Episode 261
Title: My 3 Regrets as an Entrepreneur
Host: Dr. Nicole Rivera
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Transcription:
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio. For those of you that are joining us on YouTube, I apologize about this horrendous quality of my camera. I feel like these Apple MacBooks, you know, couple years and, and, you know, They expire. But anyway, the topic I'm bringing to you today, I feel very, very, very passionate about.
And we're titling this the biggest regrets as an entrepreneur. And in reality, I don't have regrets. I have experiences that have created a lot of learnings and wisdom. But Hey, you know, we gotta, we gotta get you guys in here to listen because everybody tends to go for those extreme subject lines, but this was actually inspired by a recent social media post from a fellow entrepreneur.
And she was posting a chart about the different phases of business over the years and what I found to be very relatable. And also very transparent is that as we went through more years in business and the later phases of running a business, the category of self care, health and social life got smaller and smaller.
And as I said, this is very relatable. And it's something that I really want to speak to because there are a lot of entrepreneurs that. Will make a big change because they're sick and tired of having their business run them. And then there are some that just swallow the reality that this is what it is.
And they will go decades. And sometimes they'll go centuries. And I say that not because they're living centuries, but because they'll pass down the business and they'll pass down the same work ethic and the same values, even though those values are potentially harming the individual. And I wish that I had the grander vision, you know, when I started the business or even had a mentor to try to guide me, even though I was stubborn as shit.
But really what it comes down to is. A business is something that we should be using to using as a tool to create a life that we really enjoy to create a life on our terms. And I say this very specifically because some people are going to value having a significant amount of wealth in the bank. Well, that can be passed down, you know, to the future generations.
There are some individuals that are running a business because it makes them feel good and they are contributing to the world. They're solving problems for humanity. And then there are some people that are going to use their business so that they can travel. They can explore, they can have experiences.
And then some people want all of those things. That's me. I want all of those things. I was sick and tired of feeling like I had to. Sacrifice certain things that I wanted for success. And that's really what this podcast is about is the top three things that I wish that I knew early on. I'm very, very grateful that I figured them out at a certain point in my entrepreneurial journey.
And so I'm sharing them with you in hopes that it inspires you to, to align your business. To serve you your values, your wants, your desires, your curated life. Okay. So these are all going to flow into each other and we're just going to dive right in. One, I wish that I used my business and what came from my business, from the connections to the networking, to the money, to the opportunities.
And I used it to create more memories. And so, what I mean by that is, we naturally fall into, okay, let me backtrack. We start a business because we say, I don't want to be bound to that nine to five. I don't want to be bound to somebody else's schedule telling me I need to do this. I need to do that. I need to travel.
I need to work weekends and we seek out a level of freedom. And there's some of us that go into it a little bit one sided, a little bit naive. And then some of us go in and say, listen, I know that I'm going to have to put maybe a little more in, in the beginning, but. I'm going to do that for X amount of time to create the freedom that I really want.
And then we're years in decades in, and we don't have that freedom that we thought we were going to attain because our business starts to consume us. And so what happens is we start to remove things. And what we've removed are the things that are the easiest. And that's, you know, Self care that is time with family and friends.
It's showing up to our children's sporting events because in our minds, we've put our business on a pedestal. And so now. It's more important to go to that meeting. It's more important to go to that meet and greet. It's more important to put out that fire in the business. It's more important to hire that new individual and go through weeks of interviews.
And so at the end of the day, we find ourselves losing time, losing energy, and missing out on the creation of memories. So no matter who you are, what industry you're in, what phase of business you're in, you need to keep in the back of your mind that you cannot put memories and experiences on the back burner.
Because the more that you do, it's like the snowball going down the mountain. It becomes less and less of a priority, and then you create turmoil in your relationships. You're not getting invited to anything anymore because you never show up. And now your kids just don't even care if you come to their game because they expect you to not be there.
And if you are there and they look over at the bleachers, you're on your phone because you're distracted. You're not present. This is way too fucking common, and I feel very, very passionate about this because this is one of the most important parts of life. And for those of you that are like, I don't fucking care about people, whatever, I don't have a family.
At the end of the day, from our genetic roots that goes back hundreds and thousands of years ago, We need people in community. That's why, you know, social media, it's like funny because I moved to Italy. So I'm in the algorithm, but you know, there's all these people are like, I'm just debating if I should just throw my phone in the river and just like move and to another country and start over.
And the only reason we're thinking like that is because we've created divide in our relationships. We feel alone. And so we're like, well, I might as well just move abroad because I feel alone, or I don't feel like I have a community or I don't have quality relationships. With my extended family. So if we keep putting this on the back burner, it just gets worse.
So even though it might be difficult and that divide already exists, and you're not getting invited anymore, it's still, it's still going to be valuable to try to mend that. And to be honest and say, I know that I haven't showed up. I know that I've been invited for the past 10 Christmases and I haven't been here.
And I just want to be transparent that. My business was running me and I'm turning a new leaf and I'm really making an effort. People are going to appreciate that transparency unless they're kind of an asshole. But at the end of the day, you know, even if someone's very upset with you, they might say, Oh, okay, we'll see.
But what do you expect? You know, it's like the boy who cried wolf. So at the end of the day, you're going to always feel like there's a hole in your life. If you don't have connection community. Authentic relationships where you can have authentic conversations. And especially you're going to have a big hole in your life.
If the people around you, like your kids or your husband or your wife are distanced and they just are like, Oh, mom, dad, you know, they're, they're just, they don't care. And it's not that you don't care. Obviously you do. But your lack of being able to be present because your business is always distracting you, or the fires in your business are always distracting you, they're going to think that no matter, no matter what you try to do, because your actions speak louder than words.
And so, something else that I want to speak to in relation to this topic is, I went through a phase of business where, you know, on paper and, and for other people observing my life, they thought I was having experiences. I was creating memories, but at the end of the day, I only traveled for business. It's not until the recent years that I travel for fun, for, for bonding with my family, for meeting up with friends.
Like everything that I did was for business. It's almost like I didn't give myself permission to have fun. To prioritize what I wanted. The only way that I would validate spending the money and spending the time, quote, unquote, away from my business is if I was traveling for business because in my brain, Oh, I was getting a return on investment or I was moving my business forward.
And this is going to wrap into the next, which is so, so, so important. Wrapping my business up in my identity. And I said this Very specifically this way, not wrapping my identity up in my business. I essentially created a business to curate my identity. And no matter which one you fall in, if your, if your identity is wrapped up in your business, Listen, because the way that you make decisions in your life is always going to be about serving the business.
And then when you slow down, business gets a little slow, something happens that, you know, you lose some clients, you lose some contracts, you lose some employees. You start to go a little crazy. You start to feel like your life is fucking crumbling because you don't really have a life. or an identity outside of your business.
Outside of, I'm the leader, I'm the doctor, I'm the coach, I'm the engineer, I'm the product developer, I'm the CEO. You've wrapped everything into the business, everything into the mission of the business, everything into the contribution of the business, everything into who you are as a person. The employer, who you are as the person that's delivering a service or delivering a product to the world.
Guess what? That's just what you do. And if you get to do something that feels really fucking good, that's exciting and fun. Awesome. You've got the golden ticket, but it's not who you are. It's just what you do. Every single dollar that I made in my business, I invested it back into my business, which is going to bring me to my third point.
We're not ready yet, but we're going to get there. But I was not, I was, I was created, it wasn't a business. Let's put it that way. It was an extension of my altered identity, which creates a lot of different layers of issues. Because one, when someone had something bad to say about my business, it was like someone like ran me over with their car.
It was a dagger to my soul. Because That business was an extension of, of me, my soul, my identity, my contribution to the world. I gave it fucking everything. And in my mind, I gave every client, everything. I gave every employee everything. That's like, when you think about that, that can sound like, wow, that's so awesome.
But if you think about that, that's really fucked up. That's really imbalanced to give that much of your energy away. That's not healthy in any capacity. It's about having your energy in multiple buckets that serve you. And the majority of your energy in the bucket to serve yourself. That's the only way you can show up better for others.
A business is there for you to feel good about the work that you do in the world. And yes, it can be part of your mission, but at the end of the day, it's something that you use as a tool to curate the life that you want. And if you don't even know the life that you want anymore because you're so wrapped up and running your fucking business and it takes every minute of your time and every ounce of your energy, that's why I keep talking about this concept of values.
Because when I do values with people, I split it into character and action. Character is like, who are you? Who are you at your core? Who are you as a person? Like, how do you show up? How do you want to show up unapologetically? And then your action is more around like, how do you curate your day? How do you curate your week?
How do you curate your year? Because if you wake up every day, not feeling overly happy, not overly satisfied, your energy is, is low. And you're just kind of anticipating like chaos and problems. You're out of alignment of your values, probably because you've never given it time, or you don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about.
And so when you don't know who you are at your core, you don't know your own values. That's when it's so easy for your identity to get wrapped up in a business. Or as a, like my husband, we've had this conversation or as a football player, as a soccer player, as a student, as a tennis player, as an athlete, as, as any of that, you know, he went through this type of struggle before I did.
He was a football player and then he got really hurt. He had 13 concussions and he couldn't play anymore. And he crumbled, he fell apart. And that was because his identity was wrapped up as a football player. He didn't know who he was. And even when he was asked, who are you? He had, he, he remembers so, so specifically a, a teacher and mentor in his life who said, who are you?
And he goes, I'm a football player. Who are you? I'm a, the third son of Joanne and Bud. Who are you? He couldn't answer the question. He, he got mad. He didn't even, he, he wanted to flip a table. He's like, I don't even know what you're asking me. And honestly, that's the majority of people. And I will admit it was me for a long time.
I'm a doctor. So one of the reasons why we do the work that we do now, and it's changed from just being integrative medicine, is partly our observations. of what makes people sick. And partly it was our journey of realizing how imbalanced our lives were. And a big part of that was the bucket of business.
I want to say being full, but not necessarily full in a good way, full because it was taking so much energy. And there was so many other things being sacrificed. That's why I talk about this idea of sacrifice to success, sacrifice to success. You see a lot of people that have done really well in their careers, but they've gone through multiple divorces or they don't have a great relationship with their kids or they're don't have a huge social life.
And then it's very easy to just say, I'll just, you know, I'm just going to put my, my put my head down and just keep working, you know, so I can get through this. And at the end of the day, that's not how it works. If you want to curate something different in your life, you need to give it time and effort.
And so if you want to have better relationships and you want to have a better family life, you need to give it time and effort. You can't just put your head down and just keep working in your business. That's called a workaholic. That's called a distraction. So the third thing that I wish that I knew really, really, really, really do is To take at least a certain amount of the profits that I made in my business.
and create a more diverse portfolio. And for those of you who are like, I don't even know what that means. I don't know about investing. I don't know. That's not the point. The point is, is that this is very specific with service providers. If you are a coach, if you are a doctor, if you are a nutritionist, a dietitian, you know, I'm sure there's many, many others that I'm forgetting.
But if, if you are a service provider, even if you scale your business to have multiple practitioners working in your business or coaches in your business or underneath you, even if you franchise, like you still are capped. At a certain point in time, because there's only so much of you to go around.
There's only so much of you as the, the mentor. There's only so much of you as the, the CEO. There's only so much of you as the developer of frameworks. There's only so much of you. So you will cap out at a certain point. So the idea is, Freedom. That's why a lot of us become entrepreneurs is freedom. So you can invest all of your money back into your business.
And then obviously use a little bit of that to go have fun and play, but there's going to come a certain point in your life where you're going to feel really fucking trapped. And I personally felt that and I felt that partly because I had a brick and mortar and I was location bound. And then part of it was, I tried so hard to create a practice that didn't run off of Nick and I.
And obviously because my identity was very wrapped up in the business I wasn't doing a very good job of that. But even if I did it right from day one, I still would have had limitations in what I could curate, curate, and create inside of that type of business model. And so every business model is very different.
If you have a product, you know, things are gonna look a lot different. And this might not a hundred percent apply to you, but it's still going to be valuable in order for you to diversify your assets, diversify the way that you make money. And that's partly because anything could happen at any time.
There could be market crashes. There could be digital crashes. There could be cyber attacks. There could be all of these things. So if you have multiple ways that you make money, if it's investing in stocks, if it's investing in crypto, if it's going to be real estate, if it's buying or acquiring other businesses that are, are always going to be needed, you know, businesses like laundry mats.
