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In this episode about measuring momentum, Chris talks all about this concept and its impact on business. Momentum can be gained and lost in real terms, both mentally and emotionally. He highlights this point by telling the story of a friend who suffered tremendous loss of momentum when his business’ website traffic dropped dramatically. Chris talks about the difficulty in building up momentum once it’s lost and provides insights as to how to manage this phenomenon. The most important aspect of any business, according to him, is the ability to focus on consumers and doing right by them. This belief system has led him to sustain a no-nonsense and problem-solving approach. Chris also talks about the importance of recognizing the forces that influence momentum, both in a positive and negative manner. While it’s impossible to avoid momentum crushers altogether, Chris urges entrepreneurs to mitigate these by taking responsibility for the business. Through accountability, trusting your instincts and surrounding yourself with the right people, you can identify existing momentum within your business and address areas where momentum is lacking. In "Ideating", he analyses the process on how to make an idea become a reality. The right idea at the right time with a right process can be the keys to a successful business.
As expert digital marketer and entrepreneur, Chris is the President and partner at Juhll.com as well as founder, operator and investor in Banks.com.
This episode is sponsored by Juhll. They are a full service digital marketing consultancy that has over 20 years of experience helping your business grow sales online. They've helped most of their clients grow more than 50% year over year by helping them meet their digital marketing goals.
Juhll Digital Agency works with companies who are doing $50 million in top line revenue that have a marketing budget of $2 million. They build your company from the ground up and they also help you in creating a strategy that will work best for your team.
You can email Chris Snyder, President of Juhll Digital Agency, at chris@juhll.com, or contact their team today and find out which of their services will work best for your success story.
“Having the ability, especially as an entrepreneur, to maintain momentum with as many times as you’re going to lose it is extremely difficult. It is extremely difficult.” (07:44)
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“Once you slow that train down, it’shard to slow a train down but once you do, it’s hard to kinda get one goin’ again.” (10:43)
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“If you have to scratch your head about how someone’s making money, they’re not doing it legitimately.” (16:48)
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“It’s hard to get momentum. I think you have to play the long game. I think you have to look at the macro. I think you have to put your head down, come to work every day and grind.” (18:36)
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“To facilitate momentum you gotta have people that want to actually have momentum.” (21:40)
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“I think recognizing that momentum is important. And I think understanding how to figure out what to do to gain momentum and how fast to gain it is important as well.” (24:58)
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“You definitely hope for the best, but you always plan for the worst. Always.” (29:22)
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“It was rewarding for me to be right about my instincts. And I like that, because that means that I get a little bit more confidence for next time to take action faster, set the priority sooner,and do stuff differently next time.” (35:08)
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“’What new fuckin’ app are we gonna create for momentum to save the next entrepreneur’s life?’ Oh, here I have an app for you. How ‘bout a little fuckin’ common sense? How ‘bout that app?” (38:27)
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Chris Snyder: You wrote some shitty articles, and you put them on the internet. And now you make $100,000 a month and you're going to Affiliate Summit in Vegas. If you have to scratch your head about how someone's making money, they're not doing it legitimately.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Snyder Showdown an original Juhll Agency production. This is the show for unvarnished conversations about what's really happening in the world of digital advertising with stories from the trenches about what's working and what's not. With your host, President of Juhll Agency and owner of Banks.com, Chris Snyder.
Chris Snyder: I've been having some one-off meetings with a business colleague I guess you would call it. I really don't know what to call him. Very accomplished, was a CEO at a prior company, spent some time at one of the big five consulting firms as a strategist. Is out of the zone now and I think in prior podcasts, you and I were talking about demand gen and selling and growth and also in a prior podcast, we were talking about what I want to do this year from a ... We talked about goal setting and what I said is I've got three or four things that I want to focus on, which are my perspective, handling situations, whether they're good situations or tough situations, really controlling my reactions to those situations, and then having priorities, just conceptual priorities, which brings me to this selling, demand gen. And those priorities need to be things that you're good at, that are frictionless or limit friction, and provide easy momentum. You don't want to really try to push a car uphill if you could just turn it around and go the other way, if there's another downhill direction, right?
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Snyder: And focusing on those priorities and not getting distracted kind of holding the line, and then finally this year we're going to work on accountability more. We are very accountable now, but we're going to work on it even more. And I think accountability's important because it allows you to have a scoreboard, and when you do good things, it allows you to kind of see the score.
