Sunday scaries so bad. I remember it would be like Saturday afternoon and this was like even in the business at some point, and my husband would be like what's wrong? And I'm like you know, I got to like start work tomorrow, I got to prep tomorrow and he'd always tell me, like it's Sunday, what are you doing? And I always preached to clients that, yes, as an entrepreneur you have the liberty to work any day the week you'd like, but for me it started to creep into every single day and I didn't have the balance and the integration between what was business and what was life. So I always go back to when you feel out of alignment.

Speaker 1:

It's either a you start to despise waking up every day. You might even start to feel resentment towards the clients that you have right, and that's a big thing, especially for anyone that does service-based work. You're an agency owner. Every single one of us has gone through that at some point, some point right. So maybe there's a little bit of resentment, maybe you're not enjoying the work that you're doing as much anymore and maybe you actually are starting to feel physical symptoms of burnout, which I can tell you from going to the hospital for burnout almost four years ago. The physical symptoms are real, whether it's being really tired throughout the day, being really irritable. These symptoms will bleed into your personal life. So it's really number one realizing like are you out of alignment with what you're supposed to be doing right now?

Speaker 1:

And then from there going through a vision forecast again. So I love to do this and this is something that I do. You can check out Dr Joe Dispenza. He's a great resource from this manifestation babe, catherine Zinchina, gabrielle, laura there's so many incredible resources that we can provide in the show notes and books for you. But really going back to why you're doing what you're doing and what your feature vision actually looks like for you, because that's going to help bring you back into realignment.

Speaker 1:

So once you know, okay, this is not working, this is where I want to go? How do I actually get there? From a mindset perspective, you can have all the thoughts you want, but if you don't actively and proactively make the change in your mindset and in your body, you'll never get there. And I know it's a harsh truth. But if you are just thinking those thoughts but you actually don't believe them or embody them, they're never going to happen. And they say that with all areas of your life. So I'll get a lot of questions. Well, okay, well, how do you take it from your mind to your body? And this is where, as entrepreneurs, personal development is so powerful and it is needed. It is needed.

Speaker 1:

I remember coming into entrepreneurship when I was putting entrepreneur and I told my first advisor oh, I don't need the mindset work. Like, I'm good, just give me the strategy. I don't need any of the mindset stuff. You know this fluffy stuff, and in fact, that was the one thing that I did need. So for me, over the last few years, this has looked like breath work, tapping, journaling. I mean, there's so many different like modalities that you can use.

Speaker 1:

And after working with over 500 founders over the last few years, what I have noticed is that typically, as founders, we are making decisions from unhealed places within our mind and our body. And what do I mean by unhealed places? Maybe not physical wounds, but they're mental. You know, they're internal wounds that we have carried from childhood into our decision making. And I see this with you know clients, where you know they had rough upbringings or maybe they had you know a parent that wasn't there. And they're making these business decisions talking about hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars from an internal perspective that is not yet matured yet and that takes a lot of willpower to be able to work through those things. But that's what allows you to really, really grow as a founder and as an entrepreneur. You have to constantly go through this process of healing yourself and just getting really clear as to what's blocking you, because you know you'll quickly realize that you make these decisions based off of a belief, whether it's value, whether it's your worthiness, whether it's your scarcity around money, which that's a big thing with a lot of founders is their relationship with money and that directly impacts the way that they make investments in businesses. So your mindset's everything. So I'm gonna include some resources for you guys in the show notes, some resources that I recommend to clients as well, and we also have some great previous episodes that we'll link in the show notes for you as well.

