The Ultimate Creative

Overcoming Burnout

• Emily Milling / Michael Wood • Season 2 • Episode 59

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Feeling a little #burntout on your business? Sick of doing the thing you literally started because you felt incredibly passionate about it, and now you feel resentful? This is an episode of The Ultimate Creative you don’t want to miss.

In this episode I’m talking with Michael Wood, Founder & CEO of Helium Ventures, a website design company turned video company turned website design company turned complete client experience from start to finish all the bells and whistles company. Yes, it is a LOT of change. 

Michael and I worked on websites together ages and ages ago (you can listen to my episode on the website design part of my career here) when he realized that in order to grow his business, he’d have to start delegating out work in order to maintain the pace he had been working at. Throughout this time, we’ve both had our fair share of #burnout and had to come up with creative ways to get through it, and then avoid it at all costs so it never happens again!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How we have experienced burnout
  • What we did in order to get through it and start functioning normally again
  • How we actively work to prevent more burnout from happening

Make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your podcast app so you never miss an episode! I love hearing from you, send me a DM on Instagram @the_ultimatecreative or leave a review for The Ultimate Creative Podcast! The more reviews we get the more people we are able to reach! Thank you!

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Emily: [00:00:00]   Welcome to another episode of the ultimate creative podcast. I'm your host, Emily milling. It's so nice to be talking to you again. I am here today with a very cool person, someone who I've known for several years.

That's like, a lifetime in dog years, possibly. Anyway, I'm here today with, with

Michael: [00:00:57] Michael.

Emily: [00:00:57] Michael. He used to, he was like Cher. He's just Michael, this is Michael Wood. Michael Wood is the owner of helium marketing. And actually he's like, The person that really helped me get started in my business. Well, one of the people, I have a lot of people in my life who are very supportive and very awesome to help with business things.

And look, if you're a business owner, content creator, you've got to get these kinds of people in your life because it just makes so much. Better you need people to bounce ideas off of. So, Michael and I started working together on websites because he didn't want to do so much of them and I had the skillset and that's what I started my business, the ultimate creative with.

If you listen to a couple of episodes back, I give you a very long rundown of my entire career. It's very exciting. So we started working together on the websites and then eventually. Because everything turned into podcasting, but today we're going to be talking about burnout, overcoming burnout. What the heck, how to recognize it, how to figure out, how to get through your life when you are burnt out, because.

I wish that it wasn't an inevitability, but perhaps after you listened to this episode, it won't be anyway. Michael.

welcome to the show. Please share it with my dear loving, wonderful listeners about your business. Tell us about helium and tell us about how it's evolved over the years. 

Michael: [00:02:26] why thank you for having me. I, you gave me a lot of credit for helping build your business and sort of like, where you are now. I feel like I don't deserve any of that credit. Outside of trying to, delegate some projects to you because I was doing so so much. But it's been an amazing relationship we've had since working together on different, you know, different creative projects.

So, you know, helium, it's a digital agency. We've been doing lots of different things from video and web and social And all that kind of stuff, all to help companies promote themselves better and really try and do sort of holistic view of. How to attract the right type of people. And unfortunately, for, for me it's, it's, it's always leaned very heavily on my own sort of like involvement, which is why I've tried to surround myself with amazing people, like yourself.

Emily: [00:03:12] So we're going to talk a little bit about how to not make your whole business and everything just rely on you, but give us a little bit of background about how helium has like shaped shifted throughout the years. Like you usually do. I don't know. What is it? A quarterly redesign of your website and then you add services and you take some away.

Tell us a little bit about that. How did that all come together? 

Michael: [00:03:36] well, I I started as a web designer. So, you know, at the beginning of my career, it was all about how do we put together an amazing looking website, which is probably where I started my compulsive need to have my quarterly or biannually redesigned on my website because who else to be the better Guinea pig than the web designer to try out new things and really push the limits on what you can or can't do.

It's was super exciting to find in Guinea pig myself. But I've always been really focused on building the business and building the website and building the different areas. And I think this is it's been unusual, I guess, against what I hear a lot from other people, which is. if you're a web designer, there's always that, that idea that your website will be kind of crappy because you spend your whole day working on everybody.

Else's websites that when you come home, you really look at it. And you're like, ah, who wants to do who wants to put in the energy on something where I 

can't bill it's it's it's unpaid work when you're working on your own business, versus I really enjoy experimentation and just seeing what we can do. And it evolves, you know, we, we I started off as.

