Philip Blackett:
Thanks so much for having me A.J. Excited to be here.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right. Well, can you even forget this whole Boston thing? The New Yorker kind of was raised on the whole idea that Boston should just be kicked off the thing, but we will accept it here. But thank you. I am really excited. In looking at your background and looking at the things you’re doing now, how you’re going about helping other entrepreneurs, would you maybe discuss a little bit where you are in your own entrepreneurial journey?

Philip Blackett:
Yeah, I mean, think it’s a great question, A.J. I think that a lot of what goes on my head is just how are you moving the ball forward in your career? When you first hear about entrepreneurship, think for me it was like when I was like 13, 12 or 13, I was reading Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Somebody got me that book in front of me. Thinking Grow Rich. I was reading like Black Enterprise magazines at the time.

Still like in high school, just trying to figure out what this whole thing was about all the way up to now, as far as like buying a company, growing it and looking for other opportunities afterwards. I think the main thing was just, just the thought of, I think for me it was just like how far I wanted to go with this, how creative I’ve had jobs before. And I also thought to myself, can I do more than just a job at hand? Could I actually grow something as far as like a business that provides jobs for other people? Provides great results and experiences for customers. Hopefully in a place where everyone is sharing in the wins and the values that we’re bringing in, both as far as what we believe in and just the overall value monetary or non-monetary for people. so I think that for me now, just at the young age of 38, I guess, even though the gray hairs may say otherwise, but yeah, baby. When I think about entrepreneurial journey from here, it’s more sort of a sense of like, what can I take from the lessons I’ve learned up to this point, both the good and not so good to figure out, how can I actually be of value to grow other companies, including my own, just to really help people. Because at the end of the day, A.J, like I recognize for myself with any entrepreneur, whether you’re VC backed or bootstrapped, you had a certain dream that you had associated with that business. And you wanted to go a certain way. You had certain goals in mind.

Some things you want to do within the business, some things you wanted to get out of the business. All this was basically on the bulletin board or on the white board before you got started. And then once you got started, life happened. And that’s where a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs really start to really grind their teeth and really start to build muscle as far as what does it actually take to actually operate a company? What does it actually take to actually run a company beyond just ideas?

But now you’re going into execution. And so for me, it was just more sort of thought of like up to this point now, really just remind the entrepreneurs like, you remember the dream you had when you first started that business before life happened? And how can we get you to realize that before life happened, before investments, before you necessarily to stay in this? And how can I be of help to realize that dream that you have?

A.J. Lawrence:
I like that because myself, the early stages were external force and lucky. Had like either was born recently, wife would have, it was like, I knew I didn’t have any choice. So it was like, all right, just got to keep going. I don’t know how, but we’ll just keep going. And somehow generally that just show up every day, hit the sticks, and move the marks. Move the marks, move the sticks. I don’t know. I’m going to massacre a couple of sayings here. But it really was kind of a lot of success was just being there consistently. And yet I see a lot and I recognize also in my other efforts, if you’re not putting in that consistency and reminding yourself about the why, it’s easy to drift off. I’ve seen lots of entrepreneurs have a really cool thing, great skills, but as you said, wannabe, when things get tough, they’re like, why am I doing this? It is that interesting thing, how to create consistency around your belief. It seems simple, but I know in conversations with thousands of entrepreneurs and interviewing wonderful people like you, it is such a hard thing in practice.

Philip Blackett:
Yeah, I think it’s one of those things A.J. is just like the idea or the concept is the start of it. Now that you actually build it, that’s what makes like entrepreneurship so thrillseeking for a lot of people. It’s like actually like you’re building something like almost like alchemy and just like something that was just a thought or sentence or something and now is like you actually can like touch it and you can like realize what it actually looks like. And so when I work with clients with regard to like my dream business makeover, it’s really focusing on what I would call like my core four of dream business growth. Right? So I wanted to keep it real simple. I’ve been in school before.

A.J. Lawrence:
You went to Harvard. You didn’t just go to school, you went to Harvard. So come on don’t just kind of go yeah I went to school. I mean you are second Boston, but still you went to Harvard so. But all right.

Philip Blackett:
I didn’t want to hit on the Boston thing again for New Yorkers. You gotta be respectful here. Inspite me having my red socks red, but that’s another thing, right?

