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Acting Faster Than Your Inner Critic With Stephen Christopher
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Stephen Christopher is the founder of Seequs Digital Marketing. Seequs is a web marketing agency based in Denver that helps companies grow through online marketing.
Before Seequs, Stephen also started several financial businesses and today, uses his personal business experience to help other companies and business owners develop through online marketing.
Today we’ll be hearing Stephen’s journey; including his first entrepreneurial venture at age 14 and the huge failure he experienced when his mortgage company completely tanked in 2008.
Stephen shares why he believes you should not burn the ships and quit your job until you have a profitable side project.
And he shares how he’s learned to lean into his fears and why he highly recommends quick action and taking any opportunity to be uncomfortable.
Key Points From This Episode:
- How Stephen got into entrepreneurship at age 14.
- From engineering to business: Stephen’s college years.
- How Stephen got into the mortgage industry.
- How Stephen’s came out of his first business fail.
- Why a business crash is like a breakup.
- Assessing risk and turning failure into opportunity.
- Find out how Seequs was started on a napkin at Chilies.
- Why you need to act faster than your inner critic.
- Do your business on the side or burn the 9-5 job ship?
- Why you should learn everything you can from your current job.
- How Seequs found its niche and grows without its own marketing.
- Why clients are the best sales people.
- Overcoming imposter syndrome and self-sabotage.
- Why it takes two days to get out of a rut.
- Looking for any opportunity to be uncomfortable.
- How Stephen overcame his fear of public speaking.
- Why journaling is one of the most powerful things you could do.
- Delegate, duplicate or delete: Stepping away from your business.
- The three most uncomfortable things that you need to do next.
- And much more!
Tweetables:
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Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Stephen on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenchristopher/
Stephen on Twitter – https://twitter.com/stephenmchris
Seequs Website – https://www.seequs.com/
Power of Focus by Brian Tracy – https://www.amazon.com/Bulls-Eye-Power-Focus-Brian-Tracy/dp/1492630454
The Five Minute Journal by UJ Ramdas – https://www.amazon.com/Five-Minute-Journal-Happier-Minutes/dp/0991846206
The E-Myth by Michael Gerber – https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280
Transcript Below
Read Full Transcript
EPISODE 032
“SC: My internal saying about fear is, fear is fake. You know, when you really look back at like okay, what is the emotion of fear, right? Going back to cavemen days, it’s this thing where your brain is trying to save you from basically death, right? That’s why people are afraid of public speaking.
Your brain is telling you, if you go up on that stage, you’re going to die so that’s why we’re so afraid of certain things. When I have something that seems fearful, I just remind myself, hey look, fear is fake.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:30.3] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Fail on Podcast where we explore the hardships and obstacles today’s industry leaders face on their journey to the top of their fields, through careful insight and thoughtful conversation. By embracing failure, we’ll show you how to build momentum without being consumed by the result.
Now please welcome your host, Rob Nunnery.
[INTRO]
[0:00:56.0] RN: Hey there and welcome to the show that believes leveraging failure is not only the fastest way to learn but is also the fastest way to start a business, quit your job and live a life of absolute freedom.
In a world that only likes to share successes, we dissect the struggle by talking to honest and vulnerable entrepreneurs and this show is simply a platform for their stories. Today’s story is of Stephen Christopher, a good buddy of mine who also lives in the Denver area. He is the Founder of Seequs Digital Marketing, a web marketing agency that’s absolutely crushing it now, they tend to focus on more of the local service industry markets and help them grow businesses that may have been stagnant for a really long time.
Think plumbing, construction, electrical, like those types of businesses that haven’t had a huge online presence. Stephen comes in to the rescue, helps implement online marketing and just helps them grow really rapidly when they haven’t had that a long time. What he’s doing is really cool.
Before Seequs, Stephen also started several other financial businesses including a massive failure in 2008, that we’ll go into. But he uses his personal business experience to help other companies and business owners, find growth and development through online marketing. We’ll be discussing a huge failure that he experienced when his mortgage company completely tanked in 2008.
Why you should not burn the ships and quit your job until you have a profitable side project. Not sure I always agree, I kind of flip flop on this a little bit but I know for me personally, I like to burn the ships.
Lastly, Stephen will discuss how he’s learned to lean into his fears and tackle any obstacle that comes his way and he use the example of overcoming his fear of public speaking in the episode. Make sure to stay tuned.
But first, if you travel a lot like I do, you now need to pack less clothes than ever before and it’s for one simple reason only, it’s a shirt from an innovative Toronto apparel company called Unbound Marino. They have clothes made out of Marino wool and this is amazing. You can wear it for months on end without ever needing to have it washed.
Talk about a traveler’s absolute dream, never check a bag again, check in the show notes page for an exclusive Fail On discount that you won’t get anywhere else and if you like to stay up to date on all the Fail On Podcast interviews and key takeaways from each guest, simply go to failon.com and sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the page.
That’s failon.com.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:03:22.6] RN: How did you first get into entrepreneurship? Do you actually remember the first time that – you know, for a lot of people this is like a weird shift where you created something and somebody actually gave you money for it? Whether it’s a product or a service.
[0:03:34.3] SC: Yeah, I mean, my first kind of stint with entrepreneurship was when I was about 14 and I started a mobile car detailing business. You know, technically I would go to people’s houses, detail their cars and you know, I had become really good at that over the years. So it wasn’t an inexpensive service, it was like 120 bucks and this is what? 20 years ago.
Well, the problem with the mobile detailing business is when you’re 14, you can’t drive. Luckily, I was kind of a cute kid, I had to convince people to drive to my house, let me detail their car and t hen they’d come back and pick it up. But yeah, I ran that for practically a few years.
[0:04:09.5] RN: Nice.
