The Entrepreneurial Journey Is Hard

Being an entrepreneur is hard. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it! Today I'm talking with Michael Budensiek of the Bald Business Podcast about ways to make the journey easier.

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The Entrepreneurial Journey Is Hard

Tim Fitzpatrick: The entrepreneurial journey is hard, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it and they're not. That is why I got a special guest with me today and we are going to dig into the entrepreneurial journey, talk about it and give you some tips to help you not just survive, but thrive.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am really excited to have with me today Michael Budensiek of the Bald Business Podcast. Michael, thanks for taking the time to be here. Man, I really appreciate it.

Michael Budensiek: Yeah. And thanks for having me. This is exciting. And you hit the same square around the head.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So it's good that I asked ahead of time, right? Yes. So it's Budensiek, people. So make sure we get it right. I had an interview about a month ago and I knew the company name, but I know somebody else that has a very similar company name. And so I totally screwed it up. And in the beginning of the interview, she had to correct me. So I don't like to do that.

Michael Budensiek: Hey, been there, done that. We all make mistakes.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes, yeah, exactly. We all make mistakes. Well, dude, you had me on your podcast about a month or so ago. We had a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. And I wanted to get you on to talk about the entrepreneurial journey, which we know is hard. There's ups and downs, their highs, lows. I wouldn't have it any other way. And I think most people like us wouldn't have it any other way. But it's always good to talk about it and learn from other people's experiences.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So I'm really excited to jump into this. So let's just start. Just tell me about your journey, how it's been for you. How did you get into it? All that background information.

Michael Budensiek: Yeah. So, gosh, this could be a long story.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's all good. We got time.

Michael Budensiek: So basically I started working relatively young, actually, when I was in the sixth grade, my parents pulled me out of our private school and started homeschooling us, which back then was kind of a trial and error thing. I mean, a lot of things in life are trial and error, which I've learned. And as you know, but it wasn't super popular then. And so me being the oldest and the first that they tried to homeschool, I got distracted pretty easily, realized that I liked being out of the house and like doing other things.

Michael Budensiek: And so my dad was a carpenter and he allowed me to start going to work with him part time at the age of 13. By the time I was 15, it was a full time job. And then I pretty much became a carpenter as well. And I did that for seven years. During that time, I saw my dad beating, managing. He ran the crew for several, several years. He owned the business for the majority of the time I was there.

Michael Budensiek: And just having those experiences, working with adults in the construction industry at such a young age.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: Really, I think had had a pretty big impact on me and that and the decisions that I would make moving forward. But I got to eighteen years old, realized I hadn't finished 10th grade and my mom said, look, you either need to get your GD or you need to finish your high school. And at this point, as an 18 year old making twenty bucks an hour and this was even like 14 years ago. Yeah, I'm not going back. Right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: So I went and got my GD and my mom said, hey, just try college, try college. You know, I just want to make sure that you don't regret not doing it. So I think I made the smart decision to at least give it a try. Did that first semester kind of the same thing. I didn't really learn in high school how to study well, so it just didn't work out. I did that first semester.

Michael Budensiek: I was like, absolutely not. Can't do this. But I think I'd love firefighting. So I went to school, went to firefighter school, became a firefighter for a local department at the age of 19. And really the entire time I had always had this calling to get into the fitness industry. And I think calling because it was something I started working out in. I was like 12 or 13 again, a lot of it out of boredom because I was at home as a 12 and 13 year old. And you realize when you go from a standard school setting to what you have to learn in school is that you gain like four hours a day.

Michael Budensiek: And so I started working at a pretty young age because of that. And so around the age of 19, 20, I was just like, I really want to train people. I really want to coach people. I really want to help people. And I always just kind of felt pulled to do that.

Michael Budensiek: And so at the age of 20 I said, you know what, I finished my full first year probationary firefighting, I can always come back to this position until I'm thirty six if I choose, but I need to give this other thing a try. And I found a school in Florida that allowed me to basically come in and do an accelerated personal training course. So it was just a six month course or five hours a day, six hour, five days a week, six hours a day.

Michael Budensiek: And all they taught us basically is personal training, how to cook people, how to help people, how to adjust for different body types and so on and so forth. Got out of that immediately, and tried to start my own business. I looked around for places to look for, places that I could take clients and train them. And then I found an opportunity, a big box gym. And I was everything in me was like, don't get a job at a big box, don't get a job at a big box.

