I'm on my own again.

[00:05] years I'm on my own I don't have any employees I don't have any editors no social media managers or team there's so much that's changed over the past year next year that I wanted to talk about all the things that have been happening

[00:20] behind the scenes for me my struggle to find purpose again and to be transparent about some of the difficult decisions I've had to make I never thought I could turn you into a business but then people started watching my videos like way more

[00:34] people than I ever thought possible there it is 1 million that's [ __ ] crazy once I started making money from my videos I did what all successful creators do I hired employees I brought on Oscar to help edit my videos and

[00:48] tiger to film social content I hired my brother Mark to manage projects and enlisted my wife to help with brand strategy you can't sit on me this is sexual harassment no I can't say that in the beginning it was exciting if not a

[01:00] little bit terrifying so I guess I'm just like a little bit nervous that people won't like it or go through the site each success encouraged me to push things a little bit further best course sold aming so excited I can't believe it

[01:14] the business was doing well my YouTube channel was growing and so I did what all successful creators do I hired more employees over the period of a couple months I hired 10 full-time employees and a half a dozen Freelancers I brought

[01:26] on writers researchers editors social media expt experts and Community managers hello I remember at one point in time I logged onto a team call to see eight people in square tiles looking back at me and it was in that moment

[01:40] that I realized that [ __ ] had gotten serious what I didn't realize at the time was that I was turning something that I loved into a job there's no one else that I know that knows what I'm going through quite like

[01:53] Jason zuk Jason was an online Creator before YouTube was a job title his first business went viral in 2008 during the global financial crisis it was called I wear your shirt and finally tonight if you're having trouble finding a job you

[02:06] might consider inventing one the man you're about to meet did just that and pay him to wear their branded t-shirts the first day of the year cost a dollar the second day cost $2 and so on not a

[02:18] bad way to make a bag he pursued his million dooll goal scaled up his team chased after the magazine covers and wound up broke unhappy and uncertain about his future as a close friend he was the first person I wanted to talked

[02:30] to when I started having doubts about the path I was on when you look online at the Creator economy today it seems like everybody's obsessed with scaling and growing making as much money as possible why do you think that is the

[02:44] status quo today we don't see anybody really talking about growing sustainably and growing slowly and maybe not trying to hire an employee as quickly as you can like why are people obsessed with growth yeah I think a lot of of it comes

[03:00] down to just these like super arbitrary Milestones that have been set making a million dollars having a team having these like big successful sales or what gets talked about right the Twitter

[03:14] and like 63 days and made blah blah blah blah blah whatever like that goes viral looks good no one wants to talk about the people that are just striving for for calm businesses the people that are just striving to like wake up every day

[03:29] not hate whatever work they're doing and not have to pretend that they like it I don't need to do what Ali abdall does or I don't need to do what like any of do that to their credit are very good at what they do and they're they accomplish

[03:42] a lot that looks great on paper but like are they happy do they really like that work do they like having a big team managing people there's this idea of that's what things should look like but then in the reality when you actually go

[03:54] life it's not that much fun and it's not that rewarding and you kind of go I wish simpler and quieter and like I didn't have all these like gigantic goals that I don't even really want for my life Jason mentioned Ali abdal I'm sure

[04:08] you've heard of him before but if you haven't he's one of the most successful internet Ali and I started making YouTube videos around the same time we both made a YouTube course around the same time and we both started scaling

[04:21] our businesses a few months apart except we both ended up in very different places Ali still runs a team with 10 employees and and I'm going back to being a solo Creator again based on my own experience I had to wonder whether

[04:35] he was genuinely happy running such a large team so I asked him okay cool we've got audio running through here I'm recording over there so we should be were doing things by yourself yeah

[04:48] massively it's so nice to work with a team and it's actually way more fun than the first 2 years of the journey doing it by myself and for me part of the point of doing a business like this is to have fun and I realized that I much

[05:01] prefer working with people but like working with people in a way that I can work with people when I want to rather than feeling I had to do like regular meetings and all that kind of stuff for me scaling the business has been very

[05:15] worth it but I have not enjoyed the process of hiring and managing employees don't actually manage anyone the only person I manage is Angus who is my manage him he's like the CEO of the company so he manages himself but Angus

