How Do I Stop Doing Everything in My Business?

Opening and Guest Introduction

Shawna Suckow (0:00 - 0:35): Here we go. Do you ever feel like you are busy all the time, but you're just not accomplishing your real priorities? I have the perfect guest today, and this is the episode that's going to be so helpful to you. My guest today is Jake Thompson, and let me read you a little bit about it. Jake is an international keynote speaker and anti-complacency strategist, which I love. He's a four-time author and the founder of Compete Every Day, which is a performance brand he built from the trunk of his car in 2011. Is that still working on it? Still going.

Jake Thompson (0:35 - 0:40): We still have it. It's not in the trunk of my car, thank God, but we still have it shipping daily.

Shawna Suckow (0:41 - 1:37): That's fantastic. So you didn't sell it off. You like doing it, and you keep it. That's cool. He took it from $60,000 in debt to a seven-figure company, now worn by leaders in 62 countries. That's so cool. As a CSP, which is a certified keynote speaker, it's a designation held by fewer than 700 speakers worldwide. I like to explain it because I am also a CSP as we have a master's in public speaking. It's a great way to put it off. I like getting to that level. Jake has delivered more than 500 keynotes to organizations, including large, huge ones like Pfizer and Deloitte. Oh my gosh, Pfizer and Deloitte and Titleist Golf.

But he also has worked with a number of franchise organizations and the two of the most goldfish swim schools and Urban Air Trampoline Park. Those are awesome. Jake, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Jake Thompson (1:38 - 1:44): Thanks for having me. Excited to be here and just talk business and drift and life and all the things in between.

Shawna Suckow (1:45 - 1:49): Tell me first of all about the business that you built out of the trunk of your car.

Building Compete Every Day

Jake Thompson (1:50 - 4:20): Yeah, you know, it's funny. I finished grad school in 2008 and had spent the previous two to three years chasing what I thought was a dream career. I wanted to be a sports agent, right? Ever since Tom Cruise, Jerry Maguire. Like that was what I wanted to do. And then I got into the industry and I realized very quickly that's not what I want to do at all. And it was late. It was late 2008. We were going through the recession. I couldn't get a job, honestly, to save my life. It was like Best Buy turned me down for holiday hours. And so I was getting to a point where I was going to have to do something or I was going to move back to East Texas where I grew up and start working in our family, small family business, which we can kind of talk about later, which I did not want to do either.

And so I put out a feelers to my network. One company hired me to do a little bit of marketing strategy. Social media was so new. I could build a basic WordPress website, which a lot of companies were starting to realize, oh, we need a website. And so I built a consulting practice for a few years. But as we had success, I started making great money. I was incredibly unfulfilled. And one of the things I've struggled with my entire life as an athlete, as an only child, as all the things in between is comparison and comparison in a very unhealthy sense of I've got to be ranked better than you. I've got to do better than you because that's where I'm getting my worth and my confidence and my values is how I ranked next to you.

And I went through kind of a period of life where I started getting back into shape. I'd gotten grossly out of shape toward the end of college and grad school and working. I started pursuing like, what do I actually want to do? And ultimately, as I physically started changing, going through this idea of only competing with myself, going to the gym, not worried what anyone else was doing. It started to show up differently in how I showed up mentally, how my confidence in areas. And as people would ask me about it, they were like, what are you doing differently?

Like, I've known you for years, but something's different. And I would just tell them I'm competing with myself. Like, I'm finally not worried what everybody else is doing. And out of all of those conversations, I kept getting poked and prodded to do something with it, which eventually just started as a side hustle of selling compete everyday t-shirts out of the trunk of my car behind a CrossFit gym. And that brand started to take off. And so I started traveling the country in 2012 and 13 and 14 and 15, 16, 17, helping to teach people how do you stop living in comparison and start competing with yourself and making some hopefully comfortable gear and inspiring gear that would remind people to do it and be something they'd want to wear every day.

Shawna Suckow (4:21 - 4:32): That is super cool. So behind Gold's Gym, though, I'm guessing the types of guys that you sold those shirts to were looking to compete with others. Did they get the message from the beginning?

Jake Thompson (4:33 - 6:23): You know, it's funny. So we always laugh like the first year was all my sympathy purchases, like all of my friends. They were like, oh, that's so sweet. You're a cute little t-shirt company. But as the brand grew, you know, we did a lot within CrossFit, which was very, you know, exploded onto the scene in 2010, 11, 12. We did race marathons. I've done rock and roll marathons all over the country. And so you always have ultra competitive people in those spaces. But some of the messages we were trying to remind people of, like, be your own motivation.