Michael Budensiek: But then I got to thinking about it. I was like, you have no experience. You need to learn. You don't really know what you're doing when it comes to acquiring clients. So let's just see what happens. So I interviewed there, got the job and this is when I really started learning hard lessons, I think. Because you do this thing, we were like, oh my gosh, I, I have met my goal. Right. I'm in the fitness industry and now it's going to be easy. I'm going to love everything that I'm doing, the whole makework.

Michael Budensiek: And six months into that job, my regional manager came to me and said, hey, you're not signing up enough clients. And if you can't fix this, we're gonna have to let you go. And at first I was like, what does that mean? I didn't know I needed to know how to sell and run a business in order to train people like I'm just here to coach or help.

Michael Budensiek: So I went to my direct manager and I said, hey, so-and-so told me that if I didn't get my sales up, my numbers up, I was going to lose my job. So what I need to do and they looked at me and said, I'm not sure. So I had to decide. Yeah, I had to decide in that moment. I had to decide, OK, am I going to learn what selling is, what selling personal training is, or am I just going to quit and go back to construction and maybe start my own construction company, maybe have my own crew and maybe do all these things in construction is hard manual labor.

Michael Budensiek: You're out in the heat of the summer and in the dead of the winter and you're out and you're doing it. It doesn't matter. And I was like, that's not what I want. And so I committed to learning on my own and just started finding resources online, a lot of free resources. I ended up finding a mentor who could kind of teach me some stuff and walk through it with me. And less than a year later, I actually took over that location as the manager. I was the youngest person on staff. I was actually the youngest person on staff in the region.

Michael Budensiek: And I was in that position for about two years before the company sold, when the company sold. This was an opportunity I had learned a lot, I had managed people, I had signed up clients, I had created the best months ever. I had created lines of revenue of 30 and 40 thousand dollars a month for this company. And I had led that charge.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: So this was my chance to either go do this now or get wrapped up in the new company that's offering you a job and you'll never, never do it

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: So that was in 2011. And I said, you know what? It's time. I took about six months off, quote unquote. So when you're training in a big rush home and you're managing, you still make most of your money training clients. They don't really pay you to be a manager. So long story short, I was working about 70 to 80 hours a week just because that's what was required of the job. And so once that went away, I just was like, what do I do with all my time?

Michael Budensiek: Because I went from 70 to 80 hours a week to having 10 clients because those clients came with me to my new spot.

Michael Budensiek: And so I took about six or eight months to really try to figure it out, like, do I want to location? Do I want to have someone else's place, yada, yadda, yadda. So anyways. As we progress through this end up opening my first location, my first physical location in 2013, I train clients on the site. I work out of other people's buildings. People see things start to grow and all of a sudden they want more money from you.

Michael Budensiek: So you agree on a price to pay and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, business growth, we're going to charge you more. And finally, one day I said, enough's enough. I'm going to sign the lease. I'm going to stop dragging my feet. I'm going to put myself out there. So nobody signed our first lease and started our personal training company. And when I say started, I mean started the actual physical locations.

Michael Budensiek: And we've been doing it for two years, but we didn't actually get a physical location till 2013. And because I know some of the other things we're going to talk about going to dive into this. I'm not going to talk a lot about the rest of it. But basically, fast forward to where right now it's 2020. We opened five locations in five years with that company. During that time, I also was able to start doing some small business consulting because people were so interested in how we were able to get the results that we were seeing and be consistent with it.

Michael Budensiek: And then in 2018, my wife and I decided that we want to live in a warmer climate. So we're from Indianapolis, Indiana. We're tired of the winter, to be quite honest. And so we just made a shift and we moved to Tampa, Florida, which is where we're at now, and basically sold everything and started over. So we just opened a brand new gym here in the Tampa, North Tampa loots area, but obviously it is 2020.

Michael Budensiek: We're in the middle of a COVID pandemic. So, yes, a little bit slow.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: It's bringing on new challenges. And I think that. The biggest thing that people are missing, because I know that my introduction, you said the Bald Business Podcast, so obviously I have a podcast that I run is called Bald Business The Naked Truth on Entrepreneurship. And I started actually this year because I've seen so much stuff out there about people who, well, I was able to achieve this in 30 days, but they don't tell you that it took them eight years of trial and error, eight years and eight years of developing and trying and failing and starting over and doing it again.