Speaker 2: Can you talk about accountability a little bit? Like accountability specific to your team, holding your clients accountable or like the partnership.
Chris Snyder: Yeah, I think accountability is all around. It's for human beings. It's not about our team. It's not about just the client. It's not about our partners, our strategic partners and vendors. Like it's for human beings. If you're going to wake up every single morning, I mean, you're probably accountable to something that you're measured by. Like my kids are learning that they need to be to school on time. They're accountable for that, and I'm accountable to get them there, right? So you can't not show up for school. You have to be there, and you have to be there at a certain time. That's how a normal society works.
So throughout the course of these other podcasts and shows, we've been talking about a lot of things that I want to weave in today, which is momentum. I don't think we've specifically talked about momentum, and momentum is really hard when you're trying to do things that you're not good at. Even when you're doing things that you're good at and you're starting to gain momentum, I'm finding and I have found over the years now that I'm really thinking about momentum and now that I'm thinking about starting some different things like the selling thing that I was talking about with the CEO that we're going to work on demand gen and growth stuff. But it's really, really important.
In a prior show, we talked about ideas, which also require momentum, right? Your day to day life, like getting up in the morning and going. Maybe you need coffee to get you a little bit of momentum and grease the skids a little. Momentum is important, not only for your daily life but in the long term, and recognizing how you can generate momentum is really important.
I'll tell a story just quickly, and then I want to talk about momentum a little bit more and get some questions. But a friend of mine and a colleague of mine called me last night in a little bit of a panic saying that, "Hey, my website traffic is off 55%." And this is a very well known website. It's got momentum. It's got domain authority. They've been doing this stuff a very long time. We're in the middle of cyclical season that is very good for his business, and it's down. Wake up one morning and bam, you get hit by that proverbial two by four. And so you immediately lose momentum. It's like a car accident. It's not like your slow stopping to the stop sign because you can lose momentum that way too. You can apply a little bit of friction and lose some momentum, and that's always all around us.
Speaker 2: But for them because the website is such an integral part of their business, any impact to what they come to expect month over month from a traffic perspective is something that's going to get their attention because it's a direct hit to their bottom line.
Chris Snyder: Yeah. And you lose momentum like you lose revenue momentum. Right? Because the cyclicality of his business during this time of year specifically as you start to gain momentum and especially with companies like Google or Facebook or some of these guys, the engines, the algos. When you get to a certain point of scale, when you get a little bit of momentum, it actually turns into out sized gains, right? When these big companies are trying to reinvent themselves or they're trying to wedge themselves in to a new vertical or a new market, it doesn't take much. It only takes a little bit of momentum for them to get going, and once they do, it builds quite rapidly. It's a little counter-intuitive but in paid media, you get to a point if you're spending enough money, your costs actually go down substantially. Your scale gets to be so big. You're so much better than everybody else. It is really, really hard to get that momentum, but it's also really, really hard to lose that momentum. Like losing that momentum is extremely difficult to do. It can happen but this kind of two by four effect or the pulling the E brake when you're going 55 miles an hour and just pulling the E brake, you're going into a spin on the interstate.
So this friend of mine and colleague of mine calls me last night and we're having this discussion. I could just tell that he lost momentum in real terms, but also he lost momentum in emotional and mental terms. Having the ability, especially as an entrepreneur to maintain moment with as many times as you're going to lose it is extremely difficult. It is extremely difficult. I think the only way you can be prepared for being an entrepreneur and losing momentum as many times as you're going to lose momentum when you're an entrepreneur is growing up your whole entire life losing every single sport and game and getting the shit kicked out of you in every practice you ever went to and actually coming back to that same platform every single weekend and being like, "Okay. I'm going to get the shit kicked out of me again but maybe someday I'm going to win a game."
Speaker 2: Totally.
Chris Snyder: That is exactly what happens every single day as an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I like to say you need to be comfortable with failure. You need to grasp all the different flavors of failure because you think the here's only one way you can fail, and then you literally fall on your face and you have to get up and just be like, "Whoa. Okay. I didn't see that one coming." And now chalk that up in the experience list of let's find ways to make sure that flavor of failure, mitigate that one. But then they'll be another one and another variation. It's almost like the way that viruses mutate and they attack the body. In that same way, failures just like around the corner for you, and if you're not prepared mentality I think to expect it and handle it, you're not going to succeed.
