Hello my friends. Today let’s talk about what my day to day life looks like now that I have successfully scaled my businesses. And I want to talk to you guys about some of the crappy feelings that I didn’t know would come with scaling. And my best advice for someone who is in the midst of scaling or about to scale or dealing with these unexpected feelings.

This is episode number 98. I’m your host, Becca Pike. And it is time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Hi, friends, how are we doing? So in all honesty, I don’t watch much TV, okay? I never really have. Growing up we had a TV, we had one TV in the house. It was in the living room, my parents dominated it, okay? But when I moved out at age 17, I actually ended up buying myself a television for my first apartment. But it only lasted like three months because I sold it for a tattoo. Because priorities, right?

I didn’t repurchase a television until 10 years later when I was married to Mark and we had a baby on the way. So really, I’ve only had a television truly in my life for like eight years. And because I didn’t grow up glued to it, I had to learn how to navigate life without a TV for so long, right? Like I don’t really turn it on that much. But when I do, I do. I’ve got a very addictive personality.

And with that being said, every now and then a show will catch my eye and I won’t be able to pull away from it. You know the drill, right? So for example, I went through a Dexter phase. I mean, that was a long time ago. That was like when I first got my TV, back when I was like 25. I watched all of Dexter. I was obsessed with it.

I went through a very unhealthy Peaky Blinders phase. Like I lost my entire life to that show. I became obsessed. I thoroughly love Ted Lasso, but we have a healthy relationship, me and Ted. But right now, guys, I am deep, I am deep into Greenleaf on Netflix.

Have you guys watched Greenleaf? It doesn’t resemble the other shows that I’m into. It is a, I guess you would call it a drama. It’s just a drama. It’s like scandalous infidelity, he said she said, family dynamics drama. It’s like a modern day soap opera. And I cannot get enough.

I’ve watched 11 episodes in the last 48 hours. 11 episodes. I have not watched 11 episodes in 48 hours of anything, besides maybe Peaky Blinders. But that was during a time of my life that I’m not proud of. Did you guys watch Peaky? It was good. It was good. Okay.

But anyway, I’m recording this, it’s a Monday. And as soon as I get finished here on this podcast, I have about three hours until my kids get home from school and I’m going to go sneak in another room and sneak in two episodes before they get home because it is so juicy. I cannot wait to see what happens. I’m on episode number 11. I’m wrapping it up and getting ready to go to episode number 12. It’s all I think about right now. I’m like addicted to it.

Now, one of the reasons that I’m allowed to watch a show on a Monday at 12 o’clock is because I have successfully scaled my businesses. And that’s what I want to talk to you guys about today. Because everyone talks about scaling, how much they want to scale, or they’re trying to scale, or they will eventually scale, or they’re going to be happy when they scale or whatever. Because the American business owner’s dream is to be making money while we’re away from our business, right? That is scaling. That’s the dream.

And I do agree. I mean, honestly, I believe that 98% of business owners don’t own their businesses at all. Their business completely owns them. And I want to see business owners build a structure and a foundation in their business that allows them to step away a little. And that looks different for everyone, okay?

So your dream might be that you’re still working in your business, but only three days a week. Or it might be that you’re just wanting to take a week off every couple of months. Or maybe you’re like, I don’t ever want to work in July ever again. So I’m kind of getting to a place where I don’t work in December. December is becoming a time that I step away. And I kind of just don’t want to work in December ever again for the rest of my life.

Or maybe you’re just like, I just want to fucking vacation. I just haven’t had a vacation with my family in five years since I started this business. And you just downright just want to take your family on a trip. And you want to take your family on a trip knowing that you don’t have to completely shut down your business and piss off your customers in order for you to get some margaritas in the sun, right?

Maybe your dream is to hire staff and to have people supporting you, taking tasks off your back. And not only taking tasks off your back, but delivering those tasks in a better way than you could have ever done it yourself.

All of this is possible. More than possible, right? And it’s actually pretty simple, right? Step one, learn how to hire. Step two, learn how to delegate. Step three, step away so other people can do it for you. But, like most things, it’s not as simple as it sounds when you begin peeling the layers of the onion back, right?

So we often don’t scale because we continue to tell ourselves these stories of like, only I know how to run the business well. Or I can’t afford to hire anyone. Or no one will love this company the way that I do it. Or they won’t be as good as I am. Or there are no good employees out there. I don’t want to overcomplicate my business, blah, blah, blah, right?

