Episode 32:Three Rotting Rutabagas
What do restaurants have to do with independent consulting businesses? We try, and partly succeed, at answering this question.
Summary
Nick and Kai use Chicago restaurant stories as a lens for consulting business lessons, moving from a beloved bar’s sudden closure to constraint-heavy kitchens that punch above their weight. The core thread is how to handle failure without freaking out publicly, with a side debate on where useful vulnerability ends and client-repelling distress begins.
Highlights
- Nick requires a video call for every first client meeting. Every engagement that skipped one went poorly. He can’t explain the pattern, but it held consistently enough that he made it a hard rule.
- Kai’s framework for unfamiliar situations: before calling something bad, ask specifically in what ways it’s bad and in what ways it’s working. Blanket dismissal forfeits the learning.
- Nick’s toolkit for business crises includes therapy, a bootstrapper mastermind, daily meditation, journaling, and exercise. His rule: freakout mode creates three new problems for every one it tries to fix.
- Nick calls public signs of distress ‘rotting rutabagas.’ Admitting a mental breakdown publicly, broadcasting a failed launch with no analysis, or forcing positive spin on obvious trouble all read to potential clients the way three rotting vegetables read to a grocery shopper.
- Kai pushes back: a calm, analytical teardown of a failed launch can build confidence, because it shows self-diagnosis and the ability to apply corrections. The difference is framing it as ‘here’s what I’ll change next time’ rather than broadcasting distress.
- Zingerman’s deli in Ann Arbor sends all customer-facing staff to acting school before they’re allowed on the floor. Nick says every visit has felt like ‘Google in 1998 levels of positivity’ and he has never heard of anyone having a bad interaction with the staff.
- Nick’s method for handling a frustrating client message: step away, take a walk, journal about it, then write the response. The client sees four minutes of silence. The one genuine crisis he describes was a client breaking contract the same day his second mortgage loan fell through and his partner lost her job.
Read the transcript
Aaron and I went to Analog two days before it closed, and it was packed for one. So they’re not hurting for business, right? The landlord was okay with them to the best of my understanding. And I remember walking out of that restaurant being like, Thank God this is in our neighborhood. It is everybody’s service is great. The cocktails are always interesting. They’ve gotten next level with the food. I had some of the best fried chicken of my entire stupid life at that restaurant. And then that Tuesday, I get a DNA info article from a friend of mine that’s like, analog closes. We don’t know why. And I’m like, what the hell is going on? And me and Aaron just like, I called her in the middle of the day. I’m like, horrible news. And she’s like, did a family member die? I’m like, no, analog closed. And we just sat in silence on the phone for like a minute. She’s like, is it? Is it rehabbing? Is it going to reopen? When do I get it back? Can I have it now? Why aren’t I having it right now? And And I just find out, like, nope, we’re done, that’s it, last service. Thank you so much for all of your patronage. And I’m just like, shocked.
You know, I’m always fascinated by the restaurant industry, and I think you highlighted something very, very interesting at the start here. You don’t understand it, and you want to understand if it’s bad, well, in what ways is it bad, and if it’s good, in what ways is it? Is it good? And I think applying that sort of framework to anything that’s unknown, this really connects back to the research process we’ve talked about multiple times. When you’re going down a new path with a client or on a project or with a service within your business, well, you don’t necessarily know if it’s going to succeed or not. Or you might see somebody else doing something that’s odd. And it’s very easy to dismiss it saying, like, that doesn’t conform to the Best practices, I know that must be dumb. But by taking that step back, like you said, and saying, Okay, I don’t yet know if this is bad or not. Let me analyze it, let me look at it. If it is bad. In what specific ways is it bad? Since just to dismiss it as, no, that’s terrible, you lose out on so much potential information and potential learning. But instead, if you say, well, okay, in what specific ways is this not living up to the hype it’s generating? Or in what ways is it generating the hype and living up to it? You learn so much more. And I think that’s a really valuable lesson to think about in the scope of any product or service or business offering.