Speaker 1:

The second thing, when it comes to recalibration and this is something that I actually took from Rob Dierdek specifically I've been so fascinated with his podcast episodes. I actually have been going on a page of podcasts with him talking about lifestyle design, because I'm so fascinated with how he looks at time as being the currency. It's not necessarily the financial goals, but it's your time, so your time efficiency as a founder is extremely important and I guarantee for the people that are leaving their businesses, going on sabbaticals, selling their businesses, whatever it is. It also has a lot to do with how you manage your time, and not to say that these people are managing their time incorrectly, but what I mean by that is there might be a lack of integration with the time between business and life. Maybe you are spending too much time at business or maybe it's the other way around, but your time efficiency becomes really, really important, and when I started to see this shift in myself as a founder and I started to evaluate my time and how I did, this was I wrote down all of the things that I was doing for the week, outside of meetings, which I also looked at meetings too. I looked at meetings and looked at okay, are the client focused? Is this moving the needle forward, or am I just putting meetings on my calendar to fill a calendar? And I used to do the latter. I used to fill my calendar up until I had no room to even take a lunch break.

Speaker 1:

So evaluating your time, evaluating the things that you were doing in your business, is really, really important. I've talked to so many seven figure founders who are still in the weeds of their businesses and still doing things that they can offload so they can focus on the larger initiatives. And this is a big one because it goes back to which I've talked about in previous episodes surrendering control. Surrendering control Now I'm not saying that you are above certain tasks in your business, because as a founder, you need to be able to humble yourself and roll up your sleeves and do anything that the business requires to be able to move it forward. But this also means that you need to evaluate how you're spending your time, because if you're not doing things that are gonna move the needle forward, you're just doing time sucking tasks, and that's gonna lead to burnout as well. And then the third thing I wanna talk about is really important when it comes to recalibration is looking for blue ocean opportunities. There's a really great book on this I'm gonna link in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

And what do I mean by this? Industries are changing drastically across every industry, whether it's construction, whether it's digital businesses, whether it's interior design, space or real estate. Every industry is getting disrupted with technology, with artificial intelligence. I mean, I was just on TikTok last night looking at how this one interior designer was using AI to literally create renderings of a house, renderings of a room, design a room. The technology is changing faster than we can imagine, which is a beautiful opportunity, but also, for the people that are not embracing it, it could be a harsh reality.

Speaker 1:

And what do I mean by this? I mean that, as business owners, the way that we've been doing business the last few years might not be the same way that we do business in the next few years, and so for us, what I realized and we're gonna be talking about this, which I'm really excited about in the next few episodes is we have been developing a new private community and app. That has been the works for the last year, and for me as a founder, I realized there was a blue ocean opportunity, meaning I could fill a gap in an area, in a segment of an industry that was already existing. I'm not creating anything brand new, but I'm doing it better In the sense I'm doing it better for a segment that is not being served. So you need to look for blue ocean opportunities and look for areas where maybe competition hasn't been looking at. Maybe look where you know when people are going right, you're going left. Look at the areas where it's untapped and this could be untapped in technology. This can be untapped in the way that people are designing businesses.

Speaker 1:

I'll give you an example. I was reading this article about this guy who built in one point I think it was a $1.3 million agency solo. And when you think about that, how the hell do you build a $1.3 million agency solo? Because he restructured the way that he did these packages in a way where it was like a subscription, so customers knew exactly how much it was going to be. They could pay all a cart and then they would get their services within the next few days. So it was almost like purchasing a product. So instead of having an extended lifetime of okay have to book a call, then you have to get a proposal, then you have to go through this lengthy sales process. He made it so easy for his customers to get what they need and reduce the sales journey timeline, made clients more happier that way, and then return. That kept coming back and for him, I think that is a perfect example of looking at a blue ocean opportunity, because what do most agencies do? They bring in work, they hire more people. They bring in work, they hire more people and they're on this hamster wheel where he reinvented the way that the industry was doing business. So think about how you can do that for your own business.

