The Very Real Stress of an Entrepreneur - How to Handle Stress & Stay Resilient

The Very Real Stress of an Entrepreneur - How to Handle Stress & Stay Resilient Speaker 1: Human condition, we're supposed to feel agony. We're supposed to feel pain. Speaker 3: It's a tough life. If people think this is going to be a simple life, no matter what business that you're in, it's tough. Speaker 1: Happiness is not a thing. It's a fleeting emotion. Speaker 3: How do you get around that? How do you handle this crazy thing called entrepreneurship? Speaker 1: Make one thing that you can be successful at that nobody can take from you end to end and own it. Speaker 3: Entrepreneurship isn't about strategy. It's a mental game. There's pressure, setbacks and isolation. It's enough to break even the toughest person. But what if I told you that those struggles that you face can make you stronger? Today, we're looking into the reality of mental health as an entrepreneur, how to build resilience and the mindset shifts you need to thrive. Our guest watches mom open square one skateboards to solve a simple problem. Overpriced Tony Hawk boards in Topeka, Kansas. She ran that shop for five years, pouring her heart and soul into serving young skaters like him. But life forced her to close her doors. She walked away with nothing to show for it for her years of work. That lesson shaped his mission today. Through DeFactory, he helps entrepreneurs avoid that fate by building companies buyers fight to own, not just operate. So welcome, after the sponsor, Kevin Oldham. Tired of negative reviews dragging down your star rating in sales? TraceFuse has your back. Traceview specializes in removing non-compliant Amazon reviews the right way. I'm talking 100% compliant with Amazon Terms of Service. And with over 11,000 reviews removed for 400 plus brands, they know what it takes to protect your reputation and boost conversions. And here's the best part. You only pay for performance. That means you only pay for reviews they successfully remove. No contracts, no monthly fees, just results. Plus, as a Lunch With Norm listener, you get two reviews removed for free. Ready to clean up your reviews? Visit TraceFuse.ai. That's TraceFuse, T-R-A-C-E-F-U-S-E dot A-I. Welcome, Kevin. Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. This is amazing. Speaker 3: Can you tell me just a little bit more? Because I'm kind of curious. We just got introduced by Mark DeGrasse, just coincidentally, DeFactory. What is it? Speaker 1: It's my answer to problems that I experienced in my first 20 years in basically the workforce. So I was the chief marketing officer and co-founder of a global franchise system called United Real Estate. And that company, I sometimes had to go out my four walls to secure marketing services. And pretty much every time that happened, things were, you know, the sales pitch was awesome. And then the delivery started to go downhill. So a decade ago, when I had two young children, I decided to, with my wife's blessing, go into our basement and start a company to solve that problem. The first nine years, that's what we did. And then I got sick of just solving for revenue. And so a year ago, I went back to school to the Exit Planning Institute. I got my Certified Exit Planning Advisor designation. And now we're focused more on increasing the value of companies, which is typically the founder's most valuable asset, so that they have a transferable business one day. I want to be their best friend. I want to help them make a couple more million bucks on their way out the door. That's what we're focused on for the next 10 years. Speaker 3: We should talk offline. We talk a lot about that, just entrepreneurs not being prepared to exit. They have this dream but they're completely unprepared and it's not just at the day of Exiting, it's that horrible thing called due diligence that could just kill you. Stay ahead of the game with our latest SEO tricks for 2025. Watch our newest episode here with SEO expert, Dan Kurtz. And don't forget to subscribe. New episodes drop every Monday. After COVID, mental health was, is, and was A big thing. I want to talk a little bit about mental health, especially with entrepreneurship. Speaker 1: Yeah, this is part of my passion. And what I feel like is, you know, business is the way that I get to go like put points on the board, provide for my family and, and create value. But behind the scenes, a lot of it is helping people with this problem, which is mental issues. And so there's a lot of research out there around people that decide to sign up and do business, like start a business and be responsible for job and value creation versus consumption. And when you think about layering that pressure on top of just reality in life, it takes a certain type of person to be successful to do that. And typically those same people have addiction issues, ADHD, dyslexia, a variety of other issues. I mean, you look at some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet and they all have something. They're something, right? Could be on a spectrum or whatever. And all of these things, you know, whether it's neurodivergence or they come up as, in some cases, like an issue that can be debilitating. I think one of the superpowers of an entrepreneur is identifying that, naming it, taming