You know, every project I’ve ever had that’s gone south, which you know, the very few of them, right? All of them have taught me something, right? They teach me something about the different ways in which a project can go south. And every time I have some horrible disaster unfold in front of me. I’m stressed and I’m miserable and I’m having Yanaver in the evening and I’ve switched away from my usual chartreuse, which is horrible. And but I end up coming out of it grateful for the experience and better equipped with how to address it later. Maybe I need to change something in the application process. Maybe I didn’t set the expectations correctly. Maybe I didn’t qualify out the lead early enough and I need to figure out the reasons by which I qualify out that lead, right? It’s why I’ve forced video calls for the first call. You have to see my face. It’s because You know, I don’t know why this is, but for some reason, video calls, all of my engagements go well. And if I start without a video call, it doesn’t. Okay, well, I don’t know why that is, I can speculate. But now I require a video call. So I learned from that, right? I actually, I kind of don’t say I enjoy going to bad restaurants. I definitely avoid bad restaurants. But it’s impossible to be into restaurants and not go to bad restaurants a lot, right? Or restaurants that throw you off a little bit, or restaurants that need tweaking. I’ve had very few meals that I would consider perfect in my life. I could count them on two hands and I would have fingers left. So, okay, well, what about the imperfect meals? You can be a critic about a meal that blew your mind, right? So we, Kaya, you and I went to a meal called Geist, and I actually, I remember telling you at one point in Copenhagen, like That was good. It was like B plus A minus. My thinking on it, I have spent so much time thinking about that stupid meal. It is firmly a territory, only needed minor tweaking. Because, and I did not realize this the first time, but I told other chefs that I had gone to Geist, and they’re like, oh my God, isn’t their kitchen crazy? I’m like, Yeah, he’s like, you know what you didn’t notice in that kitchen? I’m like, what? A fire. Like, there wasn’t a fire in that kitchen. Everything they do is on induction cooktops. You’re right. Right? And you’ve never noticed that because you’re eating and drinking and having a conversation and ignoring the presence of all the induction cooktops. But now I just have like, if you pull off a meal that good on only induction cooktops, like, you have committed something. Right? You’ve done something amazing.
I’m like going through my memory and remembering watching them prepare. So, for the audience, it’s an open kitchen. We were sitting at the bar around the kitchen so we could see everything being prepared and plated. And I’m just running through my memory of that entire meal. And you’re right. Like, there was this delicious, they took a cauliflower head, sliced it in half, cooked it. That one. That one. And it had like this real truffle, not just truffle oil, real truffle base on it. And I remember looking at it and seeing them cook it by slicing the cauliflower head and putting a metal pot, like a small metal bowl, over it on the cooktop. And I’m like, oh, they must have spritzed some water in there and it’s steaming it, but no. If it’s all induction, it suddenly makes sense. Ha! That’s fascinating.