A.J. Lawrence:
Oh, you’re really…

Philip Blackett:
So basically the main focus on this is simplification is its own sense of sophistication, I would say. Like what is it exactly that we want business owners to do? Most business owners, they want to see their business grow. And that’s what I feel like is more my specialty and where I want to focus on. And so if I did like a simple like two by two table, I basically would have like four different ways of growing a business that some business owners tend to prioritize two of those versus the entire four. And so it’s really just kind of like taking the time to first broaden and open up somebody’s mind to see what is possible as far as their business and for how they can grow. Sometimes getting out of the box that they’ve been going through day in and day out, just kind of operating the business. You’re so busy like putting out fires and just keeping the doors open sort of thing versus like instead of a reactive, have a more proactive and strategic way of growing the business intentionally. Then that’s like part of my focus. And so when I think about the core four, on one side of the core four is basically what I would say is what you’re doing in the near term, like a year or so. Like you’re growing top line on one end and then bottom line the other. So you’re focused on first one, growing your sales top line in one year or so, and then the bottom line growing your profits, right? Bottom line one year or so. That’s where a lot of owners and operators focus on, like you have your own P&L. You’re focused on how do I get the sales up? How do I get the profits up? Right? That makes sense. We can help on both of those ends. They all work together, especially when you move on to that second column of that two by two. That’s toggling from the short term now to the long term. This is where things get more strategic, more intentional, more like, OK, where are you trying to go? Like this is where you’re at. This is where you’re trying to go.

The cool thing about sales is that we’re trying to bridge the gap. That’s all this is, is you’re trying to provide something that bridges the gap to where somebody is and where somebody is trying to go. So we’re talking about from the short term to the long term. Where do you want your business to go? So in the long term, if you’re trying to grow sales, yes, you can work internally. Yes, you can work organically to build your top line long term. What I focus on there as part of the core four is grow via mergers and acquisitions because there’s so much you can do within yourself. But be able to look at M&A as a possible way, a possible gateway for you to significantly or exponentially grow your top line over the long term and have a plan for it, that’s something significant that not many business owners really think either fits for their business or they don’t really have the time to really plan that out. And then the bottom line for the long term is what you were talking about alluding to before. What is this ultimately mattering?

When it’s all said and done, A.J, when you have a business, you want it to grow a certain part where it’s of value to you that if you want to sell it, it’s going to fetch a certain number for you that if it’s the right number, you say, yes, I’ll sell it. And you’ll write off to the distance in the sunset and live your best life in your next chapter or get back into business another place. Every business has a value or what I would call an exit value to it.

So what essentially happens there is if you want to be able to sell it at some point and you don’t even have to sell it right now, but oftentimes if you want to optimize your result in selling it, you should start planning for it now, even if you’re not planning on selling it in five or 10 years. Because basically it’s just like driving on a map or Google maps or Waze. Now, since people don’t have paper maps and that sort of thing, you have a destination where you’re trying to go. I’m trying to go to New York City from Boston.

You want to be able to plot it out and start making your way. It’s going to take some time, but you got to make that distance at some point anyways. So why not make sure you’re going the right route to get you to where you’re trying to go. So if you have a certain number for your business, you want to sell it at some point in time, the best time to start preparing for that is now, if not a few years ago. So it’s more so as far as growing your exit value, that long-term bottom line type of focus.

And so basically what I try to share with clients is we have the opportunity to address all four of these. Grow sales, grow profits, grow via &A and grow exit value. But it really is about what I’ve learned in my own experience that at the end of it, it all boils down to growth. One of my mentors said you’re either growing or you’re dying. And so with my clients and the people I work with, I don’t want any of them to die. So we got to focus on growth.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s funny you say that because I know from my own experience, I grew for a long time, you know, typical in a lot of service businesses and a lot of early stage businesses. The first couple of million dollars was word of mouth. And then I got lucky, I didn’t even know this was a strategic thing, but I sort of acqui-hired a few small teams that had services that were complementary to mine, but even better had clientele that worked well with the services I had.

And then their network of people for inbound, we were able to grow a few more million. And it was finally about then that I built a sales structure, but it was like, we grew so quickly once we finally got the sales structure that my salespeople were the best trading people. So I started pulling them off to help service clients thinking, well, we always get so many leads. We always have all these people asking. And then I lost my whale and I was overstocked with very smart people servicing that whale, which meant I had to cut there, which meant my next tier of clients were used to getting really smart people who were very expensive and they were gone.