And without realizing that what is actually overcomplicating their business is you trying to do everything in your business while holding the world on your shoulders. And pretending that you’re okay and excited to go to your kid’s soccer practice tonight when you really are like one stubbed toe away from losing your absolute shit and burning your whole house down.

Back story, I come from a long line of absolute workhorses. Blue collar workhorses, okay? And I admire the shit out of that. I am so thankful that I come from this family and that I get to see what I have seen. So, for example, I had a mother that showed me what hard work really looked like. My entire childhood, teenage life, all of it, it was all in the same house. We had the same house. We moved in when I think I was like five. And we kept that house until I was like 26. So all my memories are in that house.

And my entire childhood and teenage life my mother was up at 4:30 in the morning. I never saw her sleep past 4:30. And it was comfortable too. It was like I took comfort knowing that when I emerged from my room to go to school, Mom was already on her second cup of coffee. She was there, she was hustling, she was getting out the door to slay the day. Right?

And looking back now, first of all, I wish someone would have given that woman a travel mug because the memories are ingrained in my soul of her rushing around with her creamy coffee sloshing out of her cup all over the place trying to get out the door.

I don’t know why that is what stuck with me the most, but it did. I just picture her driving away with her mug being held out away from her as she went over all the bumps on our gravel driveway, just sloshing her coffee all over the place. Mom, I’m going to buy you some travel mugs.

But she would commute 40 minutes to work and she would commute 40 minutes back home at 5:30pm, okay? And I remember watching the clock and just waiting for her to get home. And she would drag herself in exhausted and she would start cooking dinner. And I admire her. Like she worked overtime, she worked a lot on Saturdays. And she just was like the little engine that never stopped. And I think that that’s where a lot of my work ethic comes from.

And my dad was a workhorse too. I mean, he worked in factories and he worked kind of odd jobs all over the place until I was about 11 years old. And when I was 11, he became disabled. He lost one of his legs to a disease that he has. And with that followed a very long, long journey, about 10 to 12 years, of a pain pill addiction and severe depression. And he didn’t work after I was around 11 years old.

And most days he spent holed up in his room only emerging every few days, which left my mom working her ass off to keep the house up, and to be quite honest, to supply him with his addiction. And honestly, I think it’s interesting, I think I mourned my dad. Because in my mind I have two different dads. I had the dad that I had leading up to being 11 and then I had the dad after 11, which were very different and very abruptly transitioned, right?

So I think I mourned my first dad. And I didn’t know that I was doing that, but looking back now as an adult I have these feelings that very much align with someone who has lost somebody. Like someone who had a parent pass away. Like I lost the younger version of my dad before the amputation, before the addiction.

The dad that took us hiking and was always working out and lifting weights in the backyard. And he was always sunburned and mowing the grass. And he loved to drive his car with his windows down and music blaring. And he was always taking us out for ice cream and giving me long walks at night to look up at the stars, like awesome dad.

But that man went away very rapidly when I turned 11. And, to be honest, was kind of replaced with a ghost that lived in our house. A ghost that almost never spoke, stopped attending everything. He didn’t show up for any of my sports, my graduations, my senior nights, my prom pictures. I had to beg him to come to my wedding.

And this lasted from the time I was 11 Until I was well out of the house and married. But I don’t blame him. I blame addiction and depression. And I have a very soft place in my heart now for addicts, recovering addicts. I just have a lot of heartstrings tied to that because the dad that I knew was a phenomenal dad. And then addiction and depression stole him from me and from my family.

And unfortunately, I’m no stranger to addiction. It runs its course through my family, and maybe even through me in a lot of ways. Ways that are somehow more socially acceptable, like when you’re a college girl and you’re drinking morning, afternoon and evening it’s normalized, right, through the university scene.

I’ve felt addicted to things like work and to working out and shows and stuff. So I’m very thankful I never let my addiction go anywhere that could completely ruin my life, and I’ve always been able to rein it back in. But addiction runs through my family. And anyone who knows and loves an addict, my heart goes out to you and I understand you so much.

But all of that, I kind of went off on a tangent. That’s all another story for another time. It’s safe to say that my dad is now sober. And he has been for about seven years. But it did take a toll on him. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t still to this day trying to get to know him again, which has been a bit of an uphill battle. But he is a good man. He is sober. And he’s in our lives. And I’m happy for that.