it, and then figuring out how to manage around and through it because you're not going to necessarily get rid of it. And so that's what a lot of what my passion is, is helping people See those things. I'm an addict to recovery across multiple, multiple addictions throughout my life, including some I've dropped 50 days ago to figuring out how to push through when the world starts to suck a little bit. Speaker 3: So we belong to the same fraternity. Speaker 1: Yes, I'm sure we do. And a lot of us do. I mean, the more you talk about it, you know, I stopped alcohol 20 years ago when it was weird and you had to make excuses. Now it's like, It's in vogue. It's chic. It's popular to do so, which I freaking love. It makes my heart smile that there's such support. Particularly as a dad who's going to have kids who have addiction issues, I can already tell. You know, they're my children. It's hereditary. Speaker 3: It's so funny that you say that because you go back 10, 15, 20 years ago and the way people think about addictive thinking is so different than what it is today. It's crazy how things have changed. But I want to just talk about a couple of things. So everything that you were just talking about, Entrepreneurship with mental disorders, some form of mental disorders. Depression, you know, could be a big one. People that are just not entrepreneurs. Like you've got to be able to be kicked in the legs, get up, kicked in the legs, get up. I mean, you've got to have something wrong with you, you know, but, and it's also very lonely. So you've got to take any problems that come up and you've got to absorb them unless you're part of a really good mastermind or your friends don't get it, right? Your next door neighbor, what the hell do you do? Like you're not an Amazon guy, but You know, you're selling this stuff on Amazon, trucks are coming to your door or your, you know, whatever it is, you can't explain to them what you do. They don't understand. And then you get kicked in between the legs again. It's a tough life. If people think this is going to be a simple life, no matter what business that you're in, It's tough. How do you get around that? How do you handle this crazy thing called entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurship is lonely, it's stressful, and it's full of setbacks. Kevin shares how founders can protect their mental health and build resilience. Speaker 1: That's a big one. I think the first thing is recognizing that you're not a superhero. A lot of first-time entrepreneurs, they don't know how to ask for help. They don't know how to, and maybe it's a pride thing or something, because a lot of us have a chip on our shoulder. There's a reason that we decided to go against the grain and do this thing, right? So you've got that wrong with you already. You've got that, you've got something, you know, rebellious, whatever it is. And then you, you know, sometimes, particularly guys, it's really hard for us to ask for help. To say, hey, I don't know the answer to this. I'm not the smartest person in the world. Who is somebody that's maybe been there before me that can help me through that process? And masterminds are phenomenal for that. My world changed when I started saying yes to opportunities like that because I was an isolated entrepreneur who would sit in my office and my employees don't know. My wife tries the best to know, but she's my wife, not here every day. You're right, the neighbors, even your peer group in town, the people you typically associate with, don't know. And so one of my superpowers, and Mark's a perfect example of that, the guy who brought us together, Mark DeGrasse, is that when I find diamonds in the world, like I'm a diamond collector, I'm a diamond collector. If I find somebody who is a reciprocating human being, gives as much as I give them and I'm a very giving person, I will go out of my way to make sure that we stay connected in a real way, not some just... Speaker 3: Emoji emoji. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So for example, Mark and I have monthly meetups that were my idea to put on our calendar and we have for almost the past two years since we met in Costa Rica. And I have that with a number of other entrepreneurs. And then when those things kind of run their course, I still go out of my way to make sure, because I need them in my life. I need them on my team. Mentally, even if we're not physically in the same place, I need their energy because left on my own, I will mess up and wreck and destroy this game of entrepreneurship because I'm actually not that smart. Speaker 3: It's funny once you realize that you have, I don't want to say anything wrong, but you have a mental disorder. Issues. Issues. Speaker 1: You get issues. Yeah, we all get issues. Speaker 3: You're not freaking nuts. You have issues. That's what my wife always says. She just says I'm nuts. You address it and once you get to address it, you can start working on it. For me, I have horrible dyslexia and I have horrible depression. You got to deal with it. People don't realize it. I look like I'm really outgoing, but I'm a just a depressed kind of guy and I have to learn how to handle it. If I feel those things coming on, I got to figure out, you know, I don't want it to get any darker. This is the way I'm going to do it. And