[0:04:10.3] SC: It’s like my first entrepreneurship.
[0:04:13.2] RN: it wasn’t like a one off, your parent’s friends would you do you a favor and drop their car off, it’s actually a legitimate thing where you actually made a little money.
[0:04:23.2] SC: Yeah, I mean, I made money to buy a car or you know, the half of a car, I had to pay for half of my car when I turned 16 and so yeah. I worked for quite a few years getting ready for that.
[0:04:34.9] RN: Was it just you kind of hustling on your own or did you have – you hired an employee? You got your buddies or?
[0:04:41.1] SC: I didn’t, when I looked back in a lot of entrepreneur’s stories, right. They figured out how to get their friends to do stuff for them. I didn’t figure that one out until much later in life so it was just me hustling. And the cool thing was I realized that – or it was the first time I realized that I could control my income. If I wanted more money, all I had to do is go sell another car or work on a Saturday or whatever that was. That was really cool
[0:05:04.8] RN: Yeah, that’s a good point. In terms of how you’re kind of brought up and raised, were you raised by entrepreneurs or was it something you kind of – is it something they encouraged you to do with the car mobile detailing? Or was it something that you just saw a need for?
[0:05:20.4] SC: Yeah, I was not raised in an entrepreneurial family. My parents have had the same jobs for 30 something years and you know, they’re going to be retiring here in the next couple of years. My mom was a principle at a school, my dad was a nurse and eventually started running like a nursing department in the hospital.
No, they didn’t know anything about entrepreneurship and they were actually the first two people in both sides of their family to go to college. That was like their big step and then my big step was entrepreneurship.
[0:05:50.2] RN: Got it, was it something that they encouraged you to do? Is it something you ran by them or are you just 14 years old and just kind of winging it on your own?
[0:05:58.1] SC: Yeah, kind of just happened. I got good at detailing cars and I enjoyed it and then like somebody at church or something, said, “I’ll pay you to do mine” and then that’s how that kind of started. It was never really a plan of any sort and they encouraged it to the extent that it was like, “Hey go make so money so that now you can save up so that when you go to college you have a little bit of cash in the bank and you can buy a car,” and that kind of thing.
It was never – they didn’t really understand business so it was never this thing of like, “Okay, well do this and do this and then get some marketing.” Yeah, they had no clue and then when I went to college, they kind of looked at and said okay, “Well shut down your little fun play toy thing and get ready for the real world.”
They didn’t even see it as like a real opportunity.
[0:06:44.2] RN: Like you said, you were able to make a little money to pay for some things. After you – that was through high school I’m imagining, right? After high school, you do go to college?
[0:06:54.7] SC: I did.
[0:06:55.6] RN: Okay, from there, what did you study, did you take anything that you used in college into entrepreneurship? Because I know for me, well four years of college is great, actually has zero relevance on anything I do today.
[0:07:11.0] SC: Yeah. I went to University of Florida in Gainesville and I studied.
[0:07:15.1] RN: I’m a Georgia fan, that’s painful.
[0:07:18.4] SC: Both of my parents went to Florida state. You can imagine how they felt.
[0:07:22.3] RN: Nice.
[0:07:22.8] SC: Yeah, I went to school, I started out as computer electrical engineering so growing up, I would always build stuff like I would take remote control cars, take all the motors out, build other stuff like cordless drills and hook them all together.
My parents always told me they’re like “Yeah, you’re going to be a great engineer.” I just, when it came time to go to college, I just assumed, well, I’ve been told all my life I should be an engineer so that’s what I went to school for.
Got through about the first two years and realized like one day I looked around in my classes and I was like, these aren’t the people that I want to be around for the rest of my life. I switched to business because it was kind of easy, I was already most of the way there.
[0:07:59.5] RN: What was it about the people in the engineering side?
[0:08:02.5] SC: It was more of like the social aspect of it, you know? They were very intelligent, really great and nice people but –
[0:08:09.0] RN: Hard to connect with?
[0:08:10.3] SC: Yeah, there was just no social. I mean, look at us, we’re sitting here talking on a podcast, most of the people in that room would never do something like this. I crave that connection with people and so that just wasn’t there.
Graduated with a finance degree and a minor in economics, didn’t really know what I was going to do. I’m kind of the same way, the four years of college, they were a lot of fun, I learned a lot about how to deal with people, you know, a lot of those like real world type skills but I took one – there was one class that I had in college that I still use today and it was Microsoft.
I learned like Outlook and Excel and do all kinds of crazy formulas and then Excel Spreadsheet and that was the only class that I actually went to pretty much every class, while I was taking it for that semester.
[0:08:54.7] RN: Got it. It’s funny how valuable Excel is, if you know it well, you can save so much time with formulas and pivot tables and all that stuff. Let’s go to what you would actually consider – moving on past college. How did you first get into I guess real world entrepreneurship outside of the small projects that you had done in the past?
What was your first real entry into creating a business?
[0:09:22.0] SC: I did a couple of things after college, I worked for Meryl Lynch. I despised that, not because of Meryl Lynch but just because of like working a real job and having like seven bosses, it was not for me.
Did a couple of things, moved around a little bit and then in 2005, moved to Colorado and that was about the time when the mortgage stuff was happening. Met a guy that did mortgages, he was like, “Hey, I’m going out on my own, you should come join me.”
I went to go work for him because I was like, “Alright, this could be really fun.” Then over the course of six or eight months, I slowly just became 50% owner of the company and so we grew that until about 2008 which you know, most people know what happened then.
[0:10:02.3] RN: All the stories of everybody I talked to in the podcast, all stories go south to 2008. That’s the common theme. Yeah.
[0:10:09.4] SC: The mortgage industry was really...
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