But that tasted like it was roasted. It tastes good. It’s like it was roasted. Good cruciferous vegetables should be roasted. Cauliflower, Romanesco, Brussels sprouts, anything in that family of vegetable. Should be roasted in order to turn all the bitter into sweet and char and deliciousness. And I’ve very like, that’s why steamed broccoli is garbage, right? And fried broccoli is half garbage. I don’t know how they pulled that off. I’m shocked by it. And to have that kind of constraint, like one of your favorite restaurants in Chicago, Kaikuma’s. If you think about their burgers, okay, they turn out really good burgers. They turn out burgers in a kitchen that’s half the size of my office. It’s insanely tiny. They test dumbness by pinching the burgers while it’s on the flame. And while listening to Black and Death Metal. Like, I have so much respect for the cooking techniques and constraints that this restaurant has to deal with. I mean. Not just as a business owner who has to deal with the constraints of a pipeline, but also as a designer who deals with the constraints of a project literally every single day. And I think about that and I kind of pull that analogy back to like what okay, let’s say you have a business and You’re handed a laptop and you said, okay, go run a business now. Only one catch. You have to do it all day on the beach. You can only run your business from a beach. Sounds like a good idea. Right? But you’re going to get sand in your laptop. You’re going to want to go out in the water. You’re going to get really distracted by all the beach bums. It’s going to be too nice outside, you’re going to get sunburned. There’s a ton of things working against you. Okay. Now, Take the beach notion and apply it to all of the things that are happening in your life right now, right? Like right before this podcast, I had to walk my dog. And so I was walking around, hanging out, realizing that my dog was taking a sweet time, only barely pooping. I had to deal with a lot of traffic. It was kind of stressful. And then I came in and ran this podcast. And so, you know. I’m dealing with a lot of emotional labor on that. What happens if I deal with a client and every client that you ever get pushes back on you on price? Well, either you become really good at negotiating on price and anticipating those things. Or you don’t do that work anymore and you figure out something else. You’re dealing with headwinds on absolutely everything. I can’t tell you how many clients are like, when do I get the money? when they ask about A-B testing. A valid and not unreasonable question. I talk a lot about how I focus on revenue generation. And the answer is, I don’t know, and it might take a while. You’re playing the lottery. Right? And that never satisfies them. And I have this conversation like nine times a year. You’d think I’d be good at it. And those are the headwinds that I’ve chosen to face, right? Kumiz has a small kitchen. Mahalo has the perception that they’re a douchebag bar. They might not be. It might be dope.
I think this is a really, really interesting thread. The constraints, the limitations, and even the failures that you experience as a business being learning opportunities.
Yeah, yeah. So, Parachute, I’ll tell you a little bit about them. They’re my favorite restaurant in the city right now. They gave me my best meal of 2015. I like flipped out about that meal, and I won’t shut up about it forever. The two chefs, they’re a husband and wife couple, and they trained at Cordon Bleu. The wife is Korean, the husband is American, and they did this like highly French inspired stuff at a restaurant called Bonsoire that’s at like Armitage and like Washington for Chicago geography people. Not far away from a lot of stuff, right? You’re three blocks from a Blue Line station. You’re right by Bang Bang and Parsons and Tasty Freeze. A ton of restaurants, a couple of good cocktail bars, that sort of thing. By all logic, Bonsoir Ray should have been booked out the Ya Ya. They got a Michelin Bib Gourmand, all these things. They ran out of money and closed. Cashed out all their retirement accounts. They’re like, We’re going to give this one more shot. We’re going to get a cheap place. We’re going to do Korean stuff. It’s going to be okay. If it fails, we’ll figure out something else to do with our careers. This is the gopher broke, YOLO move. We’re going to do whatever we can. And they get a restaurant in a no-account neighborhood. Elston Avenue is an industrial corridor filled with light industry, warehouses, factories, that sort of stuff. It’s nowhere near an L-stop. It’s nowhere near a bus line even. It’s five blocks from anything. They didn’t have bike share in the city, I think, when they opened. Or if they did, it wasn’t anywhere near there. I checked. Their kitchen is tiny, they get maybe 20 seats, and they got reviewed in the trib at like Four stars, and every reviewer was like, This is astonishing. There is no one doing anything like this in the city. You absolutely need to go. And they booked out six months. And then they got a Michelin star. They were the hardest table to get in the city outside of Schwa or L. Ideas or Alina already. And then they got a Michelin star. Like, the only reason I’m going in two weeks is literally for the hell of it because we found an opening in their schedule on Open Table. Somebody must have canceled. Oh, Jesus. Like it’s gotten so popular that not even I can go there anymore. It’s all people on their Amexes getting their concierge service to book for them. Right? And they’re operating under some hellacious constraints. They are still in the tiny kitchen in the no account neighborhood. I don’t even know what neighborhood you would call them. It’s like North Avondale or South Irving Park. Nobody lives around there. And, like, you’re operating again, they probably have a lot of headwinds. Actually, probably Uber helps them a lot.