Chris Snyder: Well, yeah. I mean, you have to expect it and then you have to ... The only way to learn how to handle it, you don't go to school for this stuff. You just have to have the personality to just get back up. And I don't know if that's a nature or a nurture thing. But you really do have to have the personality to understand that no matter what happens, of course you're going to get pissed when you lose moment and depending on how fast you lose it will escalate your level of emotion around it. But it's just getting that call last night and having a couple other things happen during the week, I just started thinking about momentum. Talking with this other colleague of mine, we're trying to build some momentum in this demand gen, revenue, and growth positioning, right? The last week, I've been thinking a lot about momentum, and then a couple things happened both last night and more specifically today that they're just momentum killers you could call it. They're disappointing or you could call it ... I'd just prefer to classify it as momentum. I feel like it's more abstract that way. It's like easier to deal with that way. It's like once you slow that train down, it's hard to slow a train down, but once you do, it's hard to kind of get one going again.
So anyway, I'm all about momentum today, and really having some perspective on momentum and trying to figure out how we control it a little bit better.
Speaker 2: So what were your thoughts when your friend or your colleague called you and was telling you like whatever it is that they saw where they were losing momentum on their site? How were you able to help them think about how to handle that?
Chris Snyder: Well, so first of all, my initial reaction was I felt bad because I've been doing this a long time, and unfortunately, when he told me what happened, it was an algo change over night from a major, major, one of the biggest publishers in the world kind of change, and it literally tanked his business in one day. I would like to say that I was surprised and I would like to say that, "Oh, wow." But I wasn't surprised, and I just felt terrible because unfortunately, when you sign up to do what we do, it's definitely stock market stuff, man. You can wake up one day and someone's like doesn't hit earnings or there's a lawsuit or there's whatever. In the stock market, in real terms, companies are literally can lose value over night, that much value.
And you're not immune to that in our business either because when you're bidding and buying and budgeting on a system, like a Facebook or a Google or an Amazon, these guys control like literally all the inventory on the planet. I'm being a little sarcastic, but they control like probably 90% of it. So not all of it. But when they want to do something, they do it. Unless you're Procter and Gamble, they don't give a shit. They're not asking you if you're okay to take a 50% or 60% revenue hit because they may feel like from the macro, they're going to put rules into place and policies into place that are going to penalize sites or publishers that look a certain way, right? That's what they decide to do. They do it in a vacuum. They're not going to ask your permission. They're in control 100%.
Speaker 2: And they change these overnight sometimes.
Chris Snyder: Oh, they change it overnight. So the question is is what did you do and how did you feel about that. So first of all, I felt terrible because talking about the two kinds of momentum that I was discussing a little bit earlier is not only did he lose his site's momentum. So in my brain, I'm thinking about, "Okay. From a practical standpoint, how do we help him get his economic momentum back?" That's like a real classic just problem solution kind of thing, and you've got to come up with ideas and you have to run fast, super fast, see if you can fix it. And you have to understand what can be fixed.
In this particular case, I had a hypothesis that there were a few things that could have happened, that could have put him in the penalty box, and one of the things that I felt is happening from a macro are sites that look a certain way, given our geopolitical environment and given what's happening on a couple other big platforms, these guys are basically like from a macro making policy decisions globally and putting everyone in the same box and saying, "If you even look close to being a site like this," like from a policy decision, "you will no longer be ranked with our ..." Like it's not going to happen. Your rankings are going to be shit. We're not going to send you any traffic because you look this way, not because you act a certain way. It's because you look a certain way from a publishers standpoint.
When you have a network and a company as big as some of these platforms, you wholesale make decisions and you roll them out, and then you pick up the pieces over the course of the next six months.
Speaker 2: So just on that point, is there anything you can, without getting to specifics obviously about who or anything that allow them to identify the site, but are there just, for the benefit of the listener, like some bullet points about things to look out for content wise that will get you flagged?
Chris Snyder: Yeah, I wish I ... You know what, I wish I had real tactical and technical things to give you, but here's what I will say and this is served me well over the years and based on my observations from easily more than 100 clients who have come through these doors. Do me a favor, focus on the customer. If you're B2B, it's a customer. If you're B2C, it's a consumer. Focus on the consumer or the customer. Focus on your product and that experience and the true value that you are delivering to your customers. Focus on doing what's right.