I've been able to do that over 30 years of having the stupid disorder. But the other one That I really didn't know what the cause was. Like I see my kids, I said this on another podcast a little earlier, that my kids are, all of them are really talented musicians. They could, like especially Hayden, and they can pick up something in songs and I can literally hear a song a thousand times and I can't get the first word out of the frigging song lyrics. Yeah, it's very interesting and that's because of dyslexia. And it always bothered me about that. And you find out now how to work around that. I was always that, I don't know if you ever knew anybody like this, but I always have like a normisms with spelling. Speaker 1: I live with one. I mean, my daughter's dyslexic. And my oldest friend on the planet is dyslexic. And what's different is because you're more like my age, not my daughter's age, she's 10, the interventions and the things that we identified, this is like the one cool thing that happened from COVID, to be honest with you. In COVID, we locked down and we started going to school online. And my wife's aunt is a paraprofessional, so she's like an educator. She led a pod of four kids of which two were mine in our basement during the pandemic when my daughter was in second grade and realized, identified right then and there that she was having issues tracking and things like that, where we were able to get interventions. She's in fifth grade now, getting ready to go to middle school, and I'm not worried about her. I contrast that to my friend who's 52 from or 51 from third grade. He never he was the kid who was misfit always in trouble. Nobody knew what it was and you probably experienced something like that as well. There's a huge survey on the amount of prisoners that have dyslexia and or ADHD. And these are like some of the issues that if we can identify them and give tools and roadmaps out there to help these folks. You know, you're still going to have these normisms, right, where you're going to misspell things. That's cool. But fitting into the culture of the world and having like a really kick-ass life where you can, you know, do what you're great at. It's now way more realistic. Speaker 3: Yeah. And you know, you adjust. So for me, spelling wasn't my bag. I could spell of wrong, you know? Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 1: I know. Speaker 3: I could spell it wrong, but you know, you get around it and you have your own tricks, you know, trying to figure out these, these words, but where this leads is I knew that I wasn't going to be that type of entrepreneur. I'm never going to be an editor. Now I have ChatGPT be my editor or my son be my editor, but on the creative side, I'm freaking good. Like I could see patterns and I could see colors and I could, so, you know, coming out as a brand expert, you know, back 30 plus years ago, That's where I was on top and then getting to learn from that and getting to learn the other business side of things. Okay. Yeah, I could identify trends. So that's a pattern. Trends are just another pattern and so I took that part of my education, you know, and knowledge and tried to Turn it around. But during that whole time, you think you're stupid because, oh God, like how come I can't spell that stupid word over or remember that song, like the first sentence, right? Until you figure that out. So today, like we're talking about like mental health with entrepreneurs. Can you give like some action steps or anything to help an entrepreneur out? What can they do, you know, to keep on top of this or maybe even get checked out? Any thoughts about this? Subscribe and leave a comment saying, I subscribed and guess what? I'll personally reply to your comment. Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot. I mean, you know, and I'm just gonna give you guys real quick background on where I'm coming from so that you know that I'm We're equipped to talk about this. So addict all my entire life, like since I was 15 until 50 days ago, I was addicted to something. This is the first time I just turned 50. So this is the first time in my life I have not been addicted to a substance. That substance could have been any hard drug except heroin or crack, nicotine, alcohol, you name it, weed, everything. And so if you layer that on top of then, you know, having depression and all sorts of things, what I figured out is that I was always trying to solve for balance, right? And trying to feel good. And the reality is that's not the human condition. The human condition, we're supposed to feel agony. We're supposed to feel pain. I love pain now. I absolutely thrive on pain because it reminds me that I'm alive. Happiness is not a thing. It's a fleeting emotion, right? And as soon as I realized, particularly in entrepreneurship, and everybody's seen this, you know, the roller coaster, right? We're all going to have dips and valleys. Every single person, if you don't, you're just probably not somebody that anybody wants to talk to. You're robotic. So, for me, what has been key, and I have a really, really good friend in Nicaragua, Jose Bolaños, who has helped me become what we call VUCA fit, which is You know what VUCA is, what it stands for? Speaker 3: I have no clue. Speaker 1: It's crazy. So it was actually a term that the