So I come from a long line of work horses. So my mom was always working. My brother began working at 16. I began working at 14 cleaning houses as much as possible. My dad’s mom worked until the day she died. My dad’s grandmother ran a house of 13 kids. The kind of woman up before dawn running a farm.

One time when I saw her she was, at the time, around 90. Maybe 92, 91. I saw her catch a chicken and cut its head off and have it baked and broiled on the table within like two hours flat, okay? Fucking savage. Savage woman.

And I was the same when it came to work. I don’t know that I have the right words to articulate how much I worked from age 14 to 26. I mean, day in, day out, double shifts, triple shifts, picking up shifts. Even if I gave myself a day off, I would spend that day doing other things to make money, okay?

So while I was building my businesses, or one business at the time. While I was building Massage Strong I couldn’t wait to create enough passive income through scaling so that I could stop the workaholic pattern of my family, right? Like I had dreams of waking up slowly and taking my kids to school. And having enormous amounts of time to cook, and clean my house, and go on hikes, and have hobbies.

And I wanted to break this generational belief that ran through my family that you have to be a workhorse to get money. You have to be physically working to get paid. And I was going to prove that I could make money while not being physically the one doing it, right? And I did. And it worked. Except when it didn’t.

You see, something that I wasn’t prepared for was how ingrained that blue collar work ethic was in my soul and how much I had it entangled with my purpose on this earth. So I began scaling. And at first it allotted me a day off per week or so and I loved it. And I celebrated it. And it was honestly amazing. And I spent that day every week that I was off just planning and dreaming and building out a game plan for making the business even bigger, but just excited to go back to work tomorrow.

So even my day off was work, but I didn’t quite catch that at the time. And then I kept scaling and growing. And before I knew it I had two days off per week. And then three days off per week because I’m hiring people to work for me so that I can just kind of transition away. And I noticed myself getting itchy.

One of those days off, I would spend planning and brainstorming on behalf of the business. On the second day off of the week, I would kind of putter around and it felt like tennis balls bouncing around in my head about the work that I didn’t really have a role with on those days because everything was taken care of and I just felt anxious.

And by the third day off each week, those tennis balls would be bouncing around in my head so hard. While it felt like I was sitting on my hands. I had zero idea what to do with myself. My mind has transitioned to full blown anxiety. I found myself feeling very itchy like I just wanted to get back to the office. I wanted to get back in, roll my sleeves up and get back to the grind.

When cognitively I knew that I was exhausted. Cognitively I knew that I didn’t want to work myself to death but I had the strongest foundation. I had created such synapses in my brain to believe that my worth came from working. And when I’m at home, I’m not creating anything of worth. I had never not worked, right?

This isn’t how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to have these days off each week to relax and raise my babies and let my businesses grow. And in my mind I was going to just be so happy and fulfilled. But I felt like, again, like I was strapped down to a chair sitting on my hands. And my entire body wanted to be hustling and working and exhausted. And I know it sounds crazy, but I also know that you get it.

You see, when we scale our businesses, it’s not as simple as what I said earlier, which is to learn to delegate and hire and step back. It is relearning our relationship with our own purpose and our work. And, for me, all arrows were pointing towards Becca is a hustler. She’s a mover and she’s a shaker. She gets shit done. She goes to bed exhausted, just like the woman before her and the woman before that, and before that.

And there’s still a part of me that I catch yelling at me when I’m watching Greenleaf on a Monday afternoon. Even after all the healing I’ve done with my work relationship. But something I constantly remind myself is that our world as we know it, is completely adapting. Every single year after year after year, it is adapting.

Technology, internet, social media, the press, it is becoming so much easier to create a life for our family without working all day. We have so many opportunities that our grandparents didn’t have. They had to be working so much more than us.

We can learn how to use social media. We can learn how to advertise for free. We can do things that are just laid out so perfectly for us because of technology that has come in that we are given this opportunity to create a life where we don’t have to be physically present to create money.

And I started realizing that maybe working my ass off all day and coming home exhausted isn’t actually the most respectable way to live a life. I know that it took away from the relationship that I had with my mom. Would we have been closer if she was home watching Greenleaf when I got off the bus? I don’t know, maybe. Would we have had a better relationship if she had the time to pick me up from school? Maybe.

But I have deeply ingrained in the last few years that I deserve an abundant amount of rest and joy and unproductivity. I love thinking about the way our ancestors lived. I try to eat very primally. I try to think about how my circadian rhythms are tied to the sun and how I need to be earthing and getting my ions in through the ground. And you might call me a hippie, but I think it’s just general knowledge that has been lost over time.