Like we're all competing for something. If you are active, a high performer, if you're pursuing something, whether it's your relationships, your health, your career, like you're striving to achieve something. And so like, what are those things you're competing for? And how can you put your efforts and energies into what you control? And so we start having these conversations with people at expo booths and things to where they really bought into the message that it's it's me versus me. And I feel like it amplified as social media continue to grow and take off and doom scrolling and everything else because we're biologically hardwired to compare.

We're just not trained to compare correctly. And so we fall into these unhealthy loops. We get pulled down the rabbit holes, especially online. And it's easy to forget that we're really in competition with ourselves. So I feel like the brand really started to grow a social group, not only from having social proof and people online sharing it and influencers, but really just people what they were experiencing in their own lives. And so it shifted, obviously, since 2011 is my speaking business started in the late 2018, but we still use the brand as a way to reinforce that message or to remind people like what's in your control.

How can you leverage it? And at the end of the day, to pick the game that you want to play and quit worrying what everybody else's scoreboard looks like.

Shawna Suckow (6:25 - 6:38): I love that whole message. So in going from mid five figures to seven figures, what was the hardest thing you had to learn or do?

Lessons From Growing the Business

Jake Thompson (6:39 - 9:25): I mean, it was a roller coaster from five to seven. We'll say two from I got caught not taking my own medicine for a while. Right. You start out with the goal and the focus and then you start looking at what other businesses are doing. And you're looking at where they are, not where they were. And when you look at where someone is, you don't really know the backstory or the inputs and the things that went into it. And I would find myself as a guy who started selling shirts out of the trunk of my car, comparing myself to companies that they started from people that left Reeboks and Nikes and had all these manufacturing experience or they had a lot of investment capital or they were selling something completely different. But I wasn't paying attention to that. I was looking at where their numbers, how big do they look?

What is their presence look like? And so I got us into early trouble from a business debt standpoint of trying to spend to make us look bigger and scale because all I heard, right, you got to scale, you got to scale. And I wasn't playing at the most strategic matter. And the thing is, it took me a few years to realize and some heartache. It's not really how much money you make. It's how much you take home. Like as a business owner, especially a small business owner, your take home is way more important than your top line. And there's people that have some very impressive top line revenue numbers that are month to month. And I would much rather have the less impressive top line revenue number and a nice little nest egg coming home every month.

And so for me, that was a huge lesson. The second part is just learning that just because I can do something doesn't mean I should do something. And that's a big right. We've got to be able to scale ourselves. And so it's easy, especially when you're a small business owner and you're thinking, where can I cut costs? Where can I streamline? Well, I can just do all this stuff myself when you're like, you're really like you should outsource that for like $15 an hour. You should hire somebody for $30 an hour to do that because you can go generate more revenue. And I struggled early on outside of like one hire to be like, if I heard this person, they need to be able to bring in to X revenue.

Well, not everybody can bring it in as sales. They need to be admin support. What I need to be able to do is bring someone in and allow me to go to exit revenue because I freed up more time. So that was a huge, huge lesson for me. And then honestly, I think the one that I did well after going through a couple of hard lessons was to get like super clear on what do you do and quit chasing the shiny objects because you think they're going to make you grow faster. And we chased a few shiny objects earlier of either a spinoff brand or trying all these different things.

And you start chasing multiple squirrels, you catch nine, multiple rabbits, you catch nine. And so once we got really clear, like what drives our business, what's our core message, what's the main thing we're doing, everything else kind of becomes support. And so that becomes incredibly helpful along the way too.

Shawna Suckow (9:28 - 9:42): So we talked a little bit before I hit record about, and that's in fact how I opened this show about being so busy that you lose track of your priorities. So do you feel like that kind of happened along your journey too?

Five Types of Drift

Jake Thompson (9:43 - 13:54): 100%. And we laugh internally that there are five types of drift that impact leaders. Yeah. So this is what we teach in a lot of our IP, but there's victory drift, which every one of us have experienced because you have a really good month or quarter or year. And you start to take your foot off the gas of the inputs that drove it. Everybody that's ever been in sales has experienced this. Every business owner has been like, oh, we had a good year. Of course, we're going to have a good year next year. And it's not always the case.

