Full Transcript

Sari
Are you loving this podcast or do you wish there were certain things that I addressed and talked about? Certain guests you'd love to see? I want to hear it all, the good, the bad, the ugly, the amazing. I want to hear your opinions so that I can help create even better content in 2024 to support you. That's why I'm here. The survey takes about five minutes and to thank you, as an added Thank You, you will be entered into a drawing for $100 and a Fuel gift box. Plus, I'm going to do some other smaller prizes as well. The survey is open until the end of November. Please take five minutes and go to foodbizsuccess.com/survey. It's completely anonymous. And then you will be prompted to enter the giveaway if you would like to. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this so that I can make Food Business Success and everything inside of that container even better in 2024. Thank you so much.

Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host Sari Kimbell. I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach, and it's got to be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in, and food founder journeys so you can learn what worked and didn't work, and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now let's jump in!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Oh my gosh, we are just cruising towards the end of the year. I gave my 10x Goal Workshop, which was so great. I had so much fun putting it together and I hope you guys really got a lot out of it. If you want to get the replay, it's still available, you can go to foodbizsuccess.com/10x. For the podcast today, I wanted to pull a little nugget out of the goal workshop and expand on it a little bit more and come at it from a little different angle than I was really had the time to talk about. So a lot of times, I work with my one on one clients, Master Your Business students, Fuel members. And we get really hung up on comparing ourselves to others, right? How people are judging us where we are in the race against somebody else. And we get stuck in comparison, competition, and none of it is useful. In fact, I would even say it actively goes against your goal, that you have a certain bank of resources to spend in your brain. And anytime we start to use our resources to compare ourselves to others, we are actively taking away those resources that could be put to better use, like going 10x, like taking big action. And so I want to come at it from this concept of raising your standards, which I absolutely think we need to do. And I go into this more in depth in the goal workshop, so make sure you go watch that. But we have to be very careful that we're not just choosing standards that we feel like we "should" do or we are using the competition and the comparison to really beat ourselves up. Just sit for a second if you think about somebody you are in "competition with". And it's so funny to me how people compare themselves just starting out with like somebody way farther down the road, and that we're not really comparing apples to apples. But in any case, think about comparison. Think about you looking at somebody else's social media, somebody else's website, someone else's product, etc, etc, right? And just notice what it brings up in your body. How do you feel? It probably feels very heavy. It feels overwhelming. It feels terrible. It feels kind of hopeless and despair. Like why even bother? And the stoic Seneca, and I'm a big fan of Stoicism, said comparison is the thief of joy. And it really is. Like you could be feeling amazing on top of the world, I had clients in this situation where they're like, something happens, they're like, this is so amazing. And then, you know, five minutes or five days later, they notice something else that their competitor's doing, and they're further along, and robs them of all of their joy in that moment of making progress. And we know that humans are most happy when we notice the progress that we are making. And so my challenge to you is in the spirit of raising standards, that we do not compare ourselves to anybody else. We do not compete with anybody else. We only compete and compare with ourselves. Can we be a little bit better today, tomorrow? Can we just raise our standards, just a teeny bit? Show up just a little bit better, a 1% difference over time will make a huge difference in your destination. And so the only comparison that I think is of any value is to compare you against you. And not to beat ourselves up for where we were. But look at it in a very positive light of like, today, I can be just a little bit better. I can take whatever social media I'm putting out there. And I could learn one tiny little thing. And we just put into action one smaller thing. Today, I can get up when my alarm goes off, and not hit snooze four times. All right, I can get up on snooze three or snooze two. And I can hop out of bed, throw my arms up in the air as I do every morning and say yes. Even that small action making your bed, right? Those small actions are 1% better than you were yesterday. And living in the game. Seen how far you have come and how you are never back at square one. You always bring along your experiences, the learnings, the people. You know, just all of it. You bring it along and you are better for it. So stop comparing yourself to everyone around you. It is of no use. In fact, it takes away energy from what you could be doing. It sucks you dry, and people are on their own path. I want you to decide ahead of time. We talk in Master Your Business a lot about planting the garden, starting with the end in mind. If you want to make salsa, let's plant a garden that makes salsa that has all of the ingredients that we need. And then we're going to decide and we're going to do that and then we're going to stay in our own lane. We are going to resist adding in some pumpkin into our garden because other people are planting pumpkin. Remember, you're planting salsa, like that's what you want to make. So you're planting the ingredients for salsa. We're not going to start adding in some trend and some thing that somebody else said you should do. And oh, I saw what somebody else was doing and I felt like kind of terrible that I wasn't doing it. Tend your own garden. Tend your own field.

