Coping With Founder Anxiety

Morning all! Here’s the time and my morning Pomodoro. Wed 14 July

I’ve already been out this morning for a walk, got my cup of coffee from a local petrol pump (the Costa inside it). Listened to some of a new audible I started this morning ‘Go For No’ by Richard Fenton (decent start and allegory for success in sales) and am now sat down to write. And I’m definitely feeling nervous. My expenses are rising way quicker than my earnings at the moment as I’m transitioning into the next stage of growth for Pearl Lemon. And it’s making me damn anxious.

I’m still on the hunt for cold callers who can light up the phones.
Still trying to find the perfect approach when it comes to generating leads via cold email

And I’m trying to do everything I can to optimize this process. At the moment that’s doing an absolute bloody multitude of things -

Discovering you CAN use mobile numbers in Crazy Call (should increase our pickup rates across the board)
Working with a growing number of callers who want to make cold calls for us and our clients (trial dials as I call them) until I find some great callers
Setting up voicemails for every client we have set up so anyone who calls us back can leave a voicemail
Setting up voicemail drops so that when we don’t reach someone we drop a brief teaser voicemail so they can call back
Standardising scripts within Crazy Call so that everyone has a general script to work from
Instituting 2x calls in the first month with new clients so I can build up some example calls for the sales team to reference
Looking at hiring from Star Now - actors who can ‘think on their feet’ to see if they’re interested in sales (47 applications have come in - now let’s see whose any good)
Getting our head of operations support from a copywriting standpoint in the form of Anita (especially now we have 10 training videos on copywriting)
Pushing Macky further forward into the role of client relationship management by inviting him to calls and getting him more and more acquainted with the role in general
Agreed terms with Adam so that’s he can just focus on getting bookings on a daily basis for our clients - which is key to our success

More steps will follow and in writing this I’m (myself) attempting to reduce my own levels of anxiety about things not being in place as I want them to be. This is notwithstanding all of the other sides of the business - but in comparison they all seem a lot less urgent because people aren’t unhappy. That’s the one good upside of pressure - when it’s constant and continual - you kind of learn to live with it and get calmer with it over time. So as you get exposed to more and more of it - it basically starts to affect you less and less as the days go by. And then there’s this act of journaling. Right now when you’ve got salary increases coming, salaried offers being made, and NOT the corresponding rises in company growth….it gets worrying! [convertful id="197358"] But then that’s why putting it all down onto paper is really powerful. Therapeutic. Cathartic. It’s also why I do these things right in the morning at the start of my day because it gets me centred for the day. The business is definitely at a stage now where I’m trying to make a transition into higher levels of growth - Pearl Lemon Properties Pearl Lemon Web Pearl Lemon Accountants These three fledgling websites which I’m aiming to turn into really successful businesses are all testament to that They’re in totally different industries and the only things they have in common are the brand and me :P But as we’re doing B2B Lead Generation for our clients - well nothing sets you up better for pressure than knowing on a weekly basis that our clients expect leads and solid one’s. It makes everything else seem much much more manageable by comparison. And that’s the exciting thing about the lead generation side of the business. 80% of my effort is going there at the moment because if I can make this work...then ‘my-oh-my’ - anything (as they say) is possible. Every b2b business on the planet is on the hunt for leads (including ours and we already have a fair amount of them!) - and if we can provide them… Everything will change. Right I feel a lot better now so I’m going to wrap this up :p