So we stopped the behaviors of it. There is current drift, which is where we get distracted of everything going on around us. Oh my gosh, this is going on in the government. And this is doom scrolling online. And let me look at all of these things that have literally zero direct impact to myself, my business or my customers. Yet we exhaust ourselves worried about everything going on around us versus what do I actually have control of. Comfort drift is what we see from a leadership standpoint when you go from performer to leader because we're really asking you to go from doer. To coach. And that's a hard deal.

Even as a business owner, because most of us, if we started our business, we were the one doing. And once you jump into leadership and having people and managing them, their success is what drives the business. But we so often want to go back to what's comfortable, right? So we keep doing. We don't give hard feedback because it's really uncomfortable. So we kind of have those those areas. And then we the one we laugh about in the two, I would say that are probably most pertinent to us is identity drift, which is where you and I and this, I think business owners and small business owners and the most susceptible to this identity drift is when you attach your worth and identity to the outcome of your business. If your business fails, you're a failure, which is not the case. But we so often attach our value and worth to it.

And I did this. And what happens is when your business starts to fail, you just think all is lost because you've completely failed. And I went through a season of that. And so I know that identity drift. But as you mentioned offline, busy drift is that one that seeps in because we don't feel like drifting like victory. I know I took my foot off the gas, right? Comfort. I know I'm kind of shying away from what I'm doing. Busy drift feels like you're doing work and you're waking up, you're hitting the ground running. You're doing all the things every day, but you're not actually evaluating. Is this the right move I should be making? Are there ways to do it better?

We're just like up. We open our inbox first thing in the morning. It feels so productive to answer and clean out emails. Not our priority. 99% of the time. Yet we do it because it feels like progress without helping us actually make progress, right? It tricks you. It's full as gold. So busy drift is that thing that gets us going because one, we fall into that trap. Two, we're most likely to have an experience that I had where you feel like you're always behind. Like, have you ever been on a vacation and you're like, I got to go answer emails. I got to be working.

I'm sitting at the pool. It's a beautiful sunset. I've got a drink in my hand. My spouse is beside me, but like, I'm, I'm anxious because I feel like I'm losing work time that I need to be quote, getting ahead. And so busy drift starts to get into this way of like, you can't slow down. And I think as a society, you know, we wear busy as a badge of honor. Sometimes it's really not like you want to have some of that productivity. You want to be super efficient, but you didn't start a business to become its most overworked employee. Like you started a business because you had an idea or a service or a product that can help others.

And you've got to be mindful of building those systems. So that's where busy drift comes in. And we can talk about how we build systems to kind of counteract it. But the thing I laughed when I talked to, to business owners, franchise owners, and salespeople like around busy drift is, do you know what the definition of insanity is? And you ask an audience and of course, yeah, it's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And I smile and say, cool. How many of you spend your Monday to Friday doing the same thing every week and wondering why you're not getting better outcomes? And you see like the light bulb start to go off of like, oh, it's not just the person banging their head against the wall. It's all of us Monday through Friday with the same routine, same habits, and yet same frustrations.

Shawna Suckow (13:55 - 14:00): We just think if we do the same things harder, yeah, that's just the, I'm not working enough.

Jake Thompson (14:01 - 14:02): Yeah, that's exactly right.

Getting Out of Your Own Way

Shawna Suckow (14:02 - 14:31): Yeah. And a lot of small business owners blame themselves. And a lot of the time it can be that we are the ones to blame because we get in our own way and we are the bottleneck. And it's so hard to let go of the things that you were so passionate about. You started this business and to put them in the hands of other people while you move to a different, like coach, as you said, and that's hard to do. And so we just stay in our own way.

Jake Thompson (14:32 - 15:01): We stay in our own way. We, we actually limit what our business could do and the impact, especially if you're in this to like, cause you want to help people and you have a product or a service that can change lives or families or you name it, you ultimately limit the potential of impact by being that bottleneck because someone doesn't do it a hundred percent just like you, 90% like you, even 85% like you freeze you up to go do other impactful things that allow you to grow and scale.

Shawna Suckow (15:02 - 15:29): Yeah. Would you rather work yourself to death to keep a tight grip on everything? Or can you let go just a little bit so that you can have a life outside of work? And that is absolutely the ball to a lot of small business owners. And I wish I could grab them by the shoulders and say, oh my gosh, now the older idea, I'm like, wow, why did I spend so much time working so hard on things that didn't matter?

