488. LIVE Workshop - Get Unstuck (Full Workshop)

My heart is to help you, um, and twenty twenty-six, I'll talk about what that looks like in a little bit, twenty twenty-seven as well, but I wanna talk to you about two thousand seventeen.

This is me back almost a decade ago with my wife, Heather, my daughter, Anna, who is now almost sixteen, and my newly born one, almost one-year-old there, Daisy.

And if you look at this picture, everything looks great, but behind the scenes, I remember that specific day just thinking, "How am I going to make ends meet? How am I going to get out of this backlog? How am I going to pay for things?" Uh, and the truth of the matter is that I was twenty-seven weddings in backlog.

I had twenty-seven weddings to edit 'cause I had said yes to so many different things.

I had to let go at the end of twenty seventeen in October, nine team members.

I had grown the business, done a lot, like a lot of volume, a lot of photographers and videographers, and I had to let them all go, go 'cause I just could not afford them.

Like I said, Daisy was a new baby at home.

I was behind on my mortgage, and I was working harder than I have ever worked.

Um, to be honest, I felt like a failure, and um, I don't know if you feel like that.

You keep working harder and working harder and thinking you're gonna get ahead with your money or get ahead with your bookings or get ahead with things, only to feel more and more trapped by this job, this career that you've put yourself in, and you feel like a failure.

So the problem that I had was I had to say yes to keep the business afloat, but every time I said yes, it was making the business sink.

Can you relate with that a little bit? Like, the more, uh, th- more, more employees I had, the more responsibility, whatever it was, I had to keep saying yes to weddings that I didn't really wanna say yes to.

Like, I was forced to say yes, but then every yes was making me get further and further into backlog.

And I remember in two thousand seventeen having to be like, "Hey, everybody, we've gotta let everyone go.

I cannot pay you in November.

I'm gonna pay you through October." And it just so happened that October of two thousand seventeen, I was doing a l- like a luxury wedding.

They were spending probably half a million to a million dollars for their wedding, so however you categorize it, it was a really nice wedding here in Tulsa.

And on paper, um, this looked like success.

I was doing the biggest wedding in town for one of the biggest, uh, business owners in town, and to be honest, that is the wedding whenever I finally broke.

It was the same week that I had let everybody go.

I had twenty-seven weddings in backlog.

I checked my, my business account balance, and it was just about two hundred dollars in the account, and I had all these weddings to edit.

I had no more business coming in for, like, almost three months, and I had this backlog.

And these are all weddings I'd already been paid, like, had already been paid for.

And I had my I've had it moment, and I, in the moment, I was broken.