U.S. War College or Military College, I'm not sure what it was, don't really care, came up for the conditions on the ground after the Cold War. So it was a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. VUCA. VUCA. And it's been used in leadership and all sorts of other things. Once I understood this word and how it could be applied to just life, okay, that is life. AI is VUCA as heck. Amazon, VUCA, everything is VUCA. And so the first step is that you have to be able to, and we talked about this earlier, you have to be able to label it, identify it, name it. You know, we always say if you can name it, you can tame it, right? So if you get this crazy world where things are up and down and you realize that that's VUCA and that's life, Okay, you can't really change it. You have to fit into it and navigate it. Speaker 2: Cool. Speaker 1: You can name it, put a label on it, which means we can do something with it. And then the goal over time is to train physically, physiologically, mentally, spiritually, whatever matters to you, to basically make those highs and a little bit less high and those lows a little bit less low over time. It's a process, not an event. So I do a lot of really, really tough things to make it so that I can manage VUCA. I take and have, way before it was trendy, an ice bath every Sunday. I'm a martial artist. I like to do things that are really, really challenging. I'm going to the skate park after this to practice my ollie again. I do a lot of things that That shut off my brain that are mentally good for me. Give me endorphins and then allow me to come back and look at this complexity as VUCA of life and just narrow it down a little bit more day after day so that the lows don't put me in the ditch as I like to say and I have three or four of those days a year and I know what my reset is and my recipe for I just go home and I take a nap. I wake back up and you know, I got two days in one and redo and And then the high highs, it's like, well, know that this is fleeting. Know that happiness is just this, this thing. It's not necessarily the state of mind. It is, it's an emotion and that it will come and go and be like, look out the front and know that these things are going to happen. And if you need proof that they're going to happen, look out the back, look out the back door and be like, yeah, that was really messed up, but I survived it. And then look at the present. So I am pretty big into die empty, live every single day like it could be your last and know that that's true. Statistically, there's a math chance that you're not gonna make it tomorrow, whatever it is. It's a small number. I hope you all make it. We may not. So live like it is your very last day. Leave it on the field, die empty, whatever you wanna say. And so that's how I have done it, but it has taken me an enormous amount of time to get to a place where I have the strength to even Articulate these things where I could share them with others and believe them and see it, see the work. Speaker 3: A buddy of mine has a A brand called Die Epic. Speaker 1: Oh, really? That's cool too. Speaker 3: And doing like whatever it is, like just go for it. And what was really cool is he's got thousands of people, get this, you want to talk about branding that have tattooed Die Epic on their body, his logo. Isn't that something? Speaker 1: It's awesome. I mean, it means he's making a difference and that's, you know, your buddy, like that's a life well lived. If he could have that impact on people, in a meaningful way, like who does that? Speaker 3: Yeah, that's crazy. Speaker 1: That's actually really, really cool. I'm glad you shared that. Speaker 3: Yeah. What about your, like, I don't want to talk to you about your specific reset, but I don't think a lot of listeners would understand. Oh, okay. I'm getting into it. I think I understand, you know, you can feel, Three things that are happening, you know, that are, okay, these things are lining up. The planets are lining up. I'm heading into a depression or I'm heading into some funk. And then you said, oh, I reset. What do you mean? Like, how can you reset something like that coming on? Ever have a day where everything goes wrong? In this episode, Kevin explains his simple eject and reset strategy that helps him bounce back instantly. Speaker 1: I used to deal with debilitating panic attacks and my remedy was Papa Xanax, right? When I first became a dad, 13 years ago, I used to have this place on the highway where I had to get off the highway and take back roads and I have to text my wife and be like, it happened again because I'd have a panic attack because I was afraid I was going to die on the highway and leave my wife to be a single mom, right? That was the disaster state before I was trained and before I could recognize when things were not going the way that I had hoped they would go, right? So the first thing is understanding when these things start to arise and for me, it's learning that I'm typically the problem. If I come into my office and I'm, nothing's going right. Every email I send is, you know, not landing right. I didn't have a good day leaving my house. Maybe I wasn't that nice to my children, whatever it is. I recognize that in my case, I'm the issue and I'm like, uh-oh, these are one of these days and I have them. It's a