Coaching and Building Systems

Jake Thompson (15:30 - 18:07): I mean, all of us, like I think all of us go through that season because a couple of things, right? When we start our business, we are the performer, we are the doer. We also start to attach a little bit of our identity from it because when we have success and the business grows or, you know, we start getting applause and accolades and all these things, we started attaching who we are to what we do. And then as we grow a business and hire people, we still have the attachment of our value. And our confidence comes from the doing versus like, what's the final outcome and how can we help others? Like what are the inputs?

How do I start generating joy and my things from building other people so they can go help versus me doing all the things and having to give all the credit. So we get into trouble. It's like a football coach that doesn't matter how good the quarterback, the offense, the defense plays like they want all the credit all the time. And that's it. Nobody wants to play for that coach. Nobody at all. You want to play for the person's like, hey, when we won, it's all of them. They did everything. They were amazing. When we lost, it was me. Even though it wasn't the coach, they want it. They want somebody who will fall in the sword form.

So I think that's it. I also think like I was spoiled a little bit from the standpoint of I got to see up close growing up what it looks like. I wouldn't say about work life balance, but I would say work life harmony. My dad owned a small gas station in our East Texas town where I grew up. He eventually opened a second one and built a small chain, but he never missed baseball practices, football games, soccer practices. He was at everything. And as a kid, I always thought like, you know, that's why I wanted to be a sports agent or own my own business because I wanted the idea of like, if I have kids, I want that freedom and flexibility to make stuff. And there were some Saturdays, dad would have to go to the store, go to seems club to pick up supplies and do stuff here or there. But it was never where like, I can never leave the office or the store.

And the store is a great example because my dad, like he's not working the shift like he, we have team members, like he had to train them, put them in. I was free labor as a kid working in the gas station a lot, but he also understood like you have to have systems in place and train those people and build it and then scale. And they may not do it exactly how you want it. So it's your job to coach and train them. And then to understand, do they actually do it better than I did it? They just do it differently.

So it was cool to see that up close, but like you, I still went through my own season of like, I got to save every dollar coming in. So I can't afford to pay somebody $10 an hour to help me with little task. I'll just do it myself when it was just the dumbest move on my part, growing a business.

Shawna Suckow (18:07 - 19:00): Yeah. And you're spending time doing all of the things behind the scenes rather than focusing on the highest and best use of your time and your brain. And I find that I, I used to do graphic design many, many years ago and I still love it. I should not be doing my own graphic design. Like say, no, stop, don't do that. But it's hard to, it's hard. I know for a lot of small business owners, myself included along the way, because what got you to that point, you know, what got you to $60,000 is not what's going to get you to double that triple that eventually seven figures. So we have to be willing to let go of most of the things that got us to that first milestone. And that's hard.

Documenting Tasks and Giving Instructions

Jake Thompson (19:00 - 22:00): It's hard. And part of it, we struggle with it because when we do it, we're not as clear in our communication or our instructions. And so it's rarely done right the first or second time. And we get frustrated and just take the task back versus evaluating like how poorly am I communicating it? And I think about this with our task, I always have a note on my iPhone of like, what is something I'm doing now? I probably shouldn't be doing. And regardless of whether I have somebody for it or not, I started to think about it. So the next time I do that task, I'll be intentional go on my computer and loom video myself doing it just so I have a blueprint that I can save into a Google drive folder. I have a standard operating procedure that I can eventually give someone.

But I'm also like going through that process. I've learned like there's some smaller task that I want to keep. So you and I both speakers, I actually will go into Canva to create my decks. My decks don't change a ton client to client from my keynotes, but we do customize them and examples. And I intentionally go in and do some of that design on them because it helps me start to ingrain the content that I'm going to prepare to give on stage. And so that is something to where I'm like, okay, this is something. Yes, I probably should outsource somebody to design it, but it helps me with the retention and the learning of how I'm going to deliver. If it's a PDF or it's a follow up document, I'm going to give it to my designer and say you do it. I don't need it to be able to deliver on stage.

Like I understand this is something that actually supports the big work versus this is something that I shouldn't actually be using my time on, even if I can kind of do it well. So to your point, I think for our listeners, like start making a list of all and I would say like exhaustive list, like I'm working on a document now to get my assistant so she can start taking over my travel. Like that's one of the last things as a speaker, I don't want to give up. I love booking my travel. Love booking because I'm like, well, maybe I want to do early morning and maybe I want to, you know, whatever. But I'm building like this exhaustive list for her to say, hey, these are the hours I typically want to fly out for a gig if there's any available.