[05:31] this is amazing because now I can spend all of my time focusing on creating reading writing learning and teaching and I spend literally 0% of my time look like management so we're now at a point many years into this where all

[05:47] makes the whole process of running this business feel really good okay so Ali figured out a way to enjoy having a team but I don't think I ever could to be fair I got to work with some incredibly talented people who became really great

[06:01] friends there was so much that I loved about collaborating mentoring and working with them it was truly an exciting time as we built the team but I found out that when you scale your business a lot of other unintended

[06:13] business a lot of other unintended things scale things like emails tasks things scale things like emails tasks obligations expenses calls problems difficult conversations meetings stress so much stress last week I got on about

[06:26] 25 phone calls this week you can see I've got about N9 or 10 it took a good year after our big hiring Sprint before the excitement of it all started to fade and was replaced by dread I remember one night in particular a tightness started

[06:43] to build in my chest and it wasn't a metaphorical tightness either this felt like my heart was covered in cling wrap and pulled tightly I told myself at the through to make it to the other side

[06:58] effect of running a business and eventually things would get easier but eventually things would get easier but they didn't so Matt's having a breakdown which happens oh about 4:00 every day this is normal this is normal for us

[07:13] Jason talked about a lot of the big reasons why people want to grow a business and scale up their team and for me personally I I wasn't doing it to keep up with the Joneses or to try to get rich I think you guys know me well

[07:26] enough at this point to know that that's not the case wanted to make more videos I wanted to fund bigger projects and I wanted to work less the irony was that I was creating less making less money and I

[07:40] was working more than I ever had before you know we're talking about like oh you're scaling this business and you're making less money I was also making worse videos because I'm pulled in a million directions like I was making I

[07:52] million directions like I was making I think better videos um most of the time by myself when I was just like I was shooting writing editing I was like a part of the entire process from beginning to end it it really becomes

[08:04] this thing where your creativity and the energy you have for your creativity kind it has to be replaced with well now I'm managing people and you have to manage all of the ups and downs of what that means all of their needs all of the

[08:18] hey they didn't submit this on time what does that mean that's like a ripple effect of all this stuff there's this glorification of growing a team and I would just say if anybody listening to this is thinking about doing it just try

[08:30] your hardest to figure out how can I just Outsource the things that really I don't want to do or shouldn't be doing with my time but keep all the things that really make my business you know what it is and make it special and for

[08:42] Outsourcing your editing Outsourcing things like that like it seems good on people do it but like most of the magic of what you create is in the edit and so when you kind of move that away and give it to someone else all of your content

[08:56] specialness that that it used to have and and I felt that too like I wasn't doing anything interesting for like 2 or 3 years because I just had no Creative Juice left like it was all given to trying to manage employees I think the

[09:09] Outsourcing my work wasn't just that it was hiding my greatest strengths it also Robb me of the one thing that I love most about making videos editing I know most people hate editing but honestly ever since I started making videos

[09:24] nearly 10 or 15 years ago it was the one place where I could get totally lost for hours and so in my pursuit of doing more of the thing that I loved I ended up with the opposite as it turns out this is a very common experience some of the

[09:39] biggest creators from Emma Chamberlain to Mark Rober and Ali abdal have all realized that there are certain aspects of their creativity that they just can't scale I think my expectation was how hard can this be cuz I I kind of thought

[09:51] another team member and you know at one point we hired four writers for the YouTube channel because I was thinking well what's the bottleneck for us making more YouTube videos and my theory was that if we just had more scripts written

[10:04] videos so we hired four writers in one go this was a terrible idea because what I thought was going to forx our output of YouTube videos ended up actually like Haring the output of YouTube videos I was making more videos when I was by

[10:17] doctor and doing videos on the side than I was when I had four writers and a producer and a bunch of editors and a videographer all working on the YouTube channel and what I realized is that oh wow hiring people is not just about

[10:30] hiring people it's also about the random complexities of communication and friction and all of this stuff that makes everything way slower so the way I can I focus on just doing the things that I really enjoy and how can I use

[10:44] the team and their input to do all of the stuff I don't enjoy and to be able to leverage up the output of the stuff that I do enjoy one question I kept asking myself during this time was are you doing it because you want to or

[10:56] started out with the freedom to make videos about whatever I wanted to but more and more I felt like I had to do it I had to create videos every month I had to fill the feed I had to make another course I eventually had the courage to