I've been doing that for 10 years, which in general is why, look, I don't think there's anything wrong with SEO. Look, I'm neither here nor there on it. I'm basically like I'm in charge of stuff that I can control, which is why we don't do a ton of SEO here. Do a lot of audits. We make a lot of recommendations. But in the end, I'm like, look, you can't control that stuff. The Google's of the world, they change their stuff all the time. So if you want to do stuff you can control, call me. I'll give advice and recommendations on other stuff, but if you want to move the needle, paid media.
Look, at the end of the day, my advice to all of our listeners is if you wake up in the morning and you talk to one of your bros or one of your buddies or someone that you know that you look at and they're driving a Ferrari and you start looking at it, and you're like, "Well, wait a second, you're driving a Ferrari. Are you telling me you're making a shit load of money because you did this. You wrote some shitty articles and you put them on the internet, and now you make $100,000 a month? And you're going to Affiliate Summit in Vegas." If you have to scratch your head about how someone's making money, they're not doing it legitimately.
I mean, full stop. Let's be clear, right? I was reading about a company I'm familiar with a little bit that closed an equity round of funding, but it was a convertible note with a thing. And then the shareholders would get a thing for another chunk of stuff and another thing. It was a bro, that sounds like someone from the FCC's going to be knocking on someone's fucking door. That's what it sounds like to me. Right? I mean, it sounds like derivatives and loan swaps back in the day. It sounds like a whole bunch of stuff that people can't understand that someone put together and now everybody's getting fucked.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We've been down that road before.
Chris Snyder: Yeah. So what is my advice? My advice to the listener is if you look at your website or you look at the things that you're doing ... And, by the way, this has nothing to do with the person I'm talking about. This is from a macro. If you're going to go out there and try to create value, if the only value that it serves is for you and your company and it doesn't actually serve the value of your constituents or your customers or your consumers, guess what. It's not going to happen tomorrow. It might not happen next week. It might take five years for that shit to happen, and when it happens, it will happen swiftly and there will be no turning back. You will wake up and your revenue will be gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: Or you can sell that company to an investor who doesn't know what the fuck is going on, and now they've got the bag and maybe you can drive your Ferrari for the rest of your life, which is great.
Look, it's about momentum. It's hard to get momentum. I think you have to play the long game. I think you have to look at the macro. I think you have to put your head down, come to work every day and grind. And then you don't just wake up one day and you're successful. You wake up one day after all of this stuff we've been talking about, losing momentum, gaining momentum, sometimes losing it rapidly, sometimes gaining it rapidly and then losing it slowly, right? There's all this crazy shit that's going on, and you have to not only ... It shouldn't be a survival thing because you don't want to come to work every day and you don't want to be in your life constantly feeling like you're trying to survive. You need to embrace this shit because this is your world. You need to have joy in this. You need to have pleasure in this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: Which may sound odd, but for me, I kind of switch off some of the emotional stuff and I go into problem solving mode, and I treat all of this stuff like a problem that can be solved.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Snyder: So in the case where my buddy calls and I can tell he lost momentum, both economically and emotionally, I was basically like, "Look, man. I'm glad you told me. I don't think there's anything we can do today or tomorrow because I think you're dealing with a macro issue and a strategy issue with how you're approaching the market. And the dependencies on third parties are so massive that it sunk you. I don't think that's going to come back. But what I would like to think about now to help a little bit with the emotional momentum is let's get in a problem solving mode and have fun hypothesizing about what we can do different strategically when everybody else probably thinks there's nothing left here to do."
When someone says that to me, I'm like, "Oh, fuck yeah. It's on." Right? Because I can promise you right now I will come up with 10 ideas in the next week because now it's on my mind constantly and we can work through the list. We will write those ideas down. We will put our thesis out there, and we will say, "If we do these things that focus on everybody else except for ourselves, if we don't focus on immediate revenue, if we don't ..." And I'm not saying you got to shut down your lights and live on welfare to create something for consumers. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying switch it. Do it for everyone else, stop doing it for yourself, and I guarantee you you'll have that bingo and you'll be off to the races.
And then it's about execution, right? It's about rack and stack on the ideas, like we talked about. It's about rack and stack on the ideas and moving fast with great teams that are passionate, share your vision, and they're on board and they're ready to go.
Speaker 2: I'm curious because with a lot of these things, the question is if that's the important thing to figure out how to keep, what are the pieces that need to be in place in order to facilitate momentum?
Chris Snyder: Well, I think to facilitate momentum, you got to have people that want to actually have momentum, first of all.