pattern that I've recognized over my life. I'm like, okay, cool. I need to eject myself out of this day. This is not my day. This isn't it. I don't care what's happening. Nothing's worth throwing grenades into the day. I don't care what is happening. I don't care if I'm giving a TED talk. I'm going to be like, hey, this isn't my day. I can't bring my best. If I can't bring my best, I need to Rest, and I have an agreement with my wife. It doesn't matter how busy our day is. She knows that Kevin who's messed up and not his best is not gonna be suitable to do whatever I need to do as a husband, as a father, as a leader, whatever it is, and I'll go home and I'll take a nap. It doesn't matter if that nap's at 5 p.m., 10 a.m., whatever, and usually it's about an hour, and I'll wake up, and it doesn't mean that all of a sudden I'm awesome, but it does mean that I've, I don't know if I call my physiological state, whatever it was, and I'm like, whew, I can redo this. I've got... I've got an opportunity to make this day salvageable. So that's on the macro. Now, one of the things that I do on the micro, and this is hilarious in how I think oddities show up for entrepreneurs. Here in the United States, we have these community mailboxes in my suburbs. So we don't have a mailbox on our house. We've got like a box that's got a lock and you've got to walk to it. And mine happens to be on a different block. And the people who live in the house next to that mailbox, when they moved in, they quickly realized how weird Kevin Oldham was. I have a ritual that I, particularly as an entrepreneur, if you guys are dealing with eCom, I mean, man, the goalposts are moving all the time. Amazon, everything's moving all the time. I mean, your world's hella VUCA, right? And it's going to feel like you can't control a lot of things, even when you get to the end of the day and you're going to feel defeated. Make one thing that you can be successful at that nobody can take from you end to end and own it. And for me, it's getting the mail. So I have this process of pulling up on the wrong side of the road to get the mail. I'll sort through it. I'll get all the junk out, tear out all the reader reply cards in the magazines and basically sanitize my mail. Just good stuff. Hopefully there's more cash in there than there are bills. Put on my dashboard and everything else is trash. That goes in the recycle bin. I walk in and I was able to win getting the mail. End to end, I was able to own that process. My kids and my wife know that that's my process, my little corner of the earth, that if all else fails and there's a pandemic or whatever happens, zombie apocalypse, that I can go win the day one small way. And build my confidence for the next day. Speaker 3: The Bundt, right? You don't need the home run. You just need something. Speaker 1: Get on base. Just get me on base. Just get me on base. Yeah, and make me not feel like I struck out today. Speaker 3: You know what? Hide your own Easter eggs. Go and put some mail in the slots. Speaker 1: Do something you can win at. It makes you feel like you accomplished something, you know? It's like why really disciplined people make their bed every morning or the military. You start off with something that was a win. Speaker 3: I was just going to say that. I was just going to say that. Yeah, you got to start with the win. Make your bed. So at the end, if you're listening for the first time, we do something a little bit different at the top of the hour. It's called the Wheel of Kelsey. And that's where our guests usually provides a giveaway. For one lucky winner and yeah, Kevin's gonna do that today. So that's awesome So if you're interested in that you got to do one thing at least one thing hashtag wheel of Kelsey if you want a second entry tag two people and Kevin what's the giveaway today? Speaker 1: This is fun. I'm glad you asked so you may have heard earlier that I said I'm a certified exit planning advisor and part of what we do is we figure out first of all how to build value in a business now and So check your ego on your top line revenue. It doesn't pay the bills, right? Profit and value are what make it so that you have something that could be sold for a multiple at the finish line of life. And the reality is, or the finish line of the business reality is, 50% of us are going to leave our business before we want to. So it's really smart to do so. But if you're like me on your, and hopefully you put the value of your business or you kind of know what it is, actually 98% of you don't know. Here you go. We're going to solve that problem. We're going to help you identify what the value of your business is, an objective valuation, right? So it's just good to know for your family's balance sheet, for your personal portfolio, whatever. On its own, it really doesn't tell you that much, although I'm gonna give you a ridiculously wrong report or long report, not wrong, long report. But what I'm gonna do is I'm also gonna hop on for an hour and help you understand how you can collapse whatever value gap that you have and increase the value of your company so that you have an asset that one day somebody wants to buy. So there you go. Hopefully just the insights will help you make a lot more money when that time comes. Speaker 3: And that's priceless because just