Ep. 153: Embracing Failure as a Pass-Through Point

WIW (00:00)
What's up everybody? Nick and Michael back for another episode. back true to form. are hanging out together. We're going to do a little bit of content here. We have a lot of new in the picture. I mean, this feels old school now. So here's the problem that we have a lot of new used to send us a box of just assorted a lot of new 48 on the news. And I think they did it for exactly a year. No, they did it for a longer. They did it for like a year and like two months. So now we're technically not sponsored.

honey, we're still drinking it, but Michael, what's up, man? It's a little later in the day for us to be cutting an episode. So we'll see how the energy levels go. It's that guy. I've had one, so I'm good. that, yeah, but so breaking up in the episodes a little bit, we've been having a lot of interviews, lot of fantastic interviews. We just finished one an hour ago and it was really great. More to come from that, but it was actually talking to somebody that dealt with a

massive multi-location urgent care from a marketing standpoint is real cool to listen to because some of the challenges and things they worked on was very familiar to what we do all the time. So it's kind of cool to hear that. Well, Michael thinks that we're going to be talking about these three little things that he's jotted down on a piece of paper, but I'm about to throw him a huge curtain call because I press play before he could finish his thought. He's like, here we go. Like, here we go. OK, I failed a thing yesterday and it's been bothering me.

Is this a therapy session? It's not. It's really a teaching and training moment, both for myself and how I think as a business owner and I think how urgent care should think in general. And it's how to deal with failure. Right. So I'm not going to go into the detail. It's too fresh. I'm still frustrated. I go into detail. I don't want you to. They need context. I failed my failed my written test for my instrument rating on my plane. So backstory.

You've been a pilot now for two years? Three. Three years? Been a pilot for three years from a VFR standpoint, which is visual. Right. And you've been working on IFR, the instrument side. And it's a very difficult rating. And yeah, the way you've explained it to me, it's like twice as hard as the visual. Very, very hard. And there's two parts, just like most things. There's a written test and a checkride, which is like the physical, like, can you actually do the things? Correct. You've been doing...

all this training, taking all these tests, getting ready for it. And then you took your official test yesterday. What the written? The written part. That's not the major, major, major. Yeah. That's the major minor. But now we're talking music. But you even said, I'm not a detailed person and this was a challenge. like, I'm confident that you're going to be confident in the checkride because I feel like that part's more natural to you anyway. It is. I know how to fly a plane. Yeah. And it's

like in the moment, right? You're good at that. So, but yeah, so you failed it. It was like a hard fail. I missed it by one question. So it's like a disappointing failure. I would rather have just like gone down and blazed a glory fail in that thing than missing it by one question. Yeah. So the point isn't so much to talk about my instrument check or my instrument test that I did not pass, but

really just to talk about failure. And the reason I wanted to talk about that is because

Failure is a pass through point. It's not a destination. It's a pass through. It's a learning opportunity. Failure as Yoda says, the best teacher is. exactly. Right. Well, like you've always said, when you meet a goal, it's the most deflating thing ever. Because you're like, what do do now? Yeah, yeah. It can be a real challenge. Like, goals are great. But like, it's the journey and the process that you go through that really develop you as a person.

and how you handle adversity. I was pretty bummed yesterday. Like there's it was pretty obvious that I wasn't having my best day. You needed to go home. But I couldn't. had stuff to do. And I didn't plan for the failure. No. Who plans for that? No. And I know going into it, you were nervous because it's just a big test, right? And it's not cheap test. And so and it meant a lot of things if you felt it like there are a lot of things you can go back and do now. Yeah. But

But yeah, you were nervous about it, but you're also like, I've taken the practice tests and I always pass them. passed all, I took the practice tests four times past every one of them. Yeah. And so now it's kind of like that mode. Cause you were telling me that details of the test, like there's 3000 potential questions, but there's only 60 they give you a 70 is a pass. And so what was your score? 65. So I got 39 out of the 40 I had to get. So there's 60 questions. And so you missed that one. Okay. I did.