So I lost that tier. And by the time I was able to restructure, it was like I don’t have the consistent lead structure that I had. The lesson I learned was yes, you can take breaths on your journey and you should look at your growth and infrastructure. But if you’re not growing, you’re just one mistake away. One very big mistake in my case, but close to blowing up your doors. So yeah, I agree with you 100% there.

Let’s talk about some transition points you’ve had in your journey when things got really difficult and what helped you move past that.

Philip Blackett:
So one that comes top of mind for me was when I, four years ago, when I bought my first business. It was a cemetery management company up in New England. It was in September of 2019. I was very excited to cross the finish line, sign the dotted line. I now own a business, saw all the different dreams I talked about before as far as where business was going to go, what it was going to mean for me and my family and that sort of thing. And everything was good for the first three months.

Right into 2020, something small that not many people on here might know about but I’ll just share here, happened on 2020 was COVID. And here I am basically, like as far as like a turning point for me was like, you’re in the euphoria of buying a business. You can now call yourself an owner or a CEO, all these different titles you can now give yourself. And now this is the first moment where I, along with many other business owners are getting punched in the mouth pretty hard. Starting in March that year in 2020 with COVID, where this is something that, as for me, I didn’t know about COVID or a pandemic before I bought this business. And it probably caught a lot of other business owners nationwide by surprise to the point where it’s like, okay, we now have governments shutting down businesses saying you can’t operate.

You got to fight to be seen as a essential business so you can actually have employees coming in to work. What do I do about dealing with, do I need hazmat suits for my guys or how much hand sanitizer do I need to buy in bulk or get masks before they run out of supply? Do I need to update HR policies? All this stuff was going on in my head and I wasn’t anticipating it whatsoever. And I think what was key about that A.J was, yes, I didn’t anticipate this and bear in mind millions of other people didn’t see this one coming either. But I can’t necessarily put my head in the sand like an ostrich and just hope that better times come ahead because you won’t be in business long. We have to see, okay, this is what’s happening. This is what I know about it. And what’s the goal in mind is that we gotta keep the ship moving. We got customers to take care of. Have some challenges to go in front of in this world, but we got to make sure that our team is supported. They have all they need to be successful. And by them being successful, they can then provide the best possible experience and service for our customers, especially going through a tough time. It was one of those things that a lot of people would initially say to me like, okay, Philip, like this was COVID, it was a pandemic. You deal with a death care company, I don’t mean to be morbid here, but wouldn’t that sound like a straight fit?

And in some sense, in all due respect, it may sound like it. But part of the thing when you buy a business is oftentimes you find out things that when you pop open the hood, sometimes you find certain things that you didn’t anticipate that you thought weren’t a big deal. That might be challenging now in this different environment that you have to adapt to. And so for example, I had a number of customers that we were serving that basically we pay a all-inclusive monthly fee for, right? So we’ll do all this stuff. We’ll bury, we’ll cut your grass, we’ll manage your records. We do all this for this one line item, which is fine if you were anticipating a certain number of burials during that time. If that number of burials you were anticipating that month went up 20%, 30%, 50 % or more because of COVID, that wasn’t extra revenue we were bringing in with that. They will already pay. We have a job to do. It’s just that that job has now increased significantly now. And those customers that were helping us keep the business afloat in that sort were very quickly becoming less and less profitable at that point because we were sending our teams out more often to do more burials, do more cutting more than what we anticipated.

And you still have to pay your team. So you’re paying them more each week. They have to get there somehow, so they have to get in a car or a truck in that instance and drive over there. At that time, diesel fuel was not cheap whatsoever. So you’re going to the gas station more times. So your fuel expenses going up more often. Your equipment is being used often more. So equipment repairs and maintenance is going up as well.