that little bit of knowledge can help add an extra zero on the back end of your account when you go to sell it or your company. All right. So we're going to have a word from our sponsor. We'll be right back. Hey, Amazon sellers, are you leaving money on the table with Amazon? Well, TrueOps is here to help you reclaim every last cent you're owed. Over 1,400 brands have already recouped millions with TrueOps cutting edge technology. Finding reimbursements others may have missed. And guess what? You only pay 10% commission, no more overpaying the industry standard of 25%. Plus the first $1,000 in reimbursements is free to you. Here's the best part. TrueOps doesn't get paid unless you do. If Amazon ever reverses a claim, TrueOps automatically credits your fees back to you. Now that's peace of mind. Remember, $1,000 free reimbursements to start, then just 10% of successfully recovered funds. You have nothing to lose but the three minutes it takes to sign up for a free audit and so much more to gain. Sign up with the link in the description and start reclaiming what's rightfully yours. So let's start talking about there's always certain hurdles that come up and how does that make you tougher either as an entrepreneur or just as a human being? Your biggest lessons won't come from wins. They come from failure. Kevin's gonna share how his hardest moments shaped him into a better entrepreneur. Speaker 1: I don't know about you. I've won a bunch of stuff in my life. I really don't talk about it that much, but I've got a lot of cool words. You can go look at my LinkedIn profile. Those didn't teach me anything. Those were validation that I thought I was seeking from the outside world. Where I have grown and become sharper as a man, as a father, as a dad, as an entrepreneur, as a leader in my community are from when I've been kicked or maybe I've kicked myself and I've been just in the gutter, right? Whether that was when I checked myself into an addiction recovery unit when I was 30 years old, and I said, hey, I got problems, right? That was my low, bottom out, full tilt, to times I've cried. Wanting to throw in the towel on my company over the past decade. Times I've gotten sick, physically sick, physically sick from things not going well at my company. I remember and I have grown from each one of those painful experiences and I'm super thankful for them. But man, would I not wish them upon anybody as you're going through them. You absolutely wouldn't. The awards are great. Speaker 2: Yay. Speaker 1: Yay. I expect to win awards. I'm a competitive person. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm playing for keeps. I am all in, right? Like that is, I think that's what we all expect, whatever, you know, we expect greatness out of ourselves. But when things, when you get humbled, which happened to me in the first three months of this company, I've been a pretty humble person since. You realize that that's where the gold is. It's where the gold is. It absolutely is where the gold is. And so I think that our culture, we talk about winning too much. We don't talk about failing enough. We're starting to talk about it more or adversity. And maybe that's why I feel like My life's work does center on a lot of these things and on how we can help navigate through really, really tough times and come out a better leader, better entrepreneur, better whatever. And so the crash and burns and the times that, you know, I fouled out or struck out, if we're going to use those analogies, made me who I am today. And I wouldn't trade them. But I wouldn't want my children to experience them either. Unknown Speaker: Oh yeah. Speaker 3: I have to agree 100% with you where you develop your chops, your personality, who you... I usually find a lot of people who you consider friends, I always find that that could be a disappointment. Fear and greed drives your friends and it's very uncommon to find somebody that will just Just take you for who you are and that's all your staff. That's everybody. So that could be a kick in the legs, but just being able to, I remember once, this goes back 40 years ago, literally having an ulcer, you know, like a really bad ulcer, not being able to sleep. On something today, that would just bounce off my shoulder. I wouldn't even blink. It's just, you know, but these things come up and until you can Pick yourself up and learn from them. I think we should absolutely talk way more about the hurdles that we've had to overcome and those are the things that we should talk about, you know, not just the successes. I hear somebody, oh, a top line. I have, I'm a $10 million Amazon seller. Well, good for you. What's your bottom line? How many hurdles? Oh, I, how many times, Kevin? Have you seen the arrogance of somebody that's been in business, it could be young, middle, or older guy, first time, first kick at the can, and they get their personality changes. They're so cocky until they have that hurdle. They lose their business, they lose their house, they lose a family because of the business. That's when you start to change. Speaker 1: No, it's exactly when you start to change. And I think we all have to go through those things. You think about schooling and upbringing and all these things that are designed to, I like to say, to just get us to the start line. So that whether