And I can make a ton of excuses for it. I've got some. I've got some. I do. And they're totally justifiable reasons. But at the end of the day, the result doesn't change. Right. And so that's what a few things that I want to talk about is one, I didn't plan for the failure. I scheduled out the rest of my day like it was going to be just the best day ever. yeah. Right. And I didn't plan for how I would feel. Emotional frustration, blame. Yeah.

Right. There's a lot that goes into failure that I don't know if it's just been a while since I failed. I don't know. You know what I mean? Or at least I felt it. You what I mean? I feel like a failure at home all the time when I'm trying to raise his teenage son. But that's another story. This is a therapy session. But no, I get that. Because especially it's something you've been preparing for, like you're very knowledgeable about. And then it's like a slap in the face. Sorry you didn't pass. Yeah, exactly. And then you have to take a step back. You say, well, am I supposed to be doing this anyway? Like your mind starts.

running. But but let me ask you a question. Is there any any doubt in your mind on whether or not I'm going to keep doing this or if I'm going to quit? You're going to keep going. So what does that make it? A pass through point. Yeah. Right. It's it's a speed bump. It's it's it's a it's a mark on a path toward the ultimate goal, which is, you know, to get my instrument and to become a better pilot and to become more proficient and to go and do more things and visit more of my awesome clients and.

visit more of you guys that are listening, get to go out and hang out in urgent cares. And the ultimate goal is just to go travel and do things and then create business around it as well for sure. But where are you in your life where you've had failure that it's caused you to just park or to quit or to step away? I mean, I can imagine, you know, for like the urgent care owners that are listening right now.

there are probably some failure points in your business that you're fed up with. And that may be as simple as staff turnover or revenue numbers aren't good. It's a fight. And some people just throw in the towel, right? They're like, I don't want to do this anymore. Right. I mean, I've felt that way in business a couple of times, or at least toward certain things that we're trying to accomplish in business, where you get to a point where you feel like you're hitting a brick wall.

You can't push through it. But again, most people that quit, quit just before their breakthrough. Yeah. You know what I mean? So let me give just full transparency. We just signed a really big account, right? We did. Super excited about that. But we had been going through a season where we were just having a hard, we were having lots of good conversations with urgent care owners, lots of people who felt like they needed what we had.

And we just have a hard time getting people to just pull the trigger with us. And so I was getting to the point where not where I was ready to quit, but just totally, totally changed strategies. I like, what we're doing isn't working. Right. Or are we in a spot where there's a reason why we don't have a lot of competitors? Yeah, exactly. And then you know what? We could have quit, but then that breakthrough came.

breakthrough came through. Right. So the breakthrough came through the breakthrough broke through. There you go. And it re-energized, re-motivated, got all the team excited again. And it was just what we needed to come and continue what we're doing and know that we're doing the right thing. And it was really funny because I would have said a year, timing is always an amazing thing. I think we can all agree to that. Timing where I don't care if you're Christian or not.

God's timing is an amazing thing to watch sometimes. just that instance with that particular new client that came on. If they came on a year ago, no blame them. That would have been rough. You know, that's a good point. We wouldn't have matured as a company to the point where we've been able serve them at that level. We wouldn't be able to boost the numbers that we produce now. And it would have been a tougher spin. Yeah, absolutely. so like, if I haven't a year ago, that would have been rough.

If it happened, and we had a failure that was kind of out of our control that caused us to go get better. Yeah, we did. never. That failure with a large dental practice, I don't even mind saying that was a large dental practice. was a failure. I don't think it was completely our fault, but the failure was nonetheless. It was it was our failure. And with that, we had to really assess how our processes.

How are SOPs? What happens if somebody quits? What happens if we do this, that and the other? Right? Like we were refined by the fire, baby. That's the way to say it. Yes. So going through, going through that adversity in business that really hurt, caused us to be in a position where when this huge client came into us, we were able to say yes confidently and already execute. Yeah. I mean, they're already up in the 200 patients, I think.