So essentially, what’s going on for us is that we were at a point where we had to adapt really quickly to a changing environment. Not just because of the pandemic and just the uncertainty that that brought in front of us, but we were trying to survive as a business because all of our costs were going up in addition to that. Not to mention that we had some customers that were planning on coming on board with us, which would have essentially doubled our business in 12 months, that because of the pandemic, they didn’t come on board with us. They changed their mind. And that’s not as bad until you realize I had to prepare for that growth. And that growth wasn’t just more so as like, okay, well, let’s just add another customer profile on our QuickBooks and that sort of thing and get everything ready for that. And you know, what’s the address? What’s the name? It wasn’t that. It was like, we had to make sure we had enough manpower, we had enough vehicles and we had enough equipment to do it. So we had to make the investment for all of that. So when we did take on more trucks and we did take on more excavators and loaders and we whacked in equipment and that sort and we found out into the pandemic that the customers we were anticipating were going to come on with us actually weren’t, we now were basically seeing what our pants down and we had to adjust. And so that’s what really started a, what I would say a three year putting out fires, roller coaster ups and downs, absolute constant adjustment process to keep everything afloat in our business.

A.J. Lawrence:
It is crazy cause business models, what would seem like such a headwind because of the choice of business model before you were even acquiring the company turned it into, did I actually reverse it? Sorry. should have should have been a tailwind became a headwind because of the business model and you’re not in a position, especially then to be able to change your business model on the fly to adapt. How did you come through this and what is this that you now use with your own clients for helping them with their business?

Philip Blackett:
Yeah. So the long story short was we did a lot of weekly adjustments. The main key for me was I wanted to do everything within my power, within reason to make sure that our team was covered for and they were paid every week because they had families, they had obligations on their end as far as like taking care of the rent, making sure they had groceries, making sure that their kids had what they needed for school and that sort. They needed gas in their cars too.

We need to do everything we could to adjust and adapt to this new environment for us, even if it meant making sacrifices. And personally, for me, I definitely can understand that word sacrifice quite a bit because there were many times that I made sure that our team was paid each Friday and I wasn’t. There were times where I took myself off a payroll for months on end and the only way I could make it as far as supporting my family was I actually took on a second job. And that second job was managing a Chick-fil-A franchise in the Boston area. And so I was doing that where I was working in the cemetery business in the morning and then shortly after lunch or so, I would change uniforms and drive across town and then work at a Chick-fil-A until closing time at 10 o’clock at night, and then repeat the same process the next day.

Like I remember once being in the fast food lane, taking somebody’s order and my phone rings. And one of my team members told me, Hey, Philip, truck 11 blew up. I was like, what do mean blew up? Like, you know, I’m at work. What’s going on? He said, no, but the truck is on fire. It blew up. What do you want to do about this? I’m thinking to myself, like, I literally am asking somebody if they want fries or a fruit cup and you’re telling me that my expensive truck that I invested in has just blown up that now is unusable and we still got work to do as far as our team. And we had to adapt to it. And I remember going through the insurance carrier and that’s where I to figure out how to think about next steps there, where it’s just like for me, one of the lessons I learned through this whole experience was it’s very helpful to have a team around you to support you.

And meaning like support the owner or the executive, like management wise. Because I got to a point where because of COVID, I couldn’t strategically grow my business the way I wanted to. I couldn’t proactively look at it in the way that as far as what things to add onto the business and stop working in the business. Like there were times where I was like, I couldn’t afford to hire somebody else to cut in the grass. So guess who was out cutting the grass with the rest of the team? Me.

Guess who else was wheat whacking alongside the tombstones and that sort of, and getting stones like repelled off of the blades hitting you and your shins and that sort of thing too. And thank God I had goggles on at the time. Me. I couldn’t complain because it was just like, if I didn’t do that, then that meant we might have to let somebody go. And that was a time where I did not want that to happen. And so I think whatever way it took to make it work, that’s what we did.

And so ultimately when it gets to your second question, A.J, is like, when it comes to like strategic growth for clients, I built a lot off of that experience for these past four years, where it’s just like what I experienced, I actually don’t want anyone else to have to go through where you don’t have the capacity to think strategically on how to grow the business, how to protect yourself against a future pandemic.

Now that we’ve experienced it, shame on us if we don’t already start thinking about what we have in place to put on reserves or to have already handed ready to access as far as capacity in case we do have another recession, which could happen next year. Or if we have another pandemic, which could happen. Or are we in an environment that might have some geopolitical issue impact us as well here in the States? Who knows?