Oh, man. Yeah. So, so here’s an interesting question that comes to mind. I love the idea of constraints, and I love the idea of these restrictions and almost battling against failure. When you’re running an independent consulting business, how do you deal with those types of constraints? Like, let’s put ourselves in this restaurant’s position. You’re booked out six months. As a consultant, that is a very great position to be in. I mean, like, we’re all fighting for that. We’d love to be booked out six months, but there’s also an opportunity cost to that. A client comes knocking, and you’re like, well, We could start, you know, next year, and usually they’ll walk at that point. How can a consultant overcome that? Or what should make like With a restaurant, you could expand, you could add more tables, you could maybe jigger the hours a little bit. You have some limitations there. As a consultant, what limitations do you have when you’re facing that same problem and how can you overcome that?
Yeah, so my recognition of the problem is the biggest thing, right? You have to recognize that there is a problem. You have to identify why it exists. And the number one thing throughout all of that is you need to act rationally and not freak out. And I know that sounds so easy. It’s just like, be calm about it, but like. Your business is literally collapsing around you, and you have a, you know, you’re running out of money, you have only a limited amount of time, you have a certain runway, and you have to fix it. There’s no safety net in business, right? Your bank account is above zero or it’s not. And so I use a lot of just like coping mechanisms, honestly, that help me deal with the fact that I’m running a business. And this is going to move into therapy territory quickly. One of those techniques is therapy. One of them is having a bootstrapper mastermind and having people who are actually willing to understand when things are going wrong and not belittle you or criticize you for it, but like try to actually address the problem with you. That’s a huge, huge benefit out of it. And a lot of it is like meditation every day helps. When things are really bad, smoking weed helps, to be entirely honest. Having one stiff drink and not going above that. Working out like exercise helps a lot. I drink a lot of green tea to stay focused. And just like journaling, like I sit down and I recognize my problems are the same problems that every other business owner faces. They’re okay. I’m going to deal with it. Maybe a client fired me out of the blue and I have to deal with it. Whatever have you. And That’s, I mean, a lot of different things that you can potentially do to not freak out, but those help you soberly and rationally identify the problem, that it is a problem, and figure out how to fix it. If you let your freak out mechanism fix the problem, you will cause three more problems. And then you will have three more problems.
I’ve gone down that same road. I’ve gone down both paths myself. The first one has been the freak out path. And that. Feels like, I mean, you’re moving very, very fast when you’re in freakout mode, and it feels like things are getting done, but nothing actually is progressing or improving. You’re just. Starting fires to put out the past fires. It’s like juggling plates. It’s not actually doing anything productive. But the second method, like, okay, identify there’s a problem. This is not necessarily a unique problem. This is a problem other people have overcome. So, the fact that other people have overcome it means that you can overcome it in your business or in your life. Okay, what is the problem? Okay, how do I cope with the problem? How do I make sure I’m staying safe, stable, and mentally together through this problem? How do I then start addressing the different aspects of the problem? The problem as a whole might be too large to solve. But if you break the problem down into component pieces, hey, I have these email issues, or stuff isn’t getting done on time, or I lost two major clients, or people keep pushing back on price. Well, When you put that all together, you’re able to say, like, okay, these aren’t discrete and individual problems. Let me tackle them one by one. It might not be solved by tomorrow morning, but at least I have a list now. I know what I could address. I know what I could tackle. And you tackle those one by one. It might be you solve two of those and things get better. That doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t solve the other two, but as things get better, it becomes, in my mind at least, Less of a high priority to address the remaining issues, since there’s always going to be some parts of a business that are not firing on all cylinders. What’s important is Identifying where those problems are and figuring out: is this something that I need to address, or is this a lower priority issue that I should set aside for now? I mean, I could spend the next six months fixing issues in my business, but if my business is working well, Are those necessarily issues I need to fix? To go back to the restaurant analogy or metaphor, a restaurant might be like, yeah, we’re booked out six months now. That’s kind of an issue because people can’t get tables, but it’s kind of a good thing because, well, we could see that there’s a lot of demand and people still want to book with us. It might be a problem, but it’s not necessarily a problem that they need to or want to address. There’s higher priority, more important things to think about.
