The Long Road to Burnout

In 2019 I was on the road for 32 weeks. I know the exact number because my CPA asked me to tell him how many times I went back and forth to the airport for some mileage deduction or something.

When I went back to my calendar and added it all up, I was both appalled and proud.

Appalled because I knew the cost of all those trips. They cost me time away from my family (my kids were 6 and 8 at the time). They cost me healthy choices (because who has time to think about eating and exercising when you're constantly packing/unpacking?). They cost me friendships (meet the girls for happy hour the day after I get back from a two-cities-in-four-days marathon? Not gonna happen).

But I was also proud, because I knew the return on those trips. Happy clients = repeat business. New leads that materialized when I spoke at conferences. Forged connections that have since born fruit in the form of partnerships and key hires.

And wasn't this what I was supposed to be doing? As the co-founder of a scaling start up, shouldn't the airport be my second home? I assumed I was paying dues that couldn't be avoided.

So I got really, really good at traveling (if ever you have to navigate Denver International's notorious labyrinths, I'm still the person you wanna go with). But I forgot how to be good at a lot of other things.

When I see it all written out like this, it's clear the seeds of burnout were being sown. It's honestly kind of shocking that I made it as long as I did in that mode. I had a few health scares that were clearly a result of spending too much time on planes, but I was convinced that there was no other way to effectively grow the business. (I'm honestly still not sure how I could have done this part differently.)

And then, 2020.

Overnight I went from seasoned road warrior at the helm of a rapidly growing business to a CEO who was staring at a long line of delayed (please let it just be delayed and not cancelled!) work. While everyone everywhere tried to figure out what the hell was going on, nobody was interested in learning about Agile marketing. The thing about a services business is that if you're not delivering services, you don't make any money. And in the space of three days we completely stopped delivering services.

Like a lot of business owners in March of 2020, I lost a lot of sleep. But it soon became clear that our online training program, which in the before times we were using for only about 10% of our client engagements, was going to be our salvation.

But it didn't come without costs. I'll never forget leading two consecutive days of 8-hour workshops on Zoom in the first month of the pandemic. Everybody had already planned to be in training during those times, so we just did the whole thing virtually.

It suuuuuucked.

Somehow it got 90+ NPS scores. But that's probably because everyone felt like we had gone through a war together in those 16 hours and needed to acknowledge our co-sacrifice.

Fortunately for everyone, we transitioned to doing 90-minute training sessions, and discovered that we could actually deliver value through virtual workshops that was comparable to what we did in person. Magically, there was no need for planes. We went from being limited by how much and how far a human could travel in a week, to having nearly no limit to how much we could do.

The scaling potential was sudden and unexpected, and we scrambled to capitalize on it. We hired contractors and full time employees as fast as we safely could, but in the meantime I spent an ungodly amount of time on Zoom.

While my travel burnout calmed down, a new, more pernicious style began to simmer.

It's shockingly tiring to be on Zoom all day. I've read a lot about why, but the reason isn't really relevant. The TL;DR is that it sucks you dry in a totally different way than being face to face, but it doesn't seem like it should.

And, to make matters worse, it's somehow much, much harder to get away from virtual meetings than IRL ones.

Over the past 2.5 years I've tried periodically to put guardrails on my calendar. No meetings before 8:30am. No meetings on Wednesdays. No meetings after noon on Fridays. It never sticks. There's always a client crisis or an internal fire that breaks the barrier, and then the floodgates are open. Before I decided to step away for my sabbatical I investigated my calendar and discovered I spent an average of 5 hours on Zoom DAILY. And that's even now that AgileSherpas has a fabulous team of trainers that's freed me from the majority of my client-facing demands.

There's no other word for it: it was exhausting.

2 years on planes + 2.5 years on Zoom = 4.5 years of burnout in the making        

So that's how I got here.

Two years of living on planes + two and a half years of living on Zoom = 4.5 years of burnout in the making.

What I can tell you, with the benefit of hindsight and a few Zoom-free days, is that I didn't get here accidentally or all at once. There were times when I knew things weren't OK, but it was bizarrely easier to push ahead than to stop and investigate what was going on. It's hard to admit, but I chose my burnout day in and day out for over four years.

To my fellow entrepreneurs and hustlers out there, please make a different choice.

Maybe it means growing slower, or turning down a mega-client, or taking a pay cut so you can hire someone sooner. Whatever it means for you, do it. Do it now, when it's your choice and you can manage the situation (I'll share more next week about how I did that). Don't wait till next month or next quarter when things "slow down."

Things won't slow down. But inevitably, and when it's probably the least convenient, you will run out of gas.