And our ancestors, the healthiest and most well adapted humans to our Earth lived lives of abundant play. Research shows that hunters and gatherers spent about one eighth of their day hunting and gathering. Almost all of their day was spent in play and leisure.

Swimming, playing games, taking multiple naps, sunshine, building community, having sex, storytelling around the fire, weaving baskets, making tools. But not in an obsessed, driven, workhorse way that they were making baskets. They did it with their feet up watching Netflix in the background and a tall glass or Merlot next to them. You dig? And that’s a fact.

The people in my scaling mastermind, 30 More, it’s interesting watching them because they’re becoming familiar with what they least expected, same thing is myself. The scaling itchies is what I call them. The itchy feeling that you should be doing more. And often I get on the Facebook group and I’m watching them all interact. And several of them have come to the group and said, “I’m scaling. I have all this time on my hands and I’m realizing I don’t know what to do with that time.”

And we talk about this extensively in the weekly coaching that we have in that mastermind. And I think this is probably why that mastermind revolves so much around health and fitness. You guys might have heard me say it, but I don’t ever market that this mastermind has anything to do with health and fitness because that would be misleading. It is a business mastermind.

But anyone that comes through it knows that we discuss our physical body, our energy, our mental health often on top of the business and the strategy and the analytics and all that. And we do this because when scaling, all of a sudden, your focus turns back to you.

And most people don’t like that. They don’t know what to do with that. They think something’s wrong. They’ve been trained to ignore that part of their body. They’ve been trained to push through anything, right?

So when scaling, you finally have time to actually check in with yourself. And a lot of people haven’t had time to check in with themselves in so long that they don’t like what they see when they check in. Or they realize that they’ve lost interest in the things that used to interest them and now their entire life is consumed by their business. But now that you take away that business, they don’t know who they are.

They don’t know what they’re supposed to do with their day to day. They don’t know what hobbies they like. And they don’t like that feeling, so they just go back to work. And they work, work, work, instead of becoming curious and breaking open what they don’t like to see and studying it. And deciding who they want to be now. And not just covering it up and not just buffering with work, but truly imagining what their life could be and deciding what it could look like and going after it that way.

Most people never create enough space to even consider any of this because their day starts with sloshing coffee all over the house at 4:30 in the morning as they rush out the door. And it ends with them crawling back home at 6pm to start dinner and bedtime routines. But, my friends, on the other side of that self-worth bullshit that is tied to how productive you are, is the life that you are working so hard to get.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go turn this microphone off. I’m going to go put on the biggest sweatpants you have ever seen, one of Mark’s t-shirts, my hair in a bun. I’m going to take my makeup off at 1pm and I’m going to turn on Netflix and I’m going to get some alone time before my kids come home. And when they arrive, I’m going to relax into them.

And I’m going to relish in the fact that I am doing exactly what I was built to do. Play and enjoy and be curious about the little things in life. Like how the hell my four year old daughter keeps beating me in Candyland. I’d like to know the answer to that.

So my parting advice for you, guys, go work your ass off to scale your business. Don’t work your ass off to just continue to run on the hamster wheel. If you’re going to work your ass off, work your ass off in a way that sets you up for your future. And don’t be afraid of getting the itchies. The itchies are a part of the game.

When you begin scaling and you don’t know what to do with yourself, you don’t know what to do with your life, and you don’t know what hobbies you even like anymore and you’ve got yourself a full afternoon and you want to watch Netflix but you’re telling yourself you shouldn’t, don’t lean out of that. Lean into it. Get curious about it. It is time to relearn yourself, okay? Love you.

Oh and PS, the deadline for the 30 More mastermind is May 5th. So what is today? It’s like end of March. Is it? Yes, it is end of March, so you have about four weeks. So if you have brought in $50,000 or more in the top line revenue in your last 12 months, you can apply to the 30 More mastermind. This is a $25,000 tuition for six months.

We’re having our kickoff party in Lake Tahoe in July, following six months of high-level masterminding. Our goal from the very beginning since we’ve started this mastermind is for you to double your revenue while cutting your workload in half within the first year. We have had more students succeed in this goal than not, and we take massive pride in that. You must also enjoy a good cocktail every now and then or you’re not allowed to apply. I’m just kidding, kind of. Okay, bye, love you.

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Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. If you’re looking to get more clarity and momentum for your business, visit hellyescoachingonline.com. See you next week here on The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast.