Sometimes it is refreshing to stop and look back at where you have come from to realize where you are going. I spent the last two days at Prospect Vision, a data mining and direct mail printing company that I bought at the beginning of 2018. Having never had a dream or even thought about being in the mail/printing business, it was one of those opportunities that just got served up on a plate in front of me and was too good not to take a shot at.

It was a different kind of place when I walked in before ever buying it. The facility was run down, printing machines looked old and tired and the carpet was dirty. I can always tell the attention to detail that has gone into a place by simply looking at the carpet. But the power in this organization wasn’t the old equipment or the tired carpet, it was the people. The people were so eager to do great work and so thrilled at the possibility to up their game that it just felt like the right thing to do. So, I embarked on my first intro into printing/production as an owner and went for it not knowing anything about how this industry worked.

Like anything, I soon found that the more volume you did the better off things looked. It was apparent that volume could solve a lot of problems and give us the ability to grow faster and get things like new equipment that was bigger and faster and even allow us to make enough of a profit to replace the carpet.

Now, after seeing the low of beginning and printing 50,000 pieces of mail a month to the high of printing over 500,000 pieces of mail a month, and being able to survive a downturn like Covid-19, I walked out of the building today on my way back home with a real feeling of accomplishment.

In 34 months, we have printed 10,766,372 pieces of direct mail out of a small unit in an industrial office park. Some people (and very high up ones at that) told me when I started that this business was a joke and “good luck with this one,” as a sign that they wanted nothing to do with it. Other people wished me luck and cheered me and the team on the entire way, trying to give every ounce of support possible. But the main thing I have learned thus far is you never know just how much you can do until you try. Now all I want to do is try a little harder.

One thing that continues to amaze me is how when trying to make decisions and look at things that could be viewed as risky, you still get those butterflies in your stomach.

All the risks I’ve taken in my life, in business, day-to-day, they all seem so big. They seem so monumental. But when you look back on them, a lot of them that you’ve made and that you’ve succeeded with, there was really no risk at all. Meaning, things that you lost sleep over, things that you worried about, things that you wondered if you were going to be able to survive financially really just fall to pieces in the rearview mirror because they weren’t that big of a risk if you have confidence both in yourself and in what you do.

Now, there are a lot of different kinds of risks. I’m not talking about risking your life climbing up a mountain. But risks in business or a personal relationship where you might be risking a friendship or a future family member because you’re caring for them or worried about them is really what you have to just not let worry you in life.

Taking risks for some people is natural. People might think for me it’s natural, but I always look at them in some regards with a little bit of fear. But once you get through them, once you take them, once you accomplish whatever it is you set out to accomplish, you realize it wasn’t really that much of a risk at all.

Got back out on the road today after a very light last two months of travel, which followed a 3-month span of virtually no travel. I have to admit that I was hesitant to get back out on the road doing my thing, not necessarily for Covid-19 concerns but because this had just been possibly the nicest time in my career where I wasn’t always moving from place to place, week after week and coming to the verge of pure exhaustion by the end of every week.

Not that I didn’t want to be back out on the road selling my company and telling our story of how we have made our clients successful, but because I didn’t feel the market was there for people to buy what I was selling. It seemed like from the conversations and Zoom meetings I was having that people weren’t just going to buy from me because I had gone to see them. With clients buying more things (some in record number) than before, it was a time when I could spend a couple of months working mostly from my office.

But after a meeting this morning where a long-time dealer who has become a good friend of mine was walking me to my car, he said, “I know you don’t have to come down here, but you do. And you do it because you are passionate about my store and passionate about seeing me be successful, and I want you to know how much I appreciate that.” After hearing these words and exchanging “elbow bump,” which are now the modern-day handshake, the switch has just flipped to where I am recommitting myself to a life back on the road, doing what I do best.

Not to say it will ever be back to some of the travel days like before, but “It’s Time.” Covid-19 and 2020 have changed me for the better in so many ways, it is like counting my blessings. I am more attentive to my own self-awareness than before. There is so much more appreciation and happiness for all the people in my organization than ever before. It has heightened my appreciation for the finer details in my work environment and driven me to create new things and take more chances on potential opportunities. It has taught me to be a better closer in that you might as well ask for the business until they tell you to never talk to them again. Last, but maybe most important, this has given me a deeper appreciation for my family and taught me to stop, put the phone down, quit looking at social media, and simply enjoy the moments.

Everything in my life is about TIME. And while I joked that Covid-19 and 2020 were simply a Time Out in my life, it is now time to get back out, and more aggressively than ever before with a whole new set of skills.

Through the last six or so months of dealing with COVID and learning how to adjust my lifestyle and normal practices, one thing that I’ve really tried to focus on is self-improvement. That includes being a better leader, being more organized, having more positive thoughts, and being more physically fit and sound in body and mind.

It’s never easy to change habits, especially when you’ve been doing them for quite some time, but the thing that I’ve found is how much better I feel with a positive mental attitude all the time through more regular strenuous exercise, better dieting, and just an overall increased sense of self-worth. You can look at things through crises or pandemics and let them get the best of you, let them wear you down. But the thing I’ve found that has really been a blessing is my ability to have a better sense of improvement from all the things I’m doing at work, with my family, and through better exercise and dieting and having a better positive mindset and outlook.

It’s something that I really want to say focused on as things appear to be getting a little more back to normal. There’s no price tag on how much better you feel in body and mind when you clean up your act a little bit and condition yourself to be more holistic in your approach to all that you do.

The more things I come into contact with and the more opportunities I deal with, the more I am required to deflect negativity. Negativity breeds in many people much more than positive energy. To be a truly effective person and not get bogged down through other people’s negativity, you have to learn how to deflect the negative.