Michael Budensiek: And I had a lot of those experiences where, you know, I mean, right now you would think, oh, this is the sixth gym I've opened. This is going to be cake.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: It's a whole set of different challenges. It's a different location. It's a different demographic. It's a different focus. So the challenges are never ending. And I think that if you're looking to get into entrepreneurship and you want to kind of have that control of your time per say, you also have to realize that you have to be willing to sacrifice all of your time.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: I think a lot of us get entrepreneurship because like, oh my gosh, I would control my time. But if you're not willing to sacrifice that time, you're never going to get where you want to be.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I totally agree and I want to pull a couple of things out of some of the things you said, because I think these are really important to highlight. First is what you said about, you know, a lot of the things we see about entrepreneurs that make us feel like they've had this overnight success.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's all the stuff we see as a highlight reel. And it's not realistic and it's not reality in most cases. And so, one, I think it's really important for us as business owners to not get caught up in that. The other thing that I want to pull out of your story, which I think is really important, is your educational experience. You know, when I was growing up, there was never a question that I was not going to go to college.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I mean, it was just the way that I grew up. But I will tell you, my view on higher education has changed dramatically over the last ten years for a number of reasons. But, you know, things have changed. And if you want to get out there and own your own business. You don't need to have a college degree, frankly, in a lot of cases, depending on where you go to college, if you've got to get out and you're in a hundred grand, 200 grand worth of debt and you're going to start your own business.

Michael Budensiek: Can't get a business loan.

Tim Fitzpatrick: No, I'm going to tell you, that made absolutely no sense because college is not going to teach you how to run a business. I don't even care if you're a business major. Business majors still don't know how to run a business. So there are so many things. If my kids came to me now and said, you know what, dad? I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to run my own business and say, OK, I don't think you should go to college.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I think you should take some of the money that you would spend on college and invest in some groups, coaching, education that is entrepreneur specific. There are so many good courses. There's so much free information. I mean, we're talking about it right now. You know, there's so much good information out there. When I graduated from college, I learned more in six months of running a business.

Michael Budensiek: Just do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And I did it all four years. And so most of us as business owners, we didn't know this. We jumped into it. It's the school of hard knocks that you were talking about.

Tim Fitzpatrick: But just know that there are people out there to help you, right. That there aren't really new frameworks. The frameworks for success are already out there. Successful business models are already out there. You don't need to go to college to find that out.

Michael Budensiek: And I say one thing that I say is it doesn't matter what the business says, the principles of the set.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Exactly.

Michael Budensiek: People are always looking for well, I don't know if this person knows what they're talking about or that person is talking about because they're not in my industry. They don't know my struggles or they might not know the specific industry struggles, but they know the principles behind reaching the goal. And those never change.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I totally agree. Right. We focus on the marketing fundamentals.

Michael Budensiek: Of course.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Because the fundamentals, the principles that they're the same. They were the same 50 years ago. They're going to be the same 50 years from now. The fundamentals, the principles don't change. Those are the foundations that you're going to build your business from. And if you skip them, you're going to run into problems. So, yeah, I totally agree.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I want to jump into this next topic, which is health, fitness, having an active lifestyle has always been a hobby and an interest of mine. So I love this question, but I think a lot of people overlook a lot of business owners who overlook the importance of fitness and health. So let's talk about this. Tell us why you believe that it's important and it's something that we can't overlook.

Michael Budensiek: So I think the hard truth here is. If you don't have your health, what do you really have?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: And I think that a lot of times as entrepreneurs and business owners, we can get so wrapped up in what we have going on right now, the stress of today, the stress of what am I going to do tomorrow if this doesn't work out that we literally forget about the most important part. And that's ourselves.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Michael Budensiek: If we're not taking care of ourselves, we're not going to be able to create the opportunities that we're wanting to or the successes that we're wanting to. And, you know, this even happens in the fitness space. I coach and I worked with probably close to one hundred other gyms and gym owners, and even in this space, we have people who won't work out for months at a time, they won't eat healthy.

Michael Budensiek: They'll gain 20, 30, 40 pounds just like any other person, because that's what we are. We're all people, right? We forget or we lose sight of the disciplines that we need to have in order to create sustainable success for ourselves as a whole, not just area. OK, so I think that it's vitally important. Number one, I tell people all the time, actually, when on a girl show a few weeks ago and she asked me how she said she said, what is the what is something that you can do to kind of like.

Michael Budensiek: It's almost like not staying positive, but to keep moving toward your goals in such an uncertain time, right? And I said, well, one of the things that you can do is exercise, because exercise creates one thing that almost everybody is missing and it's discipline.

Michael Budensiek: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: If you can create discipline in one area of your life, you can create discipline in other areas of your life. And so I just tell people, I say just start like this is not like don't look at necessarily fitness and health as, oh, I don't have a weight loss goal or I don't want to gain weight.

Michael Budensiek: I want to put on a muscle the amount of stress that it's going to help you relieve, the amount of energy that it's going to give you on the back, the amount of anxiety it's going to reduce. Your mental health is far more important when it comes to health and fitness than it is your physical body. And in a sense of someone who tries to say, I don't really need to work out, quote unquote. Right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: And so when I say it's super important for entrepreneurs and business owners, I am talking about the mental aspects that it gives us, the stress that it really the the ability to create discipline, the ability to push through and persevere, because, again, those are all things that we have to do in life, especially in business.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: So if you teach yourself to do it in one area, you can teach yourself to do it in another.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it's super important that it's not just the physical fitness, it's your mental fitness right in it. If I think of the analogy I always think of when it comes to fitness and health is the oxygen masks drop and down in the airplane, that oxygen mask is your mental physical fitness and your health for you. If you don't take that oxygen mask, you are not going to, you're not going to survive that plane ride.

Michael Budensiek: Right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: If it drops down and it's the same thing, you may be able to go for a certain period of time overlooking your health and fitness as a business owner. But at some point it's going to catch up to you. You're not going to have energy, you're going to be tired, and then that's going to impact your mental state. And as we've already talked about, this is an up and down ride. And if you don't have the wherewithal and the ability to persevere, you're not going to make it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And the other thing that I think is really important that you touched on is it's for most people, getting into the habit of exercising is really difficult. But if you can create a habit there, it can help you create better habits in the rest of your life and other areas of your life. And it's like, I don't think about it because I've always exercised. So I just got into the habit. Frankly, I don't feel right if I don't do it. So if I have an injury or something, I'm going nuts.

Tim Fitzpatrick: But once you get into that place. It's not work, it's easy, I've never worked out and said, gosh, that really sucked, I shouldn't have done that,

Michael Budensiek: Right. Absolutely well, along those lines. So this is probably three and a half years ago, I went through like a two, two and a half month stint to where I fell into the trap that everybody falls into at some point in time or another. They think, well, you know. I can't take time away from everyone else for me, so I just want time to work out right now.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: And what had happened was we were opening a location. We'd actually just open a location like six months prior. And so we were right in the middle of two things. One of them was five hours away from the other one. So it was like trying to balance there, plus do the new project and yadda, yadda, yadda. It was wild. But, what had happened was, I was like, OK, I'm already up at 4:30 or 5:00 and this is my schedule and I don't have time to workout.

Michael Budensiek: I'm going to work out if I'm going to work out, be a couple of days a week and then, well, I don't have time to eat right. So I'm not going to be too worried about my nutrition or whatever.

Michael Budensiek: I ended up losing. I don't know how much weight I ended up losing. And I don't I don't say this in a positive way.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: Because for me, it was all about just sustaining. But I ended up losing like 10 or 15 pounds. And I look back at those pictures and I'm like, you look ill almost. Right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: And the thought process there is, look, if you don't have time or you don't make time to take care of yourself, nothing else is going to be accomplished. And when I say that, I mean long term, you're going to get things done. You're going to check things off the list. But ever since that time, I said, I will never do that again. And I've literally never stepped off the routine again. And that was kind of like a blip because I've been doing it for so many years. I was just like, well, it's not going to hurt me for this little time.