Yeah, well, now I think they're close to three or four. I mean, I haven't looked today. But yeah, it is so amazing because the timing is so fun to me because I really do believe because, know, they learned, like you said, came on. We're at a point like my goodness, because some summers are slow for urgent care, summers are slow for marketing agencies. That's right. Good or bad. Right. But the reality is we don't sign a whole lot of account new accounts in the summer.

we signed them in September, October. That's right. And then it chills out and we start signing in at the new the spring, right. So we knew summers are slow. This particular summer was remarkably slow. Right. And it was to a point like this doesn't like we were keeping our clients in all the right things, but acquisition wasn't a thing for us for a hot minute. I even talked to a fellow competitor, local competitor yesterday and

He even said he was like, yeah, summer was rough this time. It was a very interesting summer. think a of it had to do with just there's an election coming up and you have a current sitting president that doesn't seem to be very visible and just new people coming in. Maybe the uncertainty of that. going back to the failure piece, what I'm learning now, like, yeah, I had a bad day yesterday, but I'm fine today.

I'm okay. I'm ready to get back after it. I'm ready to go retake the test here in the next week or so I'm going to study up. I'm going to get better at it. I'm going to find out what I missed and I'm going to go improve and I'm going to be better. What I'm learning though is Nick failing yesterday is a very different reaction than Nick failing three to five years ago, which is very different than the way I would fail when I was in college or something like that. The more you fail,

the better you get at evaluating the problem and the better you get at navigating the adversity and the better you get at attaining your goals. There is no reaching your goals without going through failure. Period. Right. Period. I'm trying to think through because I've known you now for five and a half years. You've seen some crap. Yeah. Yeah, there's been some stuff. There's some crap. Excuse my language. Yeah.

But there has been. There's been some crap. There's been I've seen some of your anger come out. It's very rare, that, but I've seen it. It's pretty rare. But yesterday was just more I watched you just beat yourself up. then and then I saw you. I'll just say this. Then I saw you look for things to beat up. I don't know what you're talking about, but it's OK. You can ask like I was like, why am I answering this question right now?

I don't even know. I don't even know what you're talking about. Then I followed up with, you should probably go home. Probably. But no, yeah, I think, but overall, like it came on hot for a second and just dipped right off real quick. And today I wouldn't even notice. Like it wouldn't be a thing. So and then we were making jokes. Yesterday we had a huge wreck on the interstate system near our office. You said it was rough day.

Huge rep. literally, Nick and I, I don't know what our coworkers, like what everybody else did, but we got in the lane of traffic and said, nope. And we both turned around and came back to the office and sat for 30, 40 minutes because the traffic had poured over from this 10 car pile up on 459. So I didn't even go home until like seven. It was a day. yeah, it was long day. It was. So going back to the failure, getting to the adversities of it, right? But it makes you better.

You know, thinking about urgent cares and some of the failures they face, I think right now is like we're just learning how what they used to do doesn't work anymore. Like the idea of I'm going to have amazing numbers and make good profits off each patient that comes in the door. It's not there anymore. So now they're facing a new failure. It's kind of coming in a slow but surely way. And it's hitting that moment like do these urgent cares say

I'm out. I'm done with this. I'm going to shut my doors. I don't care. Like we even like listening to that one guy at Symposium, I'll just shut all my doors at once and see if the insurance guy cares, the insurance pair cares anymore out of just frustration. But like, yeah, the failure side is, I feel for you people because outside of patient value, your staff turnover is incredible. And when you have somebody turn over and staff, it's like, I have to hit the reset button. I got to go find somebody. I got to get them trained up. And then they're just going to leave again.