It is always a tough thing that you have to coach yourself through mentally to make sure other people’s circumstances, issues, and drama don’t impact you in a negative way. Situation after situation that I deal with always brings out the opportunity for upside potential. But with that also comes an amazing amount of negativity.

Training people around you, not just coworkers but friends and family, to be positive is something that I think I have really learned how to do, especially in the last year, but more throughout my career. Negativity will drag you down and will make you want to always go to a dark place. Whereas, when you stay positive, you don’t let the negatives even phase you. You keep on moving.

Negative situations will impact you every single day if you let them. Deflecting them becomes really more of an art than a science because you have to let yourself be trained to not let the little things, the small things, the immaterial things that become negative phase you in any way. And once you learn to deflect the negative, you truly can be a more effective person and have a clearer mind as you go through life.

As we settle into a new normal and get used to a new way of life, I simply find myself having to do more. More at work, more communication, more execution, more follow-up, more emphasis on management. Everything I used to have to do, it now seems like there’s just simply more to do.

There’s also more to do at home in my personal life. Having time to spend around my family, having time to spend around my kids, having time to spend around friends – it just requires more. More time, more emphasis, more energy.

I think that as we look at a new way of life in 2020, everyone needs to realize that more is going to mean more. That’s if you want to keep your head above water, keep paddling, keep winning, and keep succeeding. There simply is going to be a demand for more.

I’ve been absent from this blog and from writing for a little while. The last few months have created an enormous amount of stress across every aspect of life. So, I chose to take a 30-day hiatus to focus on exercise, diet, and not allowing for burnout.

Usually, in my spare time, I think about and conceptualize what I want to communicate through writing. I feel that writing is a very keen way of expressing feelings and thoughts. Over the last 30 days, I’ve taken a break and upped my exercise to be working out, in some capacity, every day of the week. I find that working out, especially when done early in the morning, sets the tone for the day. It provides energy, gets your mind right, gives you time to center yourself, and when you workout sometimes to extreme levels, you’ve already accomplished the hardest thing you have to do that day.

Everybody knows, you can read and learn about it, that dieting also leads to more energy. So, on top of exercising and burning fuel, I’ve increased and bettered my diet over the last 3o days to have optimal energy and be able to think more and consume more work. This has given me the energy that has been required to navigate these last few months.

In culmination with all of this was a key focus of mine to not allow burnout to creep in. When you operate a business, have a young family, and a lot of extracurricular activities and requirements, it is very easy to get burned out in a very short time. Stress can wear you down and chew you up almost immediately. But, in taking time to create some breathing room, I have found a new level of myself, my thoughts, my feelings, and my emotions, that has guided me better over the last 30 days than I’ve been guided in a long time.

For the first time ever, I spent 90 days at home not out traveling, not out growing the business that I started and have really grown over the last 16 years. Our business is born and built every day by being in front of clients and customers – reviewing results, building relationships, and finding newer alternatives. But COVID-19 marked the first time ever that I was simply not able to do that. And what I realized was that 90 days was long enough.

Ninety days was long enough to see the complacency that had crept in. I’m not talking about complacency over just the past 90 days, but more about the complacency that crept in during 2017 through 2019 when the economy was booming and business was rocking and rolling.

It was really easy to become complacent. Any problem that came into our company, it was always able to be fixed by either adding staff or going out and finding new business and new sources of revenue. What I realize is that I had become complacent over the past few years. It took 90 days of being off the road, having to create a continual routine, having to have ups and downs, and having to realize what it was going to take to come out on the other end. And that’s simply to be better. It’s simply to have a better caliber of the expectation that you hold for yourself.

I find myself more engaged in communicating with people. I find myself more attentive and more present when I’m at home with my family. Phones and emails and texts are waiting until family time is over, whereas before that didn’t happen. I find myself more physically fit by creating a very strict diet and workout regemin. I also find myself with a much more vast appreciation for everything that has been built and that I had not had the same appreciation for before COVID-19.

So, complacency will always creep in. And what you have to do is realize how to find it and how to fix it.

I was talking to one of our employees today wishing them a happy birthday, and while on the phone, they were talking about the challenges they’ve had over the past 90 days with COVID-19 and other similar things that have affected their personal life. This person reminded me that their mother taught them to look at things as the glass half full. Don’t think about the negative. Be focused on the positive. And always think about what you have, not what you don’t have.

This employee has been with our organization for a long time. It was such a refreshing reminder when she said, “Everyone has a choice. You have a choice in what you want your attitude to be. Attitude is a choice. And those who choose to have great attitudes generally end up with a better disposition and can accomplish more than those who are negative.”

It was so refreshing to hear somebody else talk about that and utter those words because it really made me remember that attitude is a choice. You have the choice to have a positive attitude and be happy, or you have the choice to not.

One thing I’ve found is that a lot of things are different through the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis. It has allowed me so much more time to spend and connect with friends and people who, otherwise during the course of normal daily life and business, you just aren’t able to connect with, especially as I’ve gotten older.

I’ve talked to more friends and family members, really just from having more time. I think it’s been a very eye-opening thing for me to do – spending time with people and talking to people, even though most of the connections and contacts are calls and aren’t face-to-face. But it’s really been eye-opening about the people who are important in my life outside of work and what it’s allowed me to do with them. And I think as anybody goes through navigating a crisis such as COVID, you’ve got to always find the positive. There is so much negative news and anxiety that if you don’t always find a positive, you’re going to be in a really bad place. And one thing that I’m very grateful that has happened during this crisis is that it has allowed me to connect with old friends, lost friends, and people who otherwise you just don’t really connect with.