🥳 Hey, Kasey here! Welcome to this week’s 🏔High Growth Founders🏔 newsletter.
If you are a builder, creator, or project starter who embraces life’s challenges to extract the growth insights and lessons within them, you are a High Growth Founder.
And this newsletter is all about helping you grow as a person, a leader, and a Founder.
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In This Issue:
Growth Insight: How my burnout turned into my breakthrough
Growth Resources of the Week: The tools I use to automate, analyze, and grow my Twitter following
This Week’s High Growth Founders Episode: How to Silence Your Inner Critic
Twitter Threads: Signs to spot burnout and proven strategies to recover from it
Growth Insight: How my burnout became my breakthrough
In February of 2020, I developed severe vertigo.
Imagine the worst drunk spins of your life, but while sober.
I would lie in bed staring up at the ceiling and watching the light above me vibrate, moving to the right, and circling back again.
Over and over again.
My eyes couldn’t focus on digital screens. In 2020 America, working as the Founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency, I couldn’t look at a digital screen without getting a headache and feeling seasick.
This was not good.
I went to urgent care where the nurse practitioner said it was the worst case she’d seen and then sent me somewhere else to rule out a brain tumor.
After a few hours of tests, they confirmed that I had a viral ear infection.
I asked about treatment and they shrugged.
“There is none. You just need to rest. Eventually, it should go away.”
Ugh. I did not have time for this shit.
I did my best to slow down, but booked time to see my primary care physician and explore if there was something else I could do.
By the time I saw her, I’d had this for about 10 days. It was better, but I was by no means healed.
I explained what was going on. And she asked me, “why now?”
“What do you mean?" I responded.
Patiently she explained that this infection had a cause. With my Lyme disease and Hashimoto’s (autoimmune thyroid disease), I could get this anytime.
“This is stress, Kasey. Why now?” she asked again.”
I immediately burst into tears and without thinking, I blurted out, “I hate my job.”
There it was.
I was burned out.
But what caused my burnout?
The last year had been tough. My business partnership had imploded in the worst, most traumatizing way possible.
And I was forced to scramble to save my business, keep my clients, and save my team.
And I’d done it. We’d doubled in revenue since then and I felt like we were cranking.
Yes, since that happened, I’d been stressed, irritable, and depressed, but I thought that was just part of entrepreneurship.
Or adulthood.
Or life in general.
It reminded me of my divorce a few years earlier. I was just in a bad mood for a few months, but over time, I recovered.
But maybe I wasn’t recovering.
When I got home from the doctor’s office that night, I let myself imagine…
If I hated my job, what else could I do?
I decided to take a step back and reflect.
What did I love doing?
What was I good at?
What energized me?
Pretty quickly I had my three big answers:
I loved working directly with Founders, helping them achieve their dreams of building impactful businesses they absolutely loved.
I was good at growth strategy — devising innovative ways to accelerate revenue growth and increase customer results.
Shorter, in-depth projects were exciting, but executing the same tasks every day was excruciatingly tedious for me.
And then it dawned on me.
As my business grew over the years, I’d done less and less of what I loved, what I was good at, and what energized me.
And more and more, of the opposite.
It didn’t start out this way.
I first started my business because of serendipitous timing.
I had just returned from 10 days in Lebanon, conducting go-to-market workshops for the first ever (and I think, the last) partnership between the U.N. and a startup accelerator.
I went there teeming with imposter syndrome.
I came home on a high from adding real value and feeling like I was making a difference in the lives of entrepreneurs trying to change the world.
On my first day home, my bosses announced that the startup I was working for had run out of money.
Oooof.
Yeah, I toyed with the idea of finding an actual job, but very quickly took the leap into entrepreneurship, focused on growth strategy for early-stage startups and agencies ready to scale marketing.
I loved it. And I was making great money.
But quickly, I had clients wanting help not just with strategy, but also with execution.
So I hired a team.
I didn’t hire, train, or manage the right people in the right way (but that’s a whole other blog post).
I built an agency. And when you run an agency, you want long-running clients that your team can mostly manage.
So we transitioned from strategy to box-checking marketing.
Incremental value with more focus on
So I built a business doing things I didn’t want to do…and wasn’t particularly good at.
No wonder I was burned out.
That night, I became determined to change everything.
It took longer than I wished.
Between COVID, needing revenue, and feeling loyalty to keep my team employed, I took way too long to fully transition to a new, more aligned model of business.
But eventually, I got there.
Today, I work on complex, big-picture growth strategies with Founders, business owners, leaders, and businesses of all sizes.
Completely rewriting all sales and marketing messaging
Developing demand generation plans
Optimizing existing marketing and growth strategies
And I train or coach Founders, leaders, and teams to up-level their work:
Building company-aligned personal brands
Developing marketing skills and strategies
Improving performance, productivity, and goal-attainment
Creating productized services, communities, or digital products to increase profitability
And a million other things.
But now, it’s me doing what I love, instead of me doing what I thought would make me money.
Burnout isn’t only about working too much.
At least for me, it was about working on the wrong things.
And doing them in the wrong way.
Even if I had practiced better self-care, slept more, moved more, and drank less, I would have been miserable.
And hitting burnout rock bottom helped me see the difference.
Burnout to breakthrough.
Growth Resources: Tools to automate and grow your Twitter
For those of you unaware, Twitter has been my focus lately. I’m about 10 days into my 30 threads in 30 days. And frankly, I’m loving it.
So much that I feel confident I’ll go beyond 30 days.
But there are a few tools that make this all possible.
Hypefury. This is how I schedule my tweets, plan my threads, track my analytics, and create automated promotions for this newsletter and the High Growth Founders podcast. It’s pricey, but it’s worth every penny. And I’ve tried a LOT of them.
BlackMagic. Holy moly, this thing is a lifesaver. The analytics are 🔥 and it makes it SUPER easy to quickly respond to the recent posts of a ton of my key accounts — even segmenting them by lists. I am obsessed with this tool. FYI this link gives you $10 off a subscription.
Tweetpik. I’m newer to this one, but am starting to use it to quickly make Twitter screenshots to share on other platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. I find this one a bit clunky and technical for me, but it still works and looks great.
And if you’re on Twitter, but we’re not friends or followers yet, come find me there. Would love to connect and learn more about you.
High Growth Founders Episode: How to Silence Your Inner Critic
If you’re like I am, you are your own worst — meanest, nastiest, cruelest — critic.
And that inner voice, whispering decidedly-not-sweet nothings in your brain, can bring a level of toxicity that affects everything you do.
For years, I was downright cruel to myself and that inner monologue of nastiness made it challenging to show up in real life as the empowered, courageous version of me that I desperately wanted to be.
In today’s High Growth Founders episode, I talk about this concept of your inner critic:
How toxic it can truly be
Strategies for getting them to shut the F*** up!
How to bring self-compassion back into the conversation
Listen now. Website | Apple | Spotify
Two Twitter Threads About Burnout
The signs of burnout…How to catch yourself before it’s too late
And how to recover once you do…
As always, thanks for reading. I appreciate you.
If you learned something from this newsletter, share it with the world.
And if there’s a way I can help you, tell me.
In Love and Growth,
Kasey Jones
Very much resonated with this post Kasey. Thanks!