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It All Starts with the First Leap
My Story
One morning 20 years ago, I woke up feeling buried by my business. No matter how hard I worked, I could not relieve what felt like a 1,000-pound weight on my shoulders: constant work, unrelenting chores, never-ending bills, and round-the-clock parental responsibilities raising my 2-year-old daughter, Gabriella, by myself. I was running on empty with no time or energy to do the activities I liked or be with the people who brought me joy. In fact, I had lost the motivation to seek out joy because all I could think about was the oppressive stress that was running my life – wondering how I was going to get everything done before collapsing after midnight, only to start the cycle all over again the next day. To top it off, I was constantly wracked with the guilty feeling that I was a horrible parent. Ironically, I had started this business to become the master of my fate – to live a life of freedom and creativity and build a wonderful life for my daughter.
At the time, I was running my company, The Barali Group, a full-service advertising and public relations firm in San Diego, California. Business was good – no, it was better than good, it was shooting through the roof. I was being slammed with business from Fortune 100 companies such as Ben & Jerry’s, Supercuts, Allstate, and Charlotte Russe. The cash was flooding in. I should have been counting my blessings, right? My ship had come in. Unfortunately, this was not at all the case. I had no time to breathe, much less any free time to spend all of the money I was earning.
What was going on? Was I just being ungrateful for my good fortune?
I tried to sort out the problem, as something was dreadfully wrong. While the front end of my business was booming, the back end – the glue that held everything together – was nonexistent.
For one thing, I had a small, talented team, but needed to face the fact that I was naïve and ill-prepared to lead them. Rather than delegate tasks to my staff to free myself up and live my life, I continued to be involved in every aspect of – well, everything! I performed an honest self-diagnosis and came to the conclusion that I was a total control freak. (As I later discovered, this is a universal trait among people who start their own businesses from scratch.)
Meanwhile, I was a control freak who didn’t have anything resembling a blueprint for growth and, of course, no plan in place to scale and adapt to all of the changes occurring in my business. Although I was a whiz at bringing in clients and had a knack for building successful ad campaigns, I was sorely lacking the ability to manage anything beyond that and unable to concede enough authority to empower anyone on my staff to rise to the occasion and fill in the gaps. We haphazardly bounced from one project to the next. My team and I suffered many all-nighters loaded up on coffee in order to meet crazy deadlines. We were all breathing our own exhaust.
My Big Wake-up Call
Most of us can look back on our lives and recognize the wake-up call that set the course for our future. The moment when our lives took a drastic turn and the universe tossed us out on our derrieres, forcing us to make a change – whether we were ready for it or not. In most instances, we were not.
When you are under constant stress, one of the side effects is that you are never living in the moment. You are constantly trying to figure out what you need to do next, rather than paying attention to the brilliant opportunities for joy and prosperity right in front of you. You fail to see or feel the vision, as you are focusing so much on your day-to-day workload, your frustrations, and your own stuckness. (Yes, I admit I just made up that word, since that is the best way to describe the sensations involved.)
My wake-up call occurred on the day when I managed to run over myself with my own car. Yes, you read that correctly: I ran over myself with my own car. This feat was clearly the biggest faux pas of my life.
It happened when I was picking Gabriella up at daycare. I was in a rush from another long workday – running late, as always – and parked my Ford Taurus in haste. I began my leap out of the vehicle in a panic, feeling the shame of being tardy to pick up my child and exhaustion from hours of toiling nonstop at the office. I’m sure you can guess what happened as I exited the car.
Surprise! I realized too late that I had failed to use the parking brake. As the car began to move with me in its grip, halfway out of the driver’s seat, it dawned on me that my frenetic pace was doing me in.
The car rolled back, dragging me underneath the front tire and out into the middle of the street. If having a 4,000-pound car running over you does not cause you to drastically reexamine everything about your life, nothing will. Once the car stopped rolling, I realized that it was only by some incredible miracle that I had survived in one piece (except for the tire tracks on my legs, which lasted for a year). I knew my life had to change.
The following question popped into my head loud and clear: Do you want to be in the same place a year from now, and 10 years from now?
The thought of living like this for another year – much less another day – lit a raging fire under my feet. I made a drastic decision and walked away from everything. I essentially handed my half of the business to my partner, left my failing marriage, and rebooted. I went back out into the world as a single mom with no money, no revenue, no prospects, and no idea what I was going to do with my life.
The result? I was happier than I had been in years.
From that point onward, I made a decision that I must be 100% passionate about everything I did – or else I would drop it. The choice was either “Hell yes!” or “No way!” There wasn’t anything in between. I loved the idea of business and making money, but I arrived at the conclusion that there had to be a better way than riding myself so hard that I ended up literally running over myself.
My Business Blueprints Are Born
I spent the entire following year rebuilding my life. I made a list of all the parts of my company that worked well and separated out which ones were broken, faulty, or missing altogether. Next I dove into each individual aspect to figure out why some things worked while others didn’t. I also studied my clients who ran successful companies, examining the systems and processes that had turned them into well-oiled machines functioning with fluid perfection and garnering sustainable results over both the short and long term.
From all of this, I developed two strategic blueprints: one to grow a business and the other to scale a business. I diagrammed these blueprints like an architect renders drawings for the construction of a new building. I subsequently adhered to the...