Yeah, there’s a lot of pernicious things that happen with that, right? Like, I’m going to take a restaurant called Girl and the Goat. Girl and the Goat is run by Stephanie Eisard, who is a badass. She is amazing. And she launched this restaurant that takes up, I think, like six or seven storefronts at this huge building on Randolph Street, which is like the food drag of the city. And so it’s enormous. It’s absolutely enormous. They have a ton of tables. They are booked out six months permanently. And they have been basically since they opened. One of the best meals I’ve had in the past five years in Chicago was at Girl and the Goat the second day they opened, right? I’m sure they’ve gotten better. Or they’ve just refined what they’ve done such that all the little tweaky things that you need to figure out, like they’ve addressed that in a very forceful way. But I have no interest in actually ever going to Girl on the Goat again because I know it’s going to take six months for Get a Reservation. I know it’s going to be crazy packed. And I know that, like, all of a sudden, the people that made this restaurant a huge thing on the map Like they’re alienated, right? So that’s great for them as long as they can continue filling seats. But you have seven storefronts on Randolph Street. How many times are you going to fill a seat, right? Given infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters, you’re going to be hard up and you’re going to need to find new people. And like, I’m, you’re going to have to try and promote yourself that, like. Why I don’t have as many tables open is because you’re falling off. Like, I don’t want to go to a restaurant where the the chef is not doing as well, you know, or turning out interesting foods. So To me, like that doesn’t even look like a positive sign anymore, right? You want, if you’re in a business of any kind, you want to promote the idea that you’re successful. We have, I mean, I think it’s kind of a Chicago-ish term, but you can understand the notion. If you go to a grocery store and there are three Rudabagas that are rotting on the side of the shelf, you’re never going to go there again. You want tons of bountiful, fresh produce there. You want to not look like this. And the term you have is basically if something looks like it’s a dilapidated storefront and you don’t know why it’s there, you call it a mob front. Because it has to be. Why wouldn’t a mob front be there? It’s expensive real estate in the city, especially commercial real estate on a main drag. You’re absolutely a mob front if you have three rotting Rudabagas. Those Rutabagas are a mob tell, and I don’t want to deal with you. I don’t even want to do business with you, right? Like, you have my credit card information, and you’re with the mob.
So what are what are rotting rudibagas within the context of a freelancing or consulting business?
Oh, admitting that you had a mental breakdown in public. Telling everybody that your sales went horribly, but it’s okay. Trying to like put positive spin on stuff. Everyone can smell it. Any sort of like sign of weakness, right? If you aren’t a cool, high-powered consultant. I’m sure that, like, Alan Weiss has down years, right? But, like, he sure doesn’t let on like it. He’s got the Bentley and the Beagles that don’t bark for some reason, and all these things. And that’s that’s what he does.
I mean, that’s really interesting since like I completely agree with that idea, but I also subscribe to an idea of vulnerability and transparency and honesty in a business being something that And maybe this is a marketing to clients versus marketing to peers idea at the heart of it, but vulnerability, transparency, and honesty in your business. Helping build better relationships with the people who are reading your material or becoming potential clients, saying, Hey, there was this issue, and you know, my launch didn’t go as well. And this is my self-diagnosis of what didn’t go well, what I’m going to do better next time. My mind says being open about that. Well, yeah, it’s not like Alan Weiss style: look at my Bentley, look at my Beagles, but it’s also Sharing like stuff sometimes doesn’t go as well as expected. And this is, you know, this is how I iterate on it. And my personal philosophy is Sharing things like that, it might endanger some potential clients, but the type of client who shows up and is like, oh, this didn’t go that well for them. I don’t want to work with them, isn’t that necessarily a client giving off a brown MM as a sign versus A client who enjoys reading that and is like, Hey, I enjoyed your post on your tear down of why your launch didn’t go well and like the six things you’re going to do better next time. That inspires confidence because you’re able to show an ability to look backwards, an ability to self diagnose, an ability to apply critiques to your own business.
