It’s my birthday today. 🎂 I definitely don’t look like this. But I definitely feel like this.
This time last year, I was probably at the lowest point of my life.
Business wasn’t going well, and it shook me to my core.
A lot of my self-worth was tied to business. My online persona was tied to business. So when business wasn’t working… neither was I.
Eventually, I had to admit something I really didn’t want to admit:
I couldn’t fix this by myself.
I took a month completely off work.
Emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually I was a mess.
I spent that month doing some serious work on myself.
And on day 29, right before going back to work, I remember telling my wife:
“I could be happy even in the face of uncertainty.”
That sentence changed something in me.
I used to think I needed to figure everything out so I could be happy.
I realized I had it backwards.
I needed to be happy so I could figure things out.
And when I came back to business with a different state of mind, I started seeing opportunities that had literally been sitting right in front of my nose.
One of them came from a former client named Daniel.
Before my break, Daniel had offered me an opportunity to handle sales for his company. He knew I was still running my own business — which I still run today — and was completely fine with me doing both.
His company was exactly the kind of business I had never really sold before: B2B, recurring revenue, high-value contracts.
He thought my biggest asset would be my network.
Turns out, it wasn’t.
When simply posting to my network didn’t work, I took everything I had learned over the last 10 years about sales, marketing, data, outbound and outreach — and put it all together for his business.
With God’s help, the results blew past what either of us expected.
And then something interesting happened.
Other businesses wanted us to do it for them too.
Today, we have roughly half a dozen partners where we essentially act as their outsourced sales department, primarily for B2B businesses with recurring, high-value revenue.
And somewhere along the way, I realized:
Holy smokes. I found my groove.
For the first time in a long time, I have real clarity about what I’m building.
And the craziest part is that I probably never would have found it if everything had gone according to plan.
I had to get knocked down enough to accept an opportunity I might previously have thought was beneath me.
And that opportunity became one of the greatest sources of strength and direction in my life.
In Judaism we have a concept:
The descent is for the sake of the ascent.
At 38, I understand that differently than I ever have before.
I’m grateful to God for the blessings.
strangely enough, I’m even grateful for the fall.
Because I really like where I’m going.
Might have to start going to the gym. 😂