So it’s like the part of it is to be prepared, be strategic, think about the long-term and start preparing yourself now working not in the business, not even on the business because either one you could have somebody working for you to help support you on those areas as chief executives and people on management teams, especially owners, small business owners, we need to start working above the business and seeing how our business itself is a product in itself. It produces this much revenue. It produces this much cashflow. This is a business that I could potentially sell as a whole business or as part of its assets. And you should be looking strategically on how can I further amplify what it has to offer to help it, help keep it protected from any threats, internal or external, but also be able to look at this in a way to how can I actually move this forward where it can continue to grow in spite of any headwinds that may come out our way.

A.J. Lawrence:
As someone who has gotten hit upside the head for not doing so, I always had the cocky belief because I kind of grew all three of the businesses I was able to sell came about because of my own initial skill capability at doing the service marketing media, whatever. And as we grew, even if I was doing less of it in the back of my head, things get in the back. I’ll just dive in. And that’s good when you’re small and you’re rubbing sticks together really quickly, but somewhere in the early seven figures, business complexity, size, the amount of moving parts really does change. And you’re in a position where if you’re not thinking about how to handle things, it may not happen once, but you know, it kind of becomes more fragile.

And at first it was a super strength I had that I could just jump in and fix the fire, fix the problem. But each problem was bigger the next time, bigger the next time, and I was getting weaker. That was stress more. So yes, I completely agree. I’ve learned the hard way that lesson. Mine was more making sure that the kitchen and the coffee was always cleaned or places swept and all that because no one else would. So yeah, I know hard.

Philip Blackett:
Which is helpful too, A.J. And at the same time, it’s also like a cautionary tale because as CEOs and owners, we also want to have an attitude that no job is beneath us. We want to have that humility that we’ll do whatever it takes to keep the business running. Even if it means sweeping floors or cleaning the coffee machine because somebody forgot. At the same time, there’s also jobs and tasks to be done that only you could do. And you’re only one person and there’s only 24 hours in the day. And so if you’re not able to do those types of jobs that you know that only you could do in that day, then your business loses out from that. It’s a lost day for that one. Like we gotta see if tomorrow you have the ability to do that. And if you can’t do it tomorrow, then your business lose out on that too.

And not to mention not only is the business suffering, but how sustainable is that for you personally, as you mentioned before, as far as getting stressed out. And if you have a family at home, does that bleed into the home life as far as like with your spouse or kids and that sort of thing, and your relationships with people that you hold dear where your business can very much be all in all for you. You eat, sleep, and drink it.

And everyone else is going to see the side effects of that too, one way or the other, positive or negative. So it’s like, how do you like proactively start to work on building some sort of sanity around that? And for me, like one of the things that if I were to do this all over again, it would have been helpful for me to be able to carve out some resources. So I can at least for a chief of staff or an executive assistant, one of the two, because I took on so many hats to get us through the pandemic.

It was exhausting to the point that everyone else is excited about Friday, but me. When people were asking, Philip, what are you going to do on this weekend? I told them I’m going to sleep and I’m praying that I’ll have an answer for next week when you go through this again. And the challenge behind that is that’s not sustainable. I got these gray hairs because of that stress. And it’s just like, you can take it on for a certain period of time but you can only keep doing that until it takes on a deeper wound for you to realize it.

Maybe it’s actually like something that happens in your health later on, maybe not this year, but maybe a couple of years down the line. You keep going down this hamster wheel and you’re just constantly working on your business, you can’t figure out a way to just give yourself some space and some time to think clearly that it may come to a point where your doctor has not a good news for you on your next checkup that makes you say, I gotta pump the brakes here. Hey, I need some help. Hey, I need to like build some team capacity here that helps support me because this has to be sustainable, not just for the business, but also for myself. Otherwise the business and my family and everyone else will suffer because of it.

A.J. Lawrence:
As I experienced, because I kept just trying to do more and more and more, my sleep dropped. Watching myself drift down over time below five hours a day, the amount of alcohol I was drinking. I drink at the end of the day with the team, I drink on my walk home, maybe a drink or two, or dinner. So was like at least three was the baseline and normally above.