Michael Budensiek: And it's not that it's so much that it hurts me physically, but it was like draining mentally because you're constantly not taking the time to do things that I knew were valuable to me and things that were already a part of my routine. And so I just tell people, I say, look, don't get wrapped up in this thought that, you know, I can't take time away from others or I don't have I don't want to take time for myself because it's selfish.

Michael Budensiek: You have to look at the big picture. If you have energy, how much more of that can you give to your team? How much more that can you give to your family? How much more of that can you give to your friends, whatever? If you don't have that. I mean, in my opinion, that's more selfish because then you're just using everything you have for yourself.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Absolutely. You can't take care of others if you don't take care of yourself first. Yeah, I totally agree. It's not selfish at all. I am going to do a better job. When I'm present with my family, if I've taken care of myself first, so, yeah, I totally agree with that. So what is this entrepreneurial journey? It's up. It's down, right. What's one of the biggest things that you think is holding people back from really reaching their true potential?

Michael Budensiek: So. I don't ever believe that there's ever one single thing that gets you there, and there's never one single thing that doesn't get you there. So it's a couple of small things. And when I say small, it is because a lot of times we build these huge issues out of small bumps.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: But one thing that I think I don't really like to use the word mindset, because it just seems so like fluff.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: It really is important to work on the way that you think, first and foremost. And what I mean by that is you for every negative, you can find a positive, right? If you're constantly looking for the bad, you're going to find it. If you're constantly looking for the good, you're going to find it. You should stay balanced. You should be informed. What are my risks or my potential hiccups or downfalls? But what are the things that I'm really good at?

Michael Budensiek: What are my strengths? What are the potentials out of this opportunity? And then and then work from there? I always say capitalize on your strengths, improve on your weaknesses. And I believe that one of those people is, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship and trying to build a team and you're trying to figure out who maybe who to hire, who to focus on or who my target market should be like. That's a big thing for you right now when you're thinking about all these things.

Michael Budensiek: One thing that I think that people are really weak at is emotional intelligence, and the reason I say that is because they're spending too much time focusing on what if all the bads, right? What if all the goods? It's literally the same conversation, it's just the other way, and I think the only way that we get better at that is by improving our emotional intelligence. A lot of times our emotions are not always going to direct us in the right way.

Michael Budensiek: You have to balance the emotion with logic. And I can say probably sometimes I focus too much on logic. Right. And I don't listen enough to the emotion. And that can also be a problem or a fault. But I think that when you look at it as a whole. Right, as all people, as one of the biggest struggles that we have, it's just strengthening our emotions, our emotional intelligence, the way that we respond, the way we react, understanding that our reaction dictates their reaction.

Michael Budensiek: And the reason we got here from mindset is you can't really improve on emotional intelligence unless you work on your mindset. Right. And so it's almost like putting the cart before the horse.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's an easy way to define emotional intelligence just in case people have not heard of it?

Michael Budensiek: Yeah, so. I would just say you should just mean, if you haven't heard of it in your super interested in it, I would just do some research on the book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0. There's an original, but the thought process is controlling your own emotions about how that affects those around you. That's the simplest way that I can put it.

Michael Budensiek: And it's really the book is actually pretty cool because it asks you to take a test about yourself and read the book, study the book, do the things, and then again, in like three to six months, take it again and just see how you've improved because you write based on things that you've given and so on and so forth.

Michael Budensiek: But I think a lot of times we have to be honest with ourselves because we do these personality tests. We do these like, well, what type of person, my test or do I make a good CEO test? And we don't answer the questions. Honestly, I think we just answer them based on what we want to be. And that's not necessarily bad. But the problem is, are you doing the work to get yourself from where you're at to where you want to be?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Well, and I think the other thing that's interesting about emotional intelligence, which a lot of people also refer to, is IQ. It's not fixed. You know, most personality tests, you are this type of person with IQ, you can improve, you can get better over time because it's about not only understanding your emotions, but also picking up on and realizing other people's emotions so that you can interact with those people appropriately. Right. And so, yeah, it's honestly, I read the book that you talked about. It's a great book.

Michael Budensiek: So I can give you an example. So short story, I can give you an example of how your reaction dictates the other person's reaction. So this is a couple of years ago. It's probably about the time we were going through the book. So I was obviously just in my mind, I was just thinking about it a lot. You know how you do when you're reading a book or listening to a certain podcast or whatever. Your brain is just focused on that no matter what.