Here's the I want to be on an aisle seat unless I'm on this plane, then we want to be on a window seat. Here's like I want to give her so much exhaustive detail that she's like, this is too much information. Good. Like that's where I want it to be. But I'm building it to be able to hand off because I know otherwise I would be like, hey, I've got an event on Thursday. Can you book me a flight from Dallas to Atlanta? And I don't especially need to go out of Dallas for worth and not love field. I don't specify. Hey, I need to be on American.

Here's my number. Hey, I want to be in a window seat for this flight because it's a three hour flight. I may lean against and go to sleep versus I want to be in bulkhead if it's available. Like I want to be so exhausted because otherwise I get on the plane and I'm like, you put me at 24 B in a middle seat in the back and there's all these empty like that's all. And what happens, right? We do that. And then we get really mad at the person who did it instead of, oh, I didn't tell you what I wanted to the degree. I wanted it with a level of detail. How can I get mad at you for something you didn't know?

Shawna Suckow (22:01 - 22:01): Yeah.

Jake Thompson (22:01 - 22:02): But that's what we do.

Shawna Suckow (22:02 - 22:36): And they can't read our minds. No. For me as a Gen X. That is really hard. I have very poor communication skills when it comes to outsourcing something I want somebody else to do because I'm, I'm so used to from childhood, just doing it myself. Um, speaking of, uh, your childhood, um, I know something about you. Your first job was selling Christmas cookies door to door in your neighborhood at age seven, but it was April. And tell me about that.

Christmas Cookies in April

Jake Thompson (22:36 - 23:26): Oh man. You know, it's funny. I only remember bits and pieces of it, but I remember wanting to buy, I think it was comic books or baseball cards. Like there was something I wanted to buy at the local Walmart. And we had all these boxes of Christmas cookies just sitting around. So I literally go door to door and start selling them. And when I get home, I've got like a stack of bills, like a stack of one sitting on the table. And my mom is like, where's that? I was like, Oh, I sold cookies. She's like, what cookies? And I was like, Oh, we had boxes of Christmas cookies. She was mortified, mortified.

She made me go back with her door to door, take the cookies back, return the money. She was like profusely apologize. You know, sweet Southern just dying of the manners that her son would sell these four month old cookies. Uh, but I was like, Hey, it's, this is a way to make a buck. This is a cool deal.

Shawna Suckow (23:28 - 24:07): That is, uh, yeah, I can see that from both perspectives because I think a lot of us, if we're entrepreneurs, we were probably entrepreneurs as young children and just, I've always had that drive, you know, and, um, yeah, I, I had some foibles, but I didn't thankfully have to go door to door and return money. That's, that is mortified. So, um, Jake, this has been fantastic. I, there's so much more that I think that we can talk about. I think I need to have you on again, which if you're willing, I would love it. Um, but I need to end with a very important question.

Cats or dogs.

Jake’s Rescue Dogs

Jake Thompson (24:07 - 24:28): Oh, I'm a dog dad. I've got four, I've got four rescues. All Frenchies, uh, cookie, um, donut, pop tart and snacks. So we have a theme. Uh, we had a boxer. She passed in January. She was my sweet sugar smacks. Um, but yeah, we've got a household of, of dogs, but a short nose, stinky, loud, uh, French bulldogs. Now.

Shawna Suckow (24:29 - 24:33): Oh my gosh. Please send me a picture. I love to see them.

Jake Thompson (24:33 - 25:00): I will happily loan them out to anyone who wants to babysit. Uh, the three girls donut cookie and snacks are a little wild. Pop tart. The youngest is a boy and he's just nuts. He's my little buddy, but he's crazy. So it's, uh, this week's a fun week for me because I'm actually home, uh, Sunday to the following Monday. So I'll get all the time with them in the world, which is a lot of fun. But yeah, definitely a dog dad. Uh, never been a cat person.

Closing

Shawna Suckow (25:05 - 25:27): Uh, so, uh, again, thank you Jake for being a fantastic guest. Um, there has been so much that you have shared that I know will be so helpful to my audience of small business owners. So thank you again. And thank you everyone for listening or watching. This has been another episode of underestimated. I'll see you next time.

Jake Thompson (25:29 - 25:31): Look. Boom.

Shawna Suckow (25:32 - 25:32): Fabulous.