Doing websites and doing e-commerce environments. And then we were building up websites and everything was gravy, except we realized that we weren't getting the results that we'd really hope for. And it, starts to become more competitive in the website world in terms of getting visitors to convert and buy things.

And attention spans were shorter and shorter than ever. So we, we, we did a project where we included a video and it was. Terrible video. We hired a local videographer to come out and record. At this time it was doing trailer hitches and how to install a trailer, hitch 

we, we shot the video, we edit it.

It was terrible, but it was at the time where YouTube was fairly young and video was sort of like up and coming in the web. And it was, it was still fairly Like new. it? was fairly trend-setting. So we put it up. and what we found is on the page that we had the video. we took the average time on page from something like seven or eight seconds to 42 seconds. and we five X the conversion rate of How many people actually bought these trailer hitches because we put a video on it 

Emily: [00:05:39] Wow. Even a shitty video can make a difference. 

Michael: [00:05:42] Okay. Yeah. Just a terrible, terrible video. And it worked, 

Emily: [00:05:46] a swamp monster in it? Or like what, why was it so terrible? 

Michael: [00:05:50] Well, I mean, you know, it's, we, we recorded it in doing like an installation, so the videographer was fine to kind of following around the action. But we didn't really have much practice in doing this being a bunch of web designers and running agency that lean so heavily on building up pages that we basically had the videographer, just following the person around doing the install, but we didn't get them to like pause and set up a camera angle. so with the camera operator was literally frantically moving his camera around to try and get the Right? 

shot and never getting it in time. So. like half the edits were like, After the action had, you know, after the thing was finally screwed in the camera, finally focused on the screw that was already in.

Emily: [00:06:28] Oh, my God. Well, I mean, you know, at least you showed the transformation. 

Michael: [00:06:32] we showed it. And Hey, as an agency, we delivered results to that client. And did it on the smallest budget ever, where you could basically go out for lunch with the team and that's all it paid for so we, we pulled it off and we delivered results, even though we had no money to do it, but it demonstrated that it worked.

And so being, You know, a guy that likes to focus on moving forward and not on the past, I abandoned web design and went down the road of video production.

Emily: [00:06:56] so was there like a period in helium where you weren't doing any web stuff at all and only doing video 

Michael: [00:07:02] I want to say yes, because I made a point of completely deleting my entire website, not even doing a backup of it and rebranding the business to say, look, we're we're helium, but we're now helium video And all we do is video. We, we completely removed all references to website, all portfolio items, everything.

Somehow that referral network always keeps moving where we keep getting referrals and it's hard to turn People away for something, especially that, you're good at. Right. We have this need That, if we know how to do something, we want to do it. But that was, that was the shift. We, we went to helium video for a couple of years, basically said we don't do anything but video. And then still at the end of the day, probably, you know, half the revenue was web design work.

Emily: [00:07:42] Yeah. And so when we started working together, it was still helium video. Cause now it's helium marketing. Right? 

Michael: [00:07:50] yes, we've shifted everything over, but when you started, we were still not even selling websites. And I still had an overflow of websites where I needed you.

Emily: [00:07:59] Oh, my goodness. I feel like the first rule of how to overcome burnout is to learn how to say no to the things you don't want to do. But I feel like the thing is you probably wanted to do it because like, one thing I know about you is that you.

just love to mess around with CSS for days. A thing I never want to do again in my life. You know your passions kind of always draw you back into the thing you really want to do. So I didn't have a follow-up question. That was more of an observation. What happened between, the transformation of helium video to helium marketing? Like what made that big shift for you?

Michael: [00:08:34] looking back on it. I got so lucky with the timing that we, we sort

of made a big shift before all of this, like COVID pandemic stuff started and we had to lean so much heavier on web work. But honestly it was the fact that. We were producing video content and that's what we were talking about and selling every day.

But there just is a difficulty when you have only a small piece of the project and you're giving up the control to other people. and, as a web designer, I I've really been unsatisfied with some of the web work that we've had our clients do. And the agencies they've worked with and, and sort of like. What the output of them was where we, I really just wanted to take control of the projects so we could say, look, we'll, we'll do it from beginning to end.

So when I made that shift from being healing video to just dropping in and being helium or helium marketing or helium ventures Is technically the name. W when we made that shift, it was about what we wanted to do is sort of own the campaign from beginning to end, because the strategic stuff that we would do in a video project played so much into What they needed to do in social or on web.

Or an pay-per-click all these different places, but it? wasn't getting done. And so we would create this beautiful video and produce it and roll it out. And then the client will come back to us and say our web designer, it needs like two weeks to upload it to their page. and also they have no idea how to measure it or promote it.