Michael Budensiek: So I'm driving to the store and I go to pull in the parking lot and there's a truck in front of me. The truck goes to pull in and a spot and I just pull around and go behind them and go a couple spots over and I park.

Michael Budensiek: I'm not going to lie, I tend to drive a little bit fast, I didn't realize that. I didn't realize I was driving fast this morning and this older gentleman gets out of the truck and I open the door to my car and he just says, what's wrong with you speeding through this parking lot like that? A typical emotional response would be to attack back, right? Right, and here's where emotional intelligence is interesting is because they say that if you give it if you give any reaction or any action or any thought, five seconds, if you give it five seconds, it'll move from the emotional part of your brain to the logical part of your brain.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Michael Budensiek: So obviously, I'm thinking about this book a lot. I also don't really have the personality type that overreacts in general, but I knew that this could be handled well or poorly. And so I paused for a second and I said kind of like looked around making sure that he was speaking to me. And I said, Oh, I said, I am very sorry if you felt like I was going too fast to the car.

Michael Budensiek: And then I made a joke. I said, my wife actually says that I drive too fast sometimes too. So I do apologize if that scared you. And literally immediately shifted and changed and he said, you know what, man, I think you're driving that fast. He said, I'm just this is my third stop. I can't find what I need. I'm super stressed and I'm about to be late for an appointment.

Michael Budensiek: So we have the ability, if we can have the emotional control to respond correctly to incorrect responses and then balance that back out.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: I think that there could be a lot of benefit to emotional intelligence right now and in the world that we're in, with no doubt, betting on more conversations need to be had. And I don't think that screaming at each other is the best way to accomplish that.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, I love the fact that you brought up emotional intelligence because I can't remember where I read it, but I've read it multiple times. Emotional intelligence is a huge factor in your level of success, whether you're a business owner or not. Even if you're an employee working for somebody, IQ, it is a much bigger driver than intelligence.

Michael Budensiek: Well, for anybody that's interested in getting into the field, because this is something that I've actually looked into adding to my portfolio. But they do say that over the next five to seven years, it's going to be an exploding industry simply because they're looking for people who have strong emotional intelligence to lead, to teach, to educate on hard issues. And so I think that there's going to be a huge opportunity for people who are really interested in it for sure.

Tim Fitzpatrick: OK, so mindset, emotional intelligence, definitely holding people back. Some of the other ones that came to my mind, one is fear, right? Fear can be very paralyzing. And I'm trying to remember the quote, I think I can't remember who it was, but, you know: "Face your fears and the death of fear is certain." I think it might have been Mark Twain, you know, but it's like there's as entrepreneurs, we always have to put ourselves outside of our comfort zone.

Tim Fitzpatrick: We're not stretching. We're not getting better. And so I do think that fear stops people from taking actions that they really need to take to grow. Have you seen that in your experience?

Michael Budensiek: That's a great question. So one hundred percent. But it's kind of like you said, with the emotional intelligence thing, it's not just strictly related to entrepreneurship. Right? I mean, we see it in fitness even all the time. Like people are afraid to actually do their steps and lose the weight because they've been overweight for so long, they don't even know how they identify as a person 50 pounds lighter.

Michael Budensiek: But, you know, in short, I was actually talking to somebody about this probably two weeks ago and a pretty successful guy. I mean, he's started a few tech companies. And obviously, as we know, tech tends to explode and when done right. And so he started a few tech companies. He's got a pretty big network and organizations. And so I asked him the other day, I said, hey, do you still struggle with fear?

Michael Budensiek: And he said, absolutely. He said actually even more so now than I did because I have so many people relying on me. That means that he's got three organizations, 20, 30, some employees total, he said. So now, he said ten years ago, my decisions affected me. Now, my decisions affect me and everyone around me, he said, so yes, fear is there every single day, but as we said. He said there's a difference between living in fear and being afraid.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes.

Michael Budensiek: they're allowed to be afraid, you just have to, you have to move through that, you have to push through it. You've got to know that everybody is experiencing fear at some level. Yeah, maybe he's not afraid of starting a business, but maybe he's afraid of taking on another million dollar project.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: The fear is the same. It doesn't matter what level you're at. It's just different to different things.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. I love that. So the other one that comes to mind is asking for help. This is something I struggle with, asking for help. Right. I've always been you know, it's like if you're asking for help, it shows that you're weak. Right. And it's actually the exact opposite. When you have enough confidence in yourself to say, you know what, I don't know, I need help and ask you for that help, the help is there. Right.