Then the amount of times I was working out started decreasing. My weight blew up. All of sudden I was like, wait, when did I become my father? When did I become this round? Let me not say that because he sometimes listens to these. I became a lot more looking like my father than my mother because my mother is a tall stick and my dad, big round guy. But one thing that when reading through your material was the consistency of evaluating where you are in the business. Because the amount of times that I made any plan as things were happening, but then didn’t kind of revisit and I have a chemistry degree and all sorts of things. And it was like, yeah, you estimate and then you reevaluate based upon actuals. And when we started growing so quickly, I would just estimate and stick with it until things blew up.

And you kind of referenced earlier about the consistent fine tuning and you use the map reference for long-term. And I like that because it kind of leads to like, a couple of tuning error uncorrected early on, you’re going to go way, way, way off. But if you keep doing course corrections throughout, you’ve got to be pretty close on the way and maybe a couple of minutes late into your destination. So how do you kind of help your entrepreneurs going through your program to course correct?

Philip Blackett:
Yeah. And I think you hit on a key word there to emphasize it’s course correction, right? It’s not so advanced that a rocket scientist has to explain it to you, to us. But at the same time, course correction is what rocket scientists and the people at NASA have to deal with as well. Because I remember one mentor told me when it comes to landing a space shuttle on the moon, you got to solve two questions and be very crystal clear on those two questions if you’re gonna do this. The first question is, how do we get there? The second question is, how do we get back?

If you don’t answer both of those questions with crystal clear accuracy here, we’re going to have a problem, Houston. Because essentially what’s going on there is, I know where I’m trying to go as far as the moon is concerned and I know I have to take off here in Houston or in Florida here in that sort. But once that rocket is off and running, like you said, it’s about course correction the whole time, because if you, I’m not a math major, but I know enough to know that if you just go off just a few degrees and you stay consistent those degrees, you’re going to veer for the sun after a while. And I can promise you, you won’t be coming back after that. Right?

So it’s a similar thing with business. It’s the thought of, okay, let’s get clear on what are we trying to achieve this year? We can talk about three year, five year plan too. But in this sense, in this scenario we’re talking about, okay, what are we trying to achieve? And as we achieve, as we start moving towards it, let’s build in an expectation that we are going to course correct, that we are going to make adjustments and adapt along the way.

This is not something that is just like two plus two is four and that’s it. Like it’s a so simple, straightforward, black and white is incontestable. There’s gonna be certain things just by the fact that business is like another person told me before the great thing about business is that you work with a lot of good people. The bad thing about business is that you also have to work with a lot of people. There’s a lot of variables that come in play for you to reach your goal. It’s not as simple as just somebody individually doing it. But when you’re having other people, as far as like employees, you’re engaging with customers, you got vendors, you got investors, you got, you know, all these different stakeholders that you’re having to account for. You got infrastructure, you got equipment, you got technology, all this other stuff that you’re trying to like move together, almost like sheep. Like herding cats here as towards a certain goal, there’s gonna be certain ones that stray off.

You gotta pause every one and reach over and grab the other one and bring them back to the bunch and keep moving along, moving along. Then a lion or a bear is gonna jump in the middle of it trying to take some of your sheep away. You don’t have to battle that thing like David and just get that bear off of him. So you don’t have any casualties along the way. So the thought is like, that is a given about business that it’s almost never going to be a straight shot. Let’s just go ahead and just be on the same page that it’s not going to be that. Okay, given that if we’re on the same page there and we all understand it’s going to have to be some course correction, regardless of our goal here, then let’s figure out what are we going to do? How we’re to go about doing it? And then let’s get that feedback and figure out are we still on the right path? Do we need to make an adjustment? How do we need to make the adjustment and try that? And keep going.

Oftentimes, business is just a series of experiments until you find the one that works that you’re willing to scale it and reap the benefits of. But you have to keep trying. You have to keep testing to find out what works. Otherwise, you’re going to be still at point A when you try to get to point Z.

A.J. Lawrence:
Agree. There’s all sorts of things you can do to kind of increase the likelihood of your experiment doing better. But at the end of the day, it really is all right, let’s try and let’s quickly as possible either take the winnings and re-bat or cut our losses before we wipe out our pile.

You’ve dealt with a lot of difficulties in this and getting to this point here and you’re still growing, you’re still helping other entrepreneurs and you’re still building a really cool business. How are you going about defining success? Like what is success going to be for you? Not for the businesses and stuff, everything, but for you?