And I think that mindset is what I think sets you up for worst failure because then you get to the point where you just don't want to fight it anymore. and so those are the two paths, right? Yeah. So if you know that's going to happen, that's going to be failure, that's going to be challenged, that's going to be, you know, just the quicksand that you're going to be standing in, right? Then understanding that, OK, I'm going to have employee turnover. Well, so how can I gamify this?

Like if I know that's going to happen, how can I use that adversity to make me better? Right. If I know that we're going to have a challenge of getting paid by the payer, right. So the insurance companies, then how can I gamify that? like, how can I, how can I maintain this excellent level of care and find a way to run more lean or, or cut cost or, you know, those different kinds of things with it, without, without taking away any of the care.

without taking away the ability to generate new patients. Oftentimes people will cut their marketing first and I'm like, you're cutting your throat, but okay. But how do I run more lean? You we became incredibly lean during the COVID time because we had to figure it out. Like we just weren't creating the same amount of income at the time for obvious reasons and it caused us to get better. And it created the situation where we weren't finding new clients for a moment. I remember.

Because we were because we went completely remote for a hot minute because we couldn't go back to the office and then no one wanted to talk to us. And then we started getting those emails from clients saying we need to pause. We need to pause. need to pause. And we got them convinced to pause and not cancel because nobody knew what to do. And that's a dark spot to be in because you're like, I don't know what the future looks like. We were all told this is blow over in two months. We'll be fine. And here we are six months in. Right. And it's not going away.

Yeah, that was that was crazy time. Well, you have to learn through the adversity. You know, you have to propel yourself through the failures. They're going to come. They're going to happen. It's just a part of running a business as part of pursuing something. One of us, I saw this big sign and everybody's heard of the phrase, the pursuit of happiness. And this giant sign, they had changed the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit is happiness.

And they had just shifted the focus on the goal to the pursuit, to the journey. you know, dialing it back in and then we'll wrap up is just, you know, yes, I had failed that test yesterday, but the fact of the matter is, is I'm going to be better at it the next time I go. I'm going to answer the questions better. I'm going to understand it better. I'm going to be further along because of the failure. It's frustrating. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a mark.

that I don't want. Like I will forever have to tell people I had to take that test twice. Right. And that's hopefully not three times, right? Well, let's just say if I ever wanted to go into FAA aviation career, that they have to disclose that I have to. Well, they'll know it's like the FAA has it. And they'll ask you questions about why. Now, the good news is, is that's a commonly failed test that I wasn't aware of. I didn't do enough research to find out that it's the most failed test in FAA.

That's so fascinating. wonder if that's intentional or just the design of the questions don't reflect reality. The most likely place for you to die is in instrument meteorological conditions. So I expect they're asking very, very, very hard questions. I don't know. For me, the test asked trick questions and I don't think there's I don't think there's any trick questions in an airplane. Yeah. Yes, you have to do problem solving, but that doesn't mean it translates into trick questions. Nonetheless.

I just kind of wanted to share that. think it was on my chest and I know that we have clinics out there that are experiencing challenges with, you know, pay, they're experiencing challenges with competition. They feel like maybe they're failing in the game. And I'm just wanting to encourage you that you're refined by the fire. So that's the best way to say it. Yeah. I mean, I even think about some of the failures I've had like in

business stuff like, you know, I've shut down an LLC before because we got to a point I was part of I was a partner in another company that was a dumpster fire. And so. Yeah, you but I learned a lot from it, right, like where where I've come from to where I am here now, like I brought things got brought along with it, right. But I do remember. Well, you do you learn some hard lessons and failure that you don't want to learn. But once you come out, you're like, gosh, I'll never make that mistake again.

Right. And then you learn and you grow from it. remember having... you can grow from it. You have an opportunity to learn from it. Yeah. Yeah. You can either choose to learn from or choose to hate it. I mean, people that come out on the other side of the divorce either find the love of their life for their next marriage or they're on their fifth. That's real, isn't it? It's a true thing. is so... You either learn from the adversity or you repeat it. It's true, because you rarely find... You know, think about that. Sorry, I didn't mean that to be rude. Yeah, because like...