Yeah. I think that like, you know, on the one hand, we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the struggle that we deal with in our business, right? but we’re also successful. Like if you’re always unsuccessful and then you say the launch didn’t go well, everybody’s like, oh, that’s That’s not good. Or if you have like four launches in a row that don’t go well, well, you’re maybe not addressing it, right? So, um I totally agree with you that, like, you know, on the one hand, it is important to be honest and forthright. You can say publicly that a launch didn’t go well. But also, like, then compare it against an awesome launch, right? What went well about the previous launch? Do you do the exact same thing? Okay, well, it might not have gone well for this particular project. Let’s tease out the reasons why that might be the case. And a lot of people, they get like self-pitying or they like emote too much in public. Like you can admit that a launch didn’t go well, but like don’t freak out about it, right? Like
Yeah, no, I completely agree about that. And I think the freak out about it is the important part. I’ve seen Twitter meltdowns or Facebook post meltdowns, even blog meltdowns, or somebody’s like, everything’s going terrible and nothing’s going right. And that. Inspires fear. You want to run the other direction from that. But when it’s a rational, calm, like you said, step back, think about it. Tease out what’s right, what’s wrong, what could be improved. When it’s that sort of teardown of like, this did not go as well as expected, and these are the reasons I’ve identified why, and this is what I’ve learned from it. Suddenly, it becomes an educational opportunity for people reading what you’re putting out there, reading, engaging with. You and I think that inspires more confidence because, just like you could do a teardown of some random internet business and be like, hey, these are the six things I noticed that were wrong in their onboarding campaign. Well, if you do that to your own business, it shows I think strength, confidence, and vulnerability all at once, but it has to be framed in the scope of this is what I’m going to change and try next time, not look at me, this didn’t go well.
Yeah, yeah, I think you’re exactly right. Like, you can mention that something doesn’t go well, but like, just be calm about it. Don’t put up a bunch of drama. Don’t show that, like. Don’t flag as somebody who has weird pathological issues. And I know that sounds like obvious, but so many people don’t do it, right? I can’t tell you how many times I saw this one. I’m not even going to mention the website or the person, but this one person, he ran a SaaS business and he wrote this blog post that talked about how, and it was called The End of the Name of the Business question mark. And he literally like wrote a bunch of things about how he was miserable and he wanted to shut down the business and then wrote to be continued at the end. And all the customers just rebelled against him, right? And they were right to. And it was because he showed, not only showed that much weakness, but also showed that they might be left in the lurch for this valuable service. Don’t do that as a consultant. People want to do that. They’re so self-serving and egomaniacal about it. And like, that’s not doing your customers any favors. You are. even when you are grousing about a launch that failed, still in some way serving the customer. Don’t waste their time on your self-pitying crap. It doesn’t help you and it doesn’t help them.
One of the most influential things that somebody said to me was my ex-girlfriend’s boss. And we were chatting one day at some company event. And I was like, anytime anybody ever asks you how you’re doing, you always say, great. What’s up with that? And he’s like, nobody gives a fuck. Nobody gives a really gives a fuck about how I’m doing. It’s a social nicety. And they’re just like saying, How are you doing? Like, so they’re saying, howdy. And so I respond great. And It doesn’t matter what drama I’m going through because they don’t really care. What they care is accomplishing whatever objective they have in the meeting with me. And I really took that to heart. And so Outside of like a core group of friends, if you know, a colleague or a client is like, How you doing? I’m like, great. And it doesn’t matter what stuff’s happening in my business because Really, like, what benefit does it give them or me to be like, well, these 14 terrible things have happened to me over the past week. Oh, God, now, what do we do? Like, It doesn’t help in any way. So I think you’re absolutely right. You need to have that calm and collected demeanor. Even if stuff isn’t going well, you can share it, but sharing it within the context of, like, oh, you know, I’m working on improving my launch because I found these three things that didn’t go well the last time I did it, and I’m trying to solve. This problem. Like, that’s a much more positive framing and phrasing of an issue you might be facing than shit sucks.