Speaker 1:

And the last thing we're gonna talk about is AI and again, we've been talking about this a lot in social and this is something that I've been working really hard to integrate our community on, and not that you need to replace things, because I think that's the biggest misconception. When I first started looking at all these tools, there's just one tool that I started using Motion. It's probably one of my first AI tools that I just started using in my business. I was a little bit hesitant. I was hesitant as to what actually is this. How do we use that? I remember the first time my CMO talked to me about chat GPT and I was like, oh yeah, cool, cool. But in my mind I was like, are we actually really going to use this? And when it came to recalibrating and looking at blue ocean opportunities, I want to give you an example.

Speaker 1:

We have been working on this app for the past year. It started about a year ago. Full development started at the beginning this year and it's taken a lot of investment, taken a lot of time, taken a lot of energy. We have started to streamline our efforts with our other brands by leveraging different tools and technology, not to replace people on the team, but to enhance what they're doing. I remember one of my full-time team members asked me she goes is AI going to replace my job? And I said no, it's not going to replace your job. It's going to make you more competitive at your job. It's going to make you more streamlined at what you're doing, because now you can streamline what you're doing with these tools in a way, so now you can focus on other things and it's going to speed up your time. And this has allowed us as a team to streamline certain areas of the business so we can put more focus on the launch of this new community and the launch of this new app, which, if you have ever ventured into the tech arena or anything along those lines, you know how much time and energy and resources goes into building any type of mobile or any type of application for that matter.

Speaker 1:

Going into the tech arena is really risky and takes a lot of research, and we knew for us that, for us to get to the long-term goal where we wanted to go, it meant that we had to use our businesses and our resources like chess pieces, so each one was kind of working together and each business was a springboard for the next one. So, really, looking at delegating with intention and I think that's like the biggest piece that I want you to take away and going back to the whole theme of this episode, which is about recalibration and founders leaving their businesses, we found that when talking with a lot of people, for a lot of people this came down to the resources that were available. People were burnt out with how much marketing they had to do to get their brand out there. You know, whether it's getting on 50 platforms or being able to record content all the time and for a lot of the business owners that we have, they aren't content creators. They are business owners that have service-based business owners. They're lawyers, they're doctors, they're consultants, and content creation is part of the process, but they are not influencers in their own way and for them there needs to be a little bit of a balance.

Speaker 1:

So we found that for a lot of people leaving their businesses, this became a really big conversation, which was I couldn't keep up with the amount of content that I had to put out, and there's a way to do this in a more streamlined way. So, if you're feeling out of alignment, if you're feeling in alignment now and now, you're really excited about, like what's to come and know. For me personally, I look at some of the things that we are creating this year and these are things that I have put on my vision board years ago, years ago. But it comes with the shift in your mindset, which, again, nothing's going to change if you don't change, and I've told this to so many founders that you cannot expect any change to happen in your business if you can't allow your mind to change with it. So your mindset, your time, efficiency is a big one. Audit your time. Look for those blue ocean opportunities right. Look for the areas where people aren't playing. Look for the areas that are underserved. Look for the things that people are not doing in your industry that you can do better. And I'll give you one last example of that when I was in Nucker Island.

Speaker 1:

I'm also going to include this link to Richard Branson's book it's one of the best books I've read in a very long time about an entrepreneur, and he was talking about how he ventured into the railroad industry. And we're talking about someone that you know dropped out of high school right Ventured into the railroad industry. I mean, I probably had no business being there, but he looked for opportunities where archaic companies were stuck in their old ways and he looked for ways he could do better. And now his portfolio, I think, is over 100 companies, right, or it's a few billion dollars. It's incredible.

Speaker 1:

And then the last thing is look for ways to streamline your efforts, and not just streamline your efforts with yourself, but streamline with your team as well. Empower them to work smarter, empower them to be more efficient with their time. So I hope this was helpful, and in next month's episodes we're going to be talking about all about harmonizing business and life together, and we're hosting a really incredible week-long intensive all on AI, all on chatGPT, on ways that you can streamline this in your business in a way where it's not overwhelming right. So I'll be putting that in the show notes for you guys. There's going to be a lot of resources in today's episode, but I hope this was helpful, and it's 7 pm if you have any questions.