Speaker 2: So let's do some inception, just keep going backwards, right? So if you want people to facilitate momentum, how does that happen?
Chris Snyder: So you have to have I think a vision and a train to ride on that has wheels with a track, not in all cases because some startups don't have wheels and a train to ride on. But the one thing that will always be constant with momentum is it has to start somewhere. Momentum has to start somewhere. There has to be someone that has that spark, that starts that explosion, and momentum's contagious. Right? And then you tell someone and they're like, "Oh, that's interesting." And you get a little momentum.
Watch a basketball game or watch a football game. It's really hard to quantify momentum. It's like but you know it's happening. You know it's happening. You certainly know when the NBA team is running and gunning. They're making everything and they just can't miss and they're stealing and the coach is like, "Time out. Time out." It's like when it comes, it comes. I mean, it can come fast, and it can be overwhelming.
So back to the question, peeling back the onion, the question about momentum and how do companies keep it, that's the middle of the onion. The skin of the onion or the first part of that onion is I don't even know who is sparking it, who is giving it, what is the momentum based on. And then you got to lose it to actually keep it, right? Or you have to move this thing around to actually have some quantification if you're gaining ground or losing ground and how momentum is impacting that, and what are the forces in your organization, whether they be people or whether they be products. What is that is surrounding momentum that is moving it around? Again, your momentum can be moved by people, which in one of my cases this morning, my momentum was two by four by a person, a human being. So you have to figure out how to pick up those pieces and regain momentum. In my buddy's case, it happened through like not a person. It wasn't the Wizard of Oz guy that stepped behind the thing and was like, "Haha. I pushed the button and now you're fucked."
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: It was an entity. It was an entity that caused him to lose momentum, a lot of momentum. So they could be people or they can be things. But I think the important part about this is if you're an organization, I think everybody recognizes momentum. Well, maybe I'm out to lunch. Maybe people just come in, they put their head down, they go to the cubicle, and they have no idea what's going on around them. So they have no idea if their organization or their pod or their group or the vertical they're participating in or their boss or their teammates. Maybe they don't have any idea whether they have momentum or not. I don't think that's true.
But I think most people walking around, they understand if they have momentum, and so I think recognizing that momentum is important. And I think understanding how to figure out what to do to gain momentum and how fast to gain it is important as well.
Speaker 2: So it's interesting. So if you think about momentum and the way to measure momentum, if you think about the car analogy, the speedometer tells you how much momentum you have, right? You're going 55 miles an hour. For some reason ... And when you're on cruise control, you don't even have to worry about the effort because it's doing all the time. But if all you had as your guide was the speedometer and maybe you couldn't feel the car moving or anything like that. So you just have the dashboard. When it drops to 35 or when it goes up to 85, like you know something's wrong or something happened. You're like, "Whoa. Traffic."
Chris Snyder: You feel it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You feel it. And so that seems to me an indicator that there are actual momentum KPIs, right?
Chris Snyder: I've never thought about it until today because honestly I'm on this show right now as I usually do. Stuff happens to me during the week or it happens at my business or it happens at other people's businesses or our client's businesses. And I just got really introspective about it because I got a phone call on one end at like nine o'clock at night last night in a bit of a panic, and thank God that I have great relationships and the human being that called me puts enough trust in me to call me and ask my opinion about the matter. He's built a bunch of great relationships and I just started thinking about this whole universe of, "Wow. That really sucks." And then I started thinking about that, and then this morning I woke up and I had to deal with another issue unrelated. And so I just got two, what I would call, what I classified this morning after it was all said and done, I was like, "Man, these just crush momentum."
Actually there was three cases. There was the CEO and I who were talking about how to build this program. So in that particular case, I'm talking about gaining momentum, and I don't want to lose momentum because it's hard to put effort into stuff and then not get the momentum. Then you don't want to do it again, and that's not ... You don't want to wake up every morning and then just feel like you're not going to get the momentum. So why even try? That's a terrible attitude. That's a terrible spot to be.
So when I start having conversations and I'm so cognizant of time because our agency tracks every minute. I'm like, "Man, if I spend time on this, I know how valuable my time is. We better start ..." The speedometer has to be there. I have to see if we start pushing the gas a little, even if we're in first gear, I'd like to understand if we're going 20. And I'd like to understand if we can get to second gear. That's the momentum that I started with at the beginning of this week. It was like trying to create momentum.