And things like that, that a lot of people use for day to day life. Like there, there are so many options. You obviously do what feels good to you. What's in your knowledge base. What is something that, you know, it's something that's more aligned to your values. So for me, one of the things that I absolutely love is I love hosting.
And so one of our, you know more recent endeavors is, is working on a real estate portfolio where we can set these up in a very specific way to curate a very specific experience. I personally love interior design, interior decor, and just to curate a really, really special experience for families that want to come to Italy.
So that's something that's in alignment for me. It's not like, Oh, like I'm just doing this for the money. So it's a lot different when you're doing something that you actually enjoy opposed to just doing it for the money. Nick is absolutely obsessed with crypto, listens to videos and mentors, and he's just, Super into it.
I rather rip my eyeballs out, but that is something that he's doing separately. And so it takes a lot of pressure off of what your business needs to produce for you in order to live the life that you want. And it also creates a diversity that, you know, if something happens like COVID 19 where your business can't be open, you're not completely screwed.
So these are really my top, top, top lessons. I'm there's a million in between, but always prioritize relationships, relationships with your loved ones, relationships with your family. Don't miss out on curating and creating memories. Don't miss out on experiences. Don't push that fucking vacation a million times.
Don't miss Too many games. Don't just don't do it. You're never going to get that back. And sometimes the damage done to a relationship is not going to be redeemable if it goes on long enough. Be very conscious if your identity is being wrapped up in your business or your business is wrapped up in your identity.
And some feedback mechanisms might be that you have a lot of emotional charges when it comes to your business. You get very upset with employees. You get very upset. If you get bad feedback or a bad review, like you don't use it as, Oh, this is just objective. You know, this process sucks. Let's improve it.
It's like. makes you feel emotionally upset or frustrated or angry. These are our signs that they're, these are too mixed. And then is You know, are you just investing in your business? Is your business, the sole way that you make money, or are you using the profits from your business in order to diversify your assets, diversify your portfolio so that there's no, not so much pressure that your business has to, has to do X all the time, because at the end of the day, there's ebbs and flows.
There's highs and lows in business. And this is something that, you know, I, my stubborn ass fought. I was like, no, I should be growing and growing and it should be an upward trajectory. And it's just, that's not real life. That's not how anything works. That's not how the stock market works. It's not how any investment works.
It's not that if you have an Airbnb, it's full every week. For the entire year. Like, it's just not how it works, everything ebbs and flows. So you need to be able to create this diversity so that, you know, when one thing is down, the other thing is up, or at least there's multiple streams coming in so that, you know, you're not having more of your energy taken away by stress, which takes you away from your relationships and your loved ones.
So drop a comment below on what was your biggest takeaway from this, because I am actually so curious. And for those of you that are like this post questions, this post, like, how do I do it? What do I do? Where do I start? You know, leave it below. This is fantastic for me to inspire future episodes. But, you know, I really speak from a place of, of passion, but compassion.
You know this, this happens to all of us and it makes a, it, it's a really bold decision to say, no, I'm not, I'm not doing it like this anymore and I'm gonna do it differently. And, and I did it, and it, it was painful. It, it was painful on so many fucking levels. I, I, I really can't even explain. Part of the pain was because how much my identity was wrapped up took me two years of my own personal development.
Meditation deep work to, to think about my business differently and the amount of freedom that it's created for me is, is, is unbelievable. And the amount of opportunities that have come from that level of freedom is pretty amazing. Amazing as well. You know, the biggest thing for me is being able to be part of my child's life and to create memories because I spent over a decade just being consumed by my business.
And honestly, I probably still would be doing it if I didn't have my son. You know, I'm gonna be really honest with you guys. I probably would be doing the same thing. It took having him to say no more. This is not, this is not the type of parent that I want to be. I don't want to be working 15 hours a day.
I don't want to come home and be so distracted by all the things I need to do and all the fires I need to put out. And, and this conversation or that conversation, I was like, it's just not an option anymore. And so it took that in order to make a really, really hard, bold decision to pivot. And. And do things differently.
So it's possible. It's difficult, but it's possible. All right, guys, until next time, I hope you enjoyed, like I said, comment below.
