In today’s episode of The Render Podcast, Cam sat down with Corbin Bahcall of Night Owl Coffee to chat about all things entrepreneurial and most importantly, how to sustain your energy during some of the busiest seasons of work. Naturally being the king of coffee, you might think living on caffeine is the quick and simplest answer, but there is so much more to it than that. 

How do you truly sustain your energy and what you are able to continue accomplishing within your business? Is it personal devotions each morning? What about a quiet jog around your neighborhood? Are you taking the time to genuinely be with your family when you are home from work? Join us in today’s episode to learn more ways about how to sit back and refocus during some of the busiest seasons in your work life.

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Growth Mindset vs. Fixed Mindset

On the idea of can you just be one or the other, both can certainly exist at the same time. If you are a product or service based business, you have the idea and plan of your business, but as you expand your clientele and events you have worked, a new idea or could spark and you may think that you want to expand upon that. When you focus on what services you do offer, perhaps you work on perfecting your systems and processes as well as the products you offer so that those can work in your favor in the long run. We want to absolutely do the best with what we do, so that means continuously working to better those products and services. Think about what your core services are, are you doing that better than you were when you started? You should be. You can easily find yourself thinking if you should add this or that to your offerings when someone asks about it, and the answer should lie in what can you execute that is still done really, really well. 

When it comes to team culture and how you want your business to grow and form, that can certainly be where your growth mindset comes into play. Of course you stick to what your best products and services are, but growing as you go is also a good key part of running a business. Thinking about how you can do better and be better is a good way to continue growing your business. 

Sustaining Your Energy During Busy Season

Learning how to navigate the volume of work that comes with working in the event industry is seemingly never ending. Of course the workload has the natural ebb and flow, but overall you should know what to expect. How can you work to balance the ambition to grow while simultaneously sustaining your team along the way? You could set yourself up for success by setting black out dates that you know you will be making sure to take some time off from work. Establish this from the beginning and you can ensure that your team will run smoothly for the remainder of the year. What looks good on a spreadsheet does not always look good for your people. By your people, we mean your team. When you don’t take the time to let them take the time to sit and rest, you begin to see burnout on your team and that will affect the quality of your products and services that you are executing for your clients.

It makes the world of difference when you take the time to check in with your team. Get a feel for what they are going through. Are they tired? Are they excited for more? Are they at max capacity on their physical work load? Taking the time to touch base with your team members is the key to knowing how to move forward for your next event. In return to checking on your team, they will feel as if they can come to you, as their leader, and talk about what may need to be done in their role to have equal parts rest and work. 

Full Circle of Entrepreneurship

Look at your role within your team and ask how you can preserve one another. How can you quite possibly sustain your energy and preserve your peace? When you think about entrepreneurship, we all gravitated toward it for the craving of not being in the 9 to 5 corporate world, dress codes, or having strict systems and processes in place to abide by. Then you realize you are 5 years in and hitting over a million dollars in revenue and those systems and processes are what will continue to keep you going. You are a creative person in the naive cycle of entrepreneurship and then as the years go on, you grow up and have continued to bring in more money and now you are seeing the business side of things.

As the years go on, you have skin in the game and you are now deemable to be booked and with that comes the higher budgets that influx in there too. Those systems and processes you have implemented are key to keeping on track and staying together as a business owner.  

Personal Development

Prioritizing and focusing on your mental, emotional, and physical health is what naturally sustains us. Cam talks about how after 11 years in business, she now makes a point to prioritize those. You can only go so far without caring for those components of who you are as a person. Things such as reading a devotional each morning, going for a light jog, or prioritizing quiet alone time in the mornings are the small things that can make a world of difference. When you can prioritize the things that truly matter, you are a better business leader in your industry and are able to perform and show up better.

Onboarding Process

When you own a small business that is proving to be most all things not corporate america, you may notice that you get excited and want to onboard quickly so that you can grow and produce more events. However, you must have a process to that onboarding step. When you don’t, what do you tell your new hire about the company when they show up for their first day? What about when they are put in a role that is more so a hey, watch me do this then you do this, how does that prove to work out in the long run? There is certainly this stigma to “grow grow grow”, but what are you doing to make sure this growth can sustain itself? These are the things that we did not want in the corporate culture, yet we desperately need to sustain life within our own creative businesses to hold the structure together so we can continue to grow. Corbin of Night Owl Coffee preaches his company’s culture and shows up to help one another along the way. Approaching your job as here is who we are as an organization and here is how we are called to serve. Our mission isn’t just to serve our clients, our mission is to delight everyone in our presence and to create an experience that is memorable to everyone. 

If you are looking for a good read to gain entrepreneurial inspiration from, Cam and Corbin have a few personal recommendations for you! 

1. Mindset by Carol Dweck
2. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
3. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
4. The Man Behind Microsoft by JR MacGregor

As a leader, you can read about all of these serial entrepreneurs who have made a huge impact on our world, but think about what your autobiography would look like. What story do you want to tell your audience about you and your endeavors? 

Learn more about Night Owl Coffee and make sure you reach out to them for any events you may have coming up! As always, thank you for being here on today’s episode! We hope that you are loving this new series! We will see you next week, friend.

Joyfully,

Raven Scott | Podcast & Marketing Coordinator