And then on Thursday, I got a phone call. This was this external thing happened and it had crushed someone else's momentum. Right? And then this morning, which is Friday morning, I get a phone call and somebody crushed my momentum. I'm just like this is all just ... This needs to be classified in some way, and I classified it as momentum. There's probably someone from some Ivy league school or some consultant that does this for a living that's like, "No, dude. You got a bad case of the measles." I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. I'm just going to classify it as momentum because I think it's an appropriate word in this particular case.
Speaker 2: It's like flow, like personally when people are in the zone and everything's firing at all cylinders. Like surfers and skiers get into this sort of stuff too. Like everything's clicking, right? If your business, it's the same thing, right? You feel like finally ... And it's that moment when you just rest and be like, "You know what, everything seems to be working fine." People are coming in on time, clients are happy, getting paid on time, and then that's exactly when ... It's almost like that's the moment where you need to be like "Wait, things are too perfect because something's about to go down right now."
Chris Snyder: Yeah. And you know what, something always will. You definitely hope for the best, but you always plan for the worst, always. Just getting back to how I'm trying to understand who I want to have relationships with, both personally and professionally, and hiring and just all of this stuff, you're like how do you understand if those people that your with either on a daily basis at your job or if it's a relationship with your significant other or if it's relationships with families in your neighborhood, how do you figure out how to get around people that you can have great relationships with that understand that momentum is not a constant thing? It's not always definable. We can all feel it. There's not always a speedometer around it.
But the other thing I started thinking about, which is probably a whole 'nother show, is having the relationships, surrounding yourself with people that you can come to when you're faced with depleting momentum or when you're having success with moment is super important.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: It's super important because I started thinking about this too. It's like fortunately for me, my business partner who's also my wife, like I can tell her everything. The wins, the loses, and sometimes people just need to talk about where like their momentum and where it goes. Sometimes they just want you to listen because they just want to tell someone about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: Because we're social creatures and we want to talk about stuff, most of us.
Speaker 2: Especially business owners.
Chris Snyder: Yeah, and especially business owners. I think it's really important and I think maybe three or four years ago, I actually held a lot of this stuff really close to my vest. Like I wouldn't talk about our momentum. I wouldn't talk about our wins and loses. I wouldn't talk about how much money I made. I wouldn't talk about how much money I lost. I wouldn't talk about ... I just grew up in a day and age where a lot of that stuff was I guess considered inappropriate, right? You don't talk about your salary. You don't talk about your business. You don't talk about your revenue. You don't talk about your mortgage. You don't talk about your rent. You don't talk about Uncle Jimmy being a perv, right? It's like you just don't talk about that stuff. And I think over the last couple years, I don't give a shit because my little dent in this universe, it's not even a dent, dude. It's like a scratch. It's like a scratch on a bumper of a shopping cart that no one will ever see.
And the other thing I've learned is really nobody gives a shit about your problems, and nobody gives a shit about your momentum in general unless they're really good friends of yours. So, look, the people that care are going to listen. I hope it makes a little bit of a ... If you're an entrepreneur and you're listening to this, I hope it helps you a little. That's all I care about. I mean, it's helping me to talk about it. I guess it's being recorded, and we're talking about it. But I hope it provides you a little bit of solace in knowing there's a million of us out there. I don't know how many entrepreneurs are out there. I don't know if you can even classify that. There's a million people out there all dealing with the exact same fucking problem exactly right now.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Chris Snyder: They lost traffic on their website or they had a challenging day at work or one of their neighbors sucks or I don't know. One of your kids failed a math test. They lost momentum. It's like okay, well, let's classify this and let's try to figure out how to do a better job of figuring out solutions to momentum loses and maybe try to get a little bit ... I don't know if you can do this but maybe try to get a little bit more predictive about when momentum is slowing down. Because I would argue, actually, now that I'm thinking about it a little bit more, these things don't just magically happen.
Speaker 2: No.
Chris Snyder: It's funny how introspective you can be that hindsight bias. It's funny how smart you are after the shit happens and you go, "God, I fucking knew it. I knew it."
Speaker 2: Yeah. And that almost hurts more because you're kicking yourself.
Chris Snyder: Oh, it's your fault. It's always your fault. And by the way, if you don't think it's your fault, get off this podcast and just go somewhere else because it's always your fault. If you're an entrepreneur and you're listening to this podcast, it's your fucking fault.
Speaker 2: If you're the business owner, it's your fault.