And I love Ryan Holiday. He is an author of a lot of Stoicism books, kind of modern Stoicism. And he has a great podcast called The Daily Stoic. And I was listening to a speech he gave to this matte train manufacturer. And it was so funny, it was at the end, and he says you know tend your own field, stay in your own field. Stop getting into other people's business. Stop comparing yourself to other people. And then he had this story about Iron Maiden which I'm not personally a fan, but they are a band that has a ton of loyalty. They fill stadiums, they have had longevity. I remember when my brother was really into them. And there's a quote with their manager. And he says something like and I'll keep it clean but he says we are not in the music industry. We are in the effing Iron Maiden industry. Meaning, he's gone all in on that brand, on that business, and they are doing it their way. Stop trying to run other people's races, run your own. Decide. And that's what we do a lot in Master Your Business is really help people decide on what business model, what the race is that they are going to run. And then we make a decision, and we commit. We hold to it, we burn the boats, right? And we say I'm going to stay in my garden. This is the garden I'm planting and I'm going to put all my energy here. And if I have new information as I go for this, then we can evaluate. But only after I really give it my all, only after I really go after it. And I say no to other things. I was just talking with a client yesterday and he's changed his business model. And he would say, well, I've changed it again. And again. And I'm like, that's okay. We are recommitting. And we like our reasons why, you know, when we dug into the why, why are we doing this? He likes his reasons why. And so we said, okay, this is the garden we're planting, and we're going to stop looking around to what other people are doing, and we're going to run your race. We're going to plant your field, and we're going to stay inside of it. And we're going to give it all we have. And we're going to be fully committed, it's like we are jumping out of an airplane, and this is what we're doing. And so he committed to, we had to go through and say, there are some things we have to say no to, right? This is the 80% that needs to fall away. These are the no's. These are where we raise our standards. And we're going to say no to those things, even though it's hard, and we don't like disappointing people, and they're going to have opinions about it, of course, because they're human beings. But we know that it does not serve the race we are running, the garden we're planting. Sorry, for all the mixed metaphors here. Hopefully, you can identify with one of them, right? And it's so powerful when we get into alignment and where you recognize, here's what stays, and I'm going to focus on this as the 20% that serves me. I'm going to raise my standards around it, not going to look at what anybody else is doing, I'm only going to do it because I know that this is what's going to get it over the finish line. And then if I have new information as we move forward, then we can redecide to some extent. But we don't just switch gears because somebody else is doing something. They're running their race, you run yours. Alright, so that's what I have for you today. I want to keep this one nice and short. I know you're in the holiday season, you're very busy, lots going on. So hopefully this is a reminder to you, as you're on social media, as you're looking at what other people are doing, you're considering starting, but you're like, oh, they're so much further along. Yeah, who cares? At one point, they were just starting to. And you decide what business you're in, what race you're going to run and what the garden is that you are going to plant? What do you want to reap to harvest at the end of all of this? All right, that's what I have for you today. Until next time, have an amazing week!

The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with the how to speed up your journey and help you skip the line. When you are ready for more support and accountability to finally get this thing done, you can work with me in two ways. Get me all to yourself with one on one business coaching, or join Food Business Success which includes membership inside Fuel, our community of food business founders that includes monthly live group coaching calls, and so much more. It's one of my favorite places to hang out and I would love to see you there. Go to foodbizsuccess.com to start your journey towards your own Food Business Success.

Just a reminder that you can come work with me inside Fuel for just $57 a month. You get to ask me questions on our group calls. And we have our community feed that you can get support from me and the community. Stop sitting around in confusion and doubt and slowing yourself down. Fuel is the fastest way to light things up and get some momentum in your business. It's the best way if you aren't sure if this is for you to come and ask me your questions to get the answers and stop spinning out in overwhelm and anxiety to get those questions answered by me, and then once you are launching or have your product then you have community, then you have additional support. The learning never ends. It's not like you launch your business and then you have no other questions. You just have new questions, you have new problems to go solve. So come join me in Fuel, 57 bucks a month. What are you waiting for? Foodbizsuccess.com/fuel.