Tim Fitzpatrick: But I think that's also something that a lot of people struggle with. This goes back to one of the things we talked about in the beginning, the highlight reel of success. It's like if I don't you know, people don't think I'm successful, how am I going to be viewed? You know, it's like, well, let's just stop caring about what other people think of us and we need help. There's so many people out there that are happy to help.

Michael Budensiek: Yes. So. I'm actually glad that you brought this up, because I think that asking for help is, it's good and bad, right? In the sense of you should ask, but don't just ask and not try, because a lot of times people can be what my wife refers to as askholes, where you ask the question, you want a response or you want someone to give you feedback, that person gives you feedback and then you just throw it out the window.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Michael Budensiek: If you're going to ask for help, try it. Like whatever was told to you. Try it. Right. That goes back to the fear thing. Well, I'm afraid. What if it doesn't work? What if it makes me look bad or whatever? What if? What if? What if? But I think that I've seen this happen a lot, especially when people are put in leadership positions. Right. They don't want to ask the people below them for help because that makes them seem weak as a leader standpoint. They don't want to ask the people above them for help because, well, I can handle the job. I don't want you to think that I can't do the job.

Michael Budensiek: That's dangerous because as humans, we're meant to help each other. Like you don't know. No single person on this earth has every single answer. And I'm just a firm believer. And you can learn something from everybody at every level, every stage but because of perception, people are perceiving things differently. And so they're doing things differently or they're taking on projects differently. So you can always learn from that one hundred percent something, but not asking for help will actually push us way farther away from our goals than, you know, living in fear and in my opinion. We can be afraid and try small things and still move forward, but if we refuse to ask for help on anything, we'll never move forward.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, yeah. The answers to any of our problems are already out there. There's already somebody out there that has that problem. So it's one of the things that I think is important to touch on about what you said was it's asking for help is super important, but it's also asking the right people. If you want to be seeking advice from people that have the experience that you need. Right. But, yeah, I love it, man.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Michael, we've had another great conversation and I really appreciate very much all the time, man. So where can people learn more about you and what you're doing?

Michael Budensiek: I mean, they can always check out my website, but I think I think I provided you the link to our link to my LinkedIn.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Michael Budensiek: The easiest place we connect just because it's fully updated. I'm on there all the time. And it's one of those things where sometimes I look at my social media accounts, my website, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's not updated.

Michael Budensiek: It's not this, it's not that. Know, that's life and that's entrepreneurship. It's not going to be perfect all the time. So I can be pretty all the time. But if you continuously just take the steps every single day to reach the goal that you have in place, you will get there. It's just a matter of staying consistent, like you said, working on your fear or your mindset, your emotional intelligence, creating an exercise routine, having a healthy mind, healthy mind - healthy body, healthy body - healthy mind. It goes both ways.

Michael Budensiek: And then ultimately, just knowing that you're signing up for something that's not easy and it's not meant to be easy. Actually, I don't know if you listen to much of my stuff, but he says that becoming an entrepreneur is the single most harvest self-development journey you will ever go on.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I agree. Cool. So, guys, if you want to connect with Michael, go to LinkedIn, dot com forward, slash in forward slash Michael B life to connect with him again. Michael, thank you for being here. Thank you for those of you that are tuning in again, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you want to gain clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts right now, hop on over to our website at rialtomarketing.com.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing. Click on the Get a free consult button. I guarantee you we get a ton of value from it and walk away knowing where you need to focus right now to get the best return on your investment. Remember, marketing your business shouldn't be a challenge. All you need is a plan. Take care.

Connect With Michael Budensiek

• [email protected]
• Linkedin

Links From The Episode

• The Fit Effect
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves

About the Host Tim Fitzpatrick

Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we help small businesses & entrepreneurs eliminate the confusion of marketing by focusing on the fundamentals. As a marketing partner, we help clients put in place and manage a simple marketing plan so they can grow. Marketing your business shouldn't be a challenge. All you need is a plan.