you have a career, whatever it is, whatever life looks like for you, without the challenges, we will not ever have the, I think the humility and the understanding of what others are going through, which I think is important. We're naturally gravitate towards others. We live in neighborhoods, well, most of us, and we have to relate to other people to do things. And we serve other people, like that's how society is. So the more that you have those things, and I like to say they're earlier in life, when the stakes are a little bit lower. So if you got a bankruptcy or whatever, or you get fired from a job, like I got getting fired from a job, actually having just a company go away and get fired, but having a job go away when I was 25, Made me a freaking amazing leader now because when I have to terminate somebody, I know what it's like and I know what I'm doing, what I'm putting them through, right? And so that suck makes it so I can be better now. And I think that all those life lessons, they all just layer, layer, layer in. And then when you get to middle age, like we are, you've got this thing that maybe you didn't have when we were talking about younger people, wisdom. And wisdom on top of those experiences, good and bad, I think, I'm excited about the back half of life. I'm just going to say it out loud. I am jacked up around what can be created in the coming decades in my life. I'm here for it. A lot of the adversity prepared me for it. Speaker 3: I'm curious. Are you excited about AI? Speaker 1: Good topic. I got doomsday depressed for a decade, or a decade, a year because I am a futurist. So I came out of the womb with a computer before that was normal. Like in 1980, my dad got me a computer, like we had a basic, it was programming basic and all this stuff, right? So I've always been early, early, early in everything. I was an SEO in the 90s when Google was one of many, like I'm always early. And I used to always read near future fiction, technological fiction. I stopped doing that. When things started to get heavy, I'm like, oh, actually this stuff could happen. And I got doomsday depressed for a year. I just did. My dad's 81. We still talk about it. We had some pretty deep conversations around my position with AI. He's really into LLMs. He's a mathematician. He's a mentor to me in AI, to be honest with you. And what I did was I adjusted my framing as follows, and maybe this will help people. The gene's out of the bottle and we've decided this is what we're gonna do. Okay. So meaning we, the world, you can't change it. You cannot change it. It's like the internet. You're not going to change it. You can try. You can put your head in the sand. You can say, Hey, I don't like mobile phones. You're just not going to change it. Okay. Let me say it one more time. You're not going to change it. So if that's true, then you have two choices. Embrace it or die. And once I came to that sober realization, it took me a year. It took me conversations with Mark a lot. I mean, I know a lot of hyper, hyper intelligent human beings in this space. Once I came to that realization, I realized I could do one thing. We haven't talked about this. I'm kind of glad we haven't yet. So I'm on this rock for one reason and one reason only. To be the filament in the lives of the people I touch. To be the light. That is my life's purpose. I can honor that purpose. I always like to say, in hell, in the worst conditions on earth, I can honor that purpose. I could be the light. And I am generally an optimistic person. And so what I've decided that I get to do, and people look to me for leadership and technology and all these things, is make people unafraid. And the way that I do that is I use it myself. I experience it. I understand it. I'm cautiously optimistic around what humanity's gonna do with it. And I do think that there's more good than bad that can come out of it. And so that's my stake now, my position. If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have been completely opposite. So it did take me a lot of soul searching to get there. Speaker 3: Did you know 75% of business owners regret selling their business after a year? Kevin Oldham reveals why and how you can avoid seller's remorse. I know a lot of people that sell their businesses, make some great money, they're happy, they achieve their goal, and then they get totally depressed. Speaker 1: One year later, they do. Statistically, 75% of business owners profoundly regret selling their business 365 days later. Speaker 3: Fact. Why? Speaker 1: Want to know why? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: I can tell you why. This is part of what I do as a SIPA. The reason why is they thought two things. Number one, there was an identity transformation that occurred that they were not prepared for. So if you were somebody who built your business, you a lot of times identified yourself as like hand in hand with that business. You were tied to it. So it goes away. So that's number one. But that's like the minor thing. You can manage around that. They thought the money was gonna make them happy. Well, first of all, what did we say about happiness earlier? It's a fleeting emotion. It's not a state and there's all sorts of math out there and studies around how much money quote-unquote makes you happy or feel secure. I've had money and I've not had money. I can tell you that aside from basic needs and being able to order whatever from Amazon and all that crap that really things don't materially change for my happiness. I've flown private for a period of years, not because I had a plane. Don't make me out to be one of these people. I just had one in my life and I got to fly private all the time. Sure, that was really nice. Don't get me wrong. I hate the TSA line, but at the end of the day, did it make me materially happier? Not really. And so I can see that I've seen it happen where people go to their ATM one day and they've just got more zeros and that lasts for a hot minute. Go buy the toys, do all these things, get your watch, whatever it is, buy your second house, do all these things. But if you don't have purpose for your life, After and a plan, you're messed up. You're going to fall into that 75% of people that profoundly regret selling their business. And that's not my math. That is from the Exit Planning Institute's State of Ownership Report that we do every single year. The statistics are not in our favor, my friend. They actually are really depressing. And this is probably the thing that I want people to get their arms around, because I can probably sense that we're going to be wrapping up soon. And my free giveaway that I'm going to give away, 50% of business owners will leave their business prior to their retirement. Desire. Not on their own terms. Death. Divorce. Disability. Disagreement. There's another D. I always forget it when I'm on the air. That's math. Okay? Then, of the 50% that make it to the finish line, 75% are going to profoundly regret selling their business. Which means 2.5% of us are going to hit the finish line happy. Why didn't people tell you at the beginning? It's this dream. So here's what you can do. You can increase the surface area of luck. You can tilt things into your favor. Which is why understanding what you have right now and where the holes are is like step one. Like that's what my giveaway is. Like we're going to figure that out for you, right? That's step one. And then once you have that, you can start working a plan to kind of fix those things long-term so that I was like, say, if Warren Buffett comes and knocks on your door, in this case, Jeff Bezos, and says, Hey, I want to buy your, you know, your, your product line. And I'm just going to, you know, make it whatever, Amazon brand. Speaker 2: Cool. Speaker 1: You're in a position of strength, not weakness. Number two, if one of the other things happens, you don't leave your family with a poop sandwich. You know, like you're prepared. And then if you know that the money, and I'll give you the report, you can read it, isn't gonna make you happy and you have a plan ahead of time, then there's resources out there. Like I have a friend named Jerome who just helps men with that after, after they exit their business. He's a SIPA as well. That's his life's work. He plays in that lane. And so there's resources, but you gotta plan. You gotta plan. Speaker 3: Kevin, tell us a little bit about you, your company, how can people get a hold of you? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm Kevin Oldham. My last name is spelled like Oldham, O-L-D-H-A-M. My company is DeFactory. It's a combination of the words differentiation and factory. Funny story for a different time. So DeFactory.com. You can also go to my personal website, which is BeTheFilament.com where you'll learn a little bit more about me. These are the best places to reach out to me. And then when it comes to the giveaway, you're going to go to DeFactory.com. You're going to hit my call to action button in the top right. You're just going to get taken to my contact form because we had six minutes before I came on. But you're going to mention that you're one of the guests from Lunch With Norm and that we talked about this and then you're going to get my extra giveaways of The Business Valuation Plus, consult with me on how we can close some of those gaps. Speaker 3: Awesome. All right. So let's go to a sponsor, then we'll head over to the wheel. Speaker 2: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell, and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created 58 chapters, over 30 illustrations, 180 call-outs, and we quite frankly made this book For the ADHD entrepreneur, it's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories and has won 12 awards globally. Get your book today either on eBook, paperback, hardcover or Audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Speaker 3: Thank you for coming on. Thank you for providing this education that a lot of entrepreneurs don't even think about. So really appreciate it. Speaker 1: It's my pleasure. Nice to meet you. And yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Speaker 3: All right. Unknown Speaker: So I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you want to check out our newsletter, it is lwn.news. It kind of recaps all the episodes of the podcast. It has a special story every week with Norm and just a great place for updates about the podcast and the world of Amazon and eCommerce. Speaker 3: Okay, everybody, we will see you next Wednesday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for tuning in. Unknown Speaker: Lunch With Norm.