Yeah, you find if you find somebody's divorce, they probably got remarried once or they're on their fourth or fifth. And there's like no in between. Very rarely there's an in between. There's never just two. Right. Just keeps going. Yeah. Because they didn't learn their lesson. And by the way, if you're divorced, we're not judging. No, no. We're just telling you that that's a thing. I never thought about that. But that's the people I know. There's no I'm on my second one. It's more like I'm on my fourth or fifth or my only one. It's so weird. Huh.

But yeah, I was thinking back to some failures that I in previous company stuff. And one of them was, we had, I'll never forget this, because this was kind of brutal. We were working with a super large, well, Church of Highlands. We had done some work for Church of Highlands, and we had built an internal project or site for them. And this is probably when I was 25, 26.

And I was in charge of it, of course, and my other partner was writing the code for it and challenges there. my main contact, David, loved the guy. He will never talk to me again, probably. But he was my main contact and he was very high level, he had high expectations, high benchmarks, way beyond my ears. And the project was

not on time, not on schedule. And the guy that I was working with that was supposed to write the code was super lazy about the whole thing. wow. And I don't even know why. But either way, we're approaching a deadline. And there were five or 10 major things that weren't done yet. And I didn't want to disappoint David. And so when he asked,

two days prior or a day prior, are we good to launch? I said, yeah, I think so. So then I go back to my partner and said, we're good to launch, right? He's like, absolutely not. I'm like, why not? And then it just kind of went on and on. And so I got, and so then I had to go back to, I apologize, like, we're not going to make this deadline at all. And so he roasted me of.

We had all this stuff prepared for launch and I had to go back to my people and tell them it's not happening. It killed me. I remember sitting, because it was like after five on a Thursday and I was sitting at a Sonic that's like 10 minutes from where I work. I'm just looking at my phone like, Lord, I got roasted. And then followed up with phone calls and all the crap. But I'll never forget that. So what I learned was...

That was the moment. It's a whole lot better to tell a person the reality of it and then just try to sugarcoat and hope it blows over. So that was my moment of failure that changed a lot of things. And that was, guess that was probably 10 years ago now, but that was brutal. And I'll never forget that. And like I said, they probably won't talk to me again. Super nice guy. He's now a pastor at a church in Chattanooga. I have all the respect for him.

But yeah, that whole situation was just brutal because I was just not willing to, I was more in tune to say, I want to make sure he's happy with me and not actually give him the reality check. And I'm just, and you know me now, like I just tell you the reality of it as is, cause I don't want to deal with the other side. And I don't blame you for that. You know, it's funny failure will give you what most people lack and that's perspective. Yeah.

Right. So you get a little perspective with that. Because I find that I teach a lot of our younger people here the power of no. Just say no flat. I think I was telling somebody, when was that? Where I said the best thing you can do is protect your no. Yeah. What was that? Or protect your yes. Protect your yes. Like no is the most powerful word in your vocabulary when done properly. Protect your yes. Yeah, because I have one of our employees, they had an issue where they were like, how do I say no to this? And like, you just say it.

and don't apologize for it or add excuses around it. Just say, yeah, we don't do that. And my dad used to tell me no is a complete sentence. It is. And some people don't know that. all right. So that was our therapy session on both sides. But I just want to encourage you. There's probably a few people in here that are dealing with adversity or maybe you've had a failure at one of your clinics or maybe you had a failure of leadership. I've had that happen before to me and or I was the failure in the leadership role.

that happens, you gotta own it, you gotta learn from it, you gotta move forward. But listen, I know y'all are out there making huge impacts in your community and with your team. So embrace the suck, as you say. Fight through the failure. Success is on the other side of it. Don't quit. Keep going. Rock and roll. We'll get our instrument ready together. We'll have a celebration episode. We'll do a celebration episode. Y'all have a great week. Thanks for listening in. See ya.