Episode Details

Now it's time to get a bit personal.

Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side.

This episode starts down the road of discussing the personal side.

The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, go to http://brandingblitz.com/3/

Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand.

This is the third episode. Last time, I gave a quick overview of where we're at so far with this business. I am still very early in this process, but things are well underway and moving quickly. That is one of the things that makes me excited to share this story with you. I always love hearing people's stories of building a business – while they are actually doing it rather than after the fact. I guess it just adds an extra level of excitement and suspense not knowing what the outcome is going to be. As this story unfolds, I'm hoping to share that excitement with you – not so much an excitement about my business and where it's going but about the potential for YOUR business and the things that can happen as you take action towards your goals.

I mentioned that in this episode I wanted to talk about some details from my personal life. At first, that may sound like something that doesn't really belong here – but I truly think it does. It is an inseparable part of this story. If I don't share at least some of these details you really won't have the full story. Even more than that, I really hope that my situation can become a catalyst for you, as it has for me. I hope that it will inspire you to take action and move forward and remove any barriers or excuses that may be stopping you from starting or growing your business. Wherever you're at in the process, I think there's something here to help motivate and push you forward.

So let's get started!

About a year and a half ago, my wife and I found out we were going to have our first child. We didn't have a whole lot of resources but we were getting by. My wife had a full-time job at a residential treatment facility for women with drug and alcohol addictions. Overall, she enjoyed working there, but it was low pay and fairly high stress – and we wanted her to be able to stay home with our daughter if possible. We'd been living pretty frugally and were able to get by with the income from her job, which had left me free to begin gradually building up a small online business whatever extra resources we could budget.

I had a little business set up that was growing gradually but steadily – but it needed more money to scale than we had to invest so the growth was very slow. When I had started, we didn't have a baby on the way, so I figured scaling very slowly was okay – I had plenty of time. Suddenly, with a baby on the way, I had 9 months until our expenses were going to go up and even if my wife kept her job we wouldn't be able to get by on just her income. That wasn't going to be enough time to get this very slowly scaling business model I'd been working on up to the necessary size to support us.

We dec