Philip Blackett:
I think it’s a great question, A.J. I think that as you get older, your definition starts to do its own course correction too, right? It starts to change and evolve. It’s like what’s important to you at 22 is a lot different than like 35 or 46 and that sort. And so what I can at least say at 38 for me, like success for me is how am I being a good steward of everything I’ve experienced up to this point? Meaning, not just keeping it to myself and just saying like, I’ve got all these experiences. Look at my resume, look at my record, look at my education. I’m content with that. Now it’s more so it’s like, how do I look at myself not as like a lake or just a pool, but how can I look at myself as like a river? The difference between those two is that a lake sits there and it’s static. You dump and you pour and it accumulates.

But it’s there and people can jump in and people can jump out. Right? But it’s basically just static versus a river. It flows and it’s going from one destination to another. And it just keeps flowing and people can ride that current to where they’re trying to go to. And you’re basically the facilitator with what you have to offer to help them get to where they’re trying to go to while refreshing yourself along the way.

And so how I look at it is like I want to be that river where everything I’ve experienced up to this point, I don’t just keep it to myself, good or bad. It’s more so how do I help use this to facilitate somebody else’s growth, help somebody else get to where they’re trying to go. And in the process, trusting that as I do that, I benefit as well. So it’s ultimately a win-win scenario when it’s all said and done, but I have to make that first move to put myself out there to be willing to give, be willing to serve others as I grow as well. Because if I want to be great, I believe I have to be also a servant of others, not just having people serve me. So why not just take the first step and say, hey, how can I serve somebody today? How can I help somebody today? How can I help them get more where they’re trying to go? Because one of my biggest mentors, Zig Ziglar, once said it, the paraphrase, if you would just help just enough other people get what they want, you’ll get what you want.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think that’s a lesson that really is worth repeating because too often I think ego becomes around the money. Call us beyond eight figures, but the idea is that’s aspirational. But the truth I’m learning from people like yourself coming on the show is you find a way that yes, it’s a value system. It’s a model whenever that you are gaining value money from doing what you do. But if you do it in such a way that the people who receive your value exchange are improved in themselves, whatever it may be, coding, technology, products, lessons, you will do better incrementally directionally correcting a long run. And that is something and I think it’s very hard because ego and just life comes into the fact. It’s just the consistent remembering of that. Think it’s the reflection on creating value means you need to serve. And I think there’s a lot that us in the audience can learn from that.

So Philip, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. I appreciate you sharing the difficulties you’ve had as someone who’s also been there. It is not an enjoyable ride, but what you’ve done and the work you’re doing now to help other businesses avoid that and also succeed on their own, I think is pretty powerful. So thank you very much.

Philip Blackett:
Thank you so much, A.J., just for the opportunity to speak with you and your audience here. Hopefully this was helpful for them as well.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think there’s a lot and there’s so much more I want to talk about. But first off, how can the audience find out more about you? Where should I go? What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Philip Blackett:
Yeah. So I basically reside in LinkedIn. So if you happen to be on LinkedIn, just look up Philip Blackett, P-H-I-L-I-P-B-L-A-C-K-E-T-T on LinkedIn. Happy to connect with anyone there. And then you can also check out my website at www.dreambusinessmakeover.com. Dreambusinessmakeover.com.

A.J. Lawrence:
We’ll have all the links in the show notes and the email when this episode comes out and also in our socials everyone. I think the understanding of what you’re building for all the ways when you’re talking about calling a shot and looking and course correcting over time, that’s a powerful thing. And yes, you hear a lot of people say it, but I think it is way so up to describe is one of the better ways of aligning with the real life of a business because putting out fires and dealing with the day to day eats us so much, especially when we’re in this early late six figures, early seven figure space. It really is difficult to get the breathing space. So finding that it consists of course correct is a really powerful thing. So everyone please go check out Philip. I think he has some great information that he puts up on LinkedIn on a regular basis.

It’s kind of how I first saw him when he was talking about some of the difficulties he’s had. And I really thought that was powerful. And also, if you enjoyed today’s show, please go to your podcast and listening platform of choice and give us a favorable review. It helps other people find us and it makes it easier for us to find really cool entrepreneurs like Philip come on the show and talk about their journeys. So then we can all learn more. Please go give this a great review.

All right. Have a wonderful time and I’ll talk to you soon.