Emily: [00:09:52] Oh my God, what the tools are out there. People they're very available that, Oh my goodness. That, or just go talk to Michael because clearly he knows what he's doing. Well that is, that was a shocker. And so now you shifted into a complete holistic strategic approach, which I feel like is something you were kind of doing.

All the way through, since I've known you anyway, like you've always had your hand in some sort of a weird, like extra side project where you're like building out entire platforms for people. and we've talked about as well that you really want to start building out your own software platforms. Is that the right term?

What would you call it.

Michael: [00:10:30] Yeah, it's that need of, there's always been a little bit of a lack in terms of like, tools and, And and the things that we're using day to day. So In the shift that I've done, you know helium has always been about trying to do that comprehensive marketing, but at the end of the day, it's all about client service with the agency space is you're so familiar with it.

It's, it's a different kind of animal. So one of the things that I've always looked at is what I'd really love to do. Being someone that loves to build and rebuild and take things apart and make them work in different ways is shift. The skills And sort of the, the drive that I have to sort of like construct things into focusing more on the software development and be able to get into product as a service or software as a service developer.

Okay.

Emily: [00:11:13] And so we started talking about this particular idea, something for your business to evolve into a couple of weeks ago, when you sent me a text messages message, you sent him a text message, and you said, how do you not be burnt out? You said it far more eloquently than I just did, but that's sort of like, God has started on that conversation.

And so now that we're bridging into this. So seamlessly. I don't know if you're impressed by how good I am at podcast hosting, but you know, it's kind of my job. Anyway, now that we're bridging into this topic, I want to ask you about your experience with burnout. I'm going to share some of mine too, because like burnout fricking sucks, but like what led you to send me that text? 

Michael: [00:11:57] Oh, it's, you know, it's what we all face, especially anybody that works in client service. Right. We no longer control our own time. And then what we do is we say yes to people. Cause that's, that's, that's what you do when you run a business Right. You agree. And you're like, I will definitely be able to do that Cause I know. I can do it What we don't do though, is we don't really budget our own time. And we sorta just agree to things that we know are going to take awhile, but we're like Oh, we'll figure it out. I'm sure the future may we'll be able to get this done. 

Problem is the present me is 

exhausted. 

Emily: [00:12:29] Yeah. 

Michael: [00:12:30] and. that's It Right? So the, the, the future me has endless energy and is willing to take on anything, especially really complex things that seem like lots of fun or even simple requests where you know, you get emails all day long with, can you change this? Can you adjust this? Can you, do this? And w you know, we, we budgeted And our minds were like, yeah, sure.

That, that won't take much time. Or maybe this will be a big project, but it'll be tons and tons of fun. But it, it becomes a future problem in our minds. Like, we're, we're not really worried about it We're just, we're just going to do it. We'll we'll find a way to do it.

Emily: [00:12:59] I've been there a lot. And like I would say to the poll to do that for me, especially earlier on in my business was like, Oh, well it means more money. I love money. I'll take more money, but then I end up working like 80 hour, weeks or 120 hour weeks. Is that even a thing? I don't know. I probably did it though, because I was taking on literally as much as I possibly could.

The other thing that contributed to the fact that I had to bring in a lot of money was there was a point in my business where I was responsible for several different salaries, like several people that had to get paid and. It didn't quite balance out like the work division didn't quite balance out. So we brought in lots and lots of projects, but didn't have the right team in place, which I think was like a major contributor to me.

Getting to a point where I just started shrieking at everybody. I think at one point I like fully snapped at you or something or told you, like, I'm not doing anything else. And you're like, why are you being such a Dick? And I'm like, well, I don't know. Like, you know, it got to that point. Luckily you're a nice person.

And you understood that. I was like in. No man's land at that point, but it's, you know, like when you, when you bring on so much stuff and you don't have the systems in place to manage it, like that can really contribute to you know, sending you into a downward spiral of burnout town and it's miserable.

I feel like, you know, I've been through it. Too many times, and I never want to be burnt out again because it took me, I would say from that time back of that project, we were working on where I was like losing my mind. It took me a good solid year, maybe over a year to actually get over that burnout. Like I couldn't.

Brain I could not brain. I couldn't think of anything. There's the brain fog. There was just the general malaise and fatigue, the snapping of people, the depression. It's not fun. It's really not fun. I think the time before that was probably when I worked at a day job the job that I had right before I started my business and it was the same kind of thing, but it was different in that sort of like what you mentioned.

Not being