Chris Snyder: It's your fault.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: Look, I know when I'm losing momentum, I know it. And the interesting thing about it is you doubt yourself and then you start thinking about it, and your like, "Oh, well, maybe ..." And in another show, I talked about listening to the macro and how I'm going to stop listening to the macro and let the forces of society pressure us into operating a certain way or doing something that everybody else is doing.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Snyder: I knew I was losing momentum. I knew I was losing momentum for three months. I talked about it.
Speaker 2: And how did you prepare for that?
Chris Snyder: Oh, I talked about it. I probably didn't prioritize ... I did not prioritize this as an item as much as I should have and could have. So, again, it's my fault. It's my fault, and I knew it. And think back, think back when you started to lose momentum. Think back when you start to lose this traction, and you know damn well it's your fault. So fucking learn from your mistakes, right? And, by the way, honestly, the only pumped up thing I got from all these things this week, because there was a lot of this momentum shift changes, all this stuff. It was rewarding for me to be right about my instincts. Very rewarding for me to be right about my instincts, and I like that because that means that I get a little bit more confidence for next time to take action faster, set the priorities sooner, and do stuff differently next time because shame on me if I don't because now I know it, and now the world knows it. Well, the two people that listen to this podcast know it. You and me. You and me.
Speaker 2: Well, I think the takeaway is to think about if there's a real ... Takeaway for this episode is to really think about where there's momentum ... where there's current momentum in your business, and if you're a business owner, you can probably rattle off 10 easily. And then where are the places where there's a yellow flag, you don't have to wait for the red flag, but where is there like a little like warning, the canary in the coal mine? Like hey, your momentum's in jeopardy here, and if you don't pay attention, you're going to lose it. And just kind of go back to your own business and take a look at those.
Chris Snyder: It's so funny. Nowadays, everybody's got an app for that. I think that humans just have become overly dependent, overly reliable and just downright lazy as it relates to not having to think some of these things through. It's easy just to make a JIRA ticket and say, "Okay. It's on my list. I'm so organized. I'm doing such a good job."
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Chris Snyder: By the way, I love lists. I fucking love them. But there's also this thing that says your brain really needs to go backwards and adapt towards the stories and the feelings of the time because language in stories were passed down from generations through campfires and communities getting together and singing songs and doing these things. And they didn't have apps. They didn't put a JIRA ticket in for shooting a musk oxen during the ice age. What the fuck, man? Like can you imagine Cromagnum with a JIRA ticket and his little flint spear thingy and fucking that's a sub task, bro. That goes over to the other department. That's not my department. That's the skinning and cleaning department. I cut up the filets. Right?
It's like humans were so smart and still are very smart. Were so smart back then, they built pyramids, man. They didn't have JIRA. They didn't have to write all this shit down. And, again, I'm not saying don't write shit down. But I am saying I don't think there's anything ... Your question is, okay, so how do we solve the problem, which is a great question. Like what are you going to do when you go back to work tomorrow, which is Saturday. Yes, I'll be back to work tomorrow. What are you doing to do when you go back to work tomorrow to do a better job of this, and like how are you going to create a process or how are you going to ... I know you're not asking me if I'm going to create a process. But it feels to me like, okay, what are we going to do? What new fucking app are we going to create for momentum to save the next entrepreneur's life?
Oh, here. I have an app for you. How about a little fucking common sense? How about that app?
Speaker 2: Is that one available in the Apple store?
Chris Snyder: Yes. Just now. I just built it because I built the pyramids. No, look, I mean, does it make you feel icky? Do you have this thing in your gut that's telling you something's not right? Does our hair on your arm stand up or your eyebrows stand up when your ... I mean, just go ... You know what, use your instincts, go solve the fucking problem. You don't need an app for this. You don't need a process for this. If you are dealing with stuff and you're at a job or you are the boss, go hit it head on. Go deal with it. Go deal with it, communicate about it, over communicate about it professionally. I mean, I think I guess try to be nice. But at the end of the day, I'll just be better next time on this particular item. This isn't a math problem. There's no process for this. There's no app for this.
Speaker 2: That's a good bow.
Chris Snyder: That is a good bow.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Snyder Showdown. Visit SnyderShowdown.com to see the full show notes for every episode, which includes a recap as well as any links mentioned in the show, and because it's Chris, we'll definitely have a few awesome quotes that you can share. There you'll also be able to sign up for our newsletter, so you're notified when new episodes are ready. Tune in next week
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