[11:11] myself that I was no longer happy I wasn't fulfilled with my work anymore I'd likely need to step away from my work and slow down significantly but how do I do that when I have Rising expenses and a payroll to cover so that's when I

[11:26] decided to do what few creators do I started to simplify I had some really difficult conversations with my team I reduced my expenses as much as I could I stopped making videos to fill a feed or hit an arbitrary Cadence I stopped

[11:40] selling my habits course because I wasn't excited about it anymore even though it meant that I'd make less money as I took steps towards simplifying my life again the tightness in my chest started to release I started to feel

[11:52] less pressure and less stress I had less calls and meetings and emails I found my own solution to the problem that Ali had how do I spend more time on the things I love and less time on the things that are distracting

[12:06] me so I'm cutting down as many expenses as I possibly can but one that is non-negotiable for me is Squarespace they're my sponsor for this video but they're also a really amazing platform that helps me run my business as a solo

[12:19] Creator again the most important things for me when picking a website hosting platform are that I need to be able to do it myself make quick changes and bank one of the best things about Squarespace is that you don't need a

[12:32] you can pick one of their beautiful templates to get started customize as you'd like and publish it without writing a single line of code and since need to wait around for a designer copywriter or developer to make a change

[12:46] drop to make an update from there Squarespace allows you to scale your business by helping manage your domain poost your site without worrying about bandwidth usage and also access built-in tools for e-commerce blogging and

[12:59] analytics this is squarespace.com today for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com Della to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain I genuinely can't recommend Squarespace enough they help

[13:11] help you as well even with all these changes that I've been making I realized things were and that's because I couldn't lie to myself about the fact that something had changed I've gone through this process of scaling this

[13:27] through this process of scaling this team and then the painful process of scaling back and now I'm by myself again for the first time in 4 years and I think what's like what I'm struggling with now is like I don't love what I'm

[13:43] doing like I'm bored by the things that I'm making I feel more and more like have to do it and that was like certainly having employees made that 10

[13:55] times worse because I'm like I have to create 10x if I have 10x the employees like I need to pay everybody's salary and so I'm forced to work and now as I'm like scaling back I'm like it still feels like a job it still doesn't feel

[14:08] as fun and exciting as when I started like when I got started on YouTube it was like every day I woke up I can't say every day you know I think sometimes like I I look back and I'm like I genuinely was fired up and excited to

[14:21] genuinely was fired up and excited to create uh most days and now I do it cuz I feel like I have to and so what should I do Jason I mean like you know I know you've been here in my position before but it's

[14:36] been here in my position before but it's like I am feeling quite stuck creatively and feeling less passionate about my work I'm really curious to know like what do you want to say to the world you know cuz I think that's why you started

[14:48] your YouTube channel was like I I I want to say that like you know I love productivity and I I want to say that I'm curious about all these different things in life like why we sleep or you know how to manage money and and you

[15:01] kind of went through all these things and I think the interesting Arc of all those things it'd be like if I started doing like my t-shirt business again know like just do you got to do something new and I think for you it's

[15:15] got to be something new like there's got to be something where you go okay great like the gear gets the story told in like the camera and the editing and whatever but like what is the story I want to tell there's no one who can give

[15:27] you the right answer it's only the kind of motivation to say but like you know inside you there's something that you are probably pushing to the side or that you're not letting come out because you think you have to

[15:40] keep doing things the way that they've been working as opposed to like yeah but Mountaintop so like now it's time to look for a new mountain and go that over but I'm actually really excited about that and I want to try that as a

[15:53] challenge the biggest question for me now is what do I want to create what kind of Life do I want to build and the honest answer to that question is I don't know but that honestly doesn't seem as scary anymore I need to give a

[16:08] huge thanks to Jason zook for being an amazing friend and Mentor go subscribe advice every week thanks to olly for always inspiring me and proving that finding success Let's help his new book Feelgood productivity become a

[16:22] bestseller thanks to my brother Mark who's been by my side throughout this entire journey I spent more time working with Mark than I did as a solo YouTuber finally I want to thank every single person who joined my team over the past

[16:35] 4 years I don't look back on this time as a failure because of everything that I learned from you I only hope that you got as much in return you have eyelashes all over your eyes blow what did you wish for a better