Right. So I’m going to talk a little bit about more food stuff. The greatest business in America is a Jewish deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Zingerman’s. And they are Interesting in many, many ways. I’m gonna talk about the one thing that is germane to this conversation. They um send their cash register people and their sales people to and like the people who are like working the deli counter and the bakery and stuff like that. They send everybody with basically customer facing. which is most of the company, to acting school as a prerequisite of getting on the floor and talking to customers. And the theory behind that Is that if you’re having a bad day and you come into work and you start treating somebody badly, that’s bad customer service and you’re doing a bad job at your job, right? You can’t be faulted for having a bad day. People have bad days. It’s fine to have a bad day. But like, once you enter the hallowed brick walls of the greatest business in America, leave it at home. Right. So they make sure that you have like a constant positive experience. And you do that by effectively acting techniques. And that’s I think that’s tremendously interesting to have a cashier do acting. But you know what? It works. I’ve been to Zingerman several times in my life. And every time, it’s like Google in 1998 levels of positivity and optimism. They ask me about like the Shopping bag, I’m holding, and ask me about myself. And it’s basically just the entirety of the Dale Carnegie book: how to win friends and influence people in a like 30-second transaction. And I just gave you my money for a $50 bottle of olive oil, and I’m smiling. Why? Why? And it works, it makes you feel better. It’s probably tremendously good business for them, right? I don’t know a s Single soul on this earth. And if you exist listening to this podcast, let me know whoever went to Zingerman’s and had a bad interaction with the staff. Is it physically possible? Are we violating some law of physics here? Please advise. And it’s the same way with client services. You don’t care about what’s happening in my personal life. You don’t care that I’m going through mortgage underwriting and that I just lost my second loan and I’m freaking out about it. You don’t care that my partner is dealing with a major health problem, and you don’t care that I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. You know what you care about? Me being a reasonably pleasant person to work with and having good results with A B testing. That’s all you care about.
How do you balance the two scenarios where something is going on in your life that impacts your ability to deliver on those results, but you don’t want to be like emotional info-dumped to client who doesn’t necessarily give a fig?
They don’t give a fig, I assure you. I apologize and recuse myself if it gets really bad and I can’t deal. I’m just like, I’m dealing with a lot of stuff right now. I’m terribly sorry. I will email you on this date and we will find a way forward. And it’s usually like bad afternoon or tomorrow where I just need like an hour away from the computer. But another thing that I should say about this, that very rarely has to happen. Very rarely has to happen. Because I’m sitting on Slack all day and in email, and I’m literally just writing text If you say something that I view as upsetting or frustrating on the very rare occasion, because I love you, all of my clients, then I, you know, get up. take a walk around the house, take a few deep breaths, sit down, journal a little bit about what happened, figure out what I’m going to write, go back, and I write it. And you know what they see? They see four minutes of silence. I could have gone up to the bathroom. They know nothing. And that’s exactly how it should be. I literally am just writing in text. It is the most amazing thing, I get to hide behind a text editor. And do my job for a living most of the time. Now, the times when this breaks down are you do something that is like potentially the only time it’s happened in the past five years. That I’ve had a bad scenario with a client. Somebody broke contract on the day that I got my second loan pulled out from me on my mortgage. And the day after my partner lost her job. That was enough. That sucked. I don’t think I’m going to deal with that amount of stress for a long time. But I’ll be honest about it. It sucked. It was really, really hard to deal with. I learned a lot about myself and my limitations from it, and now I know how to keep that from happening again. So that’s another thing is just like you recognize your blind spots. Maybe it’s not right to work on the beach all day. Now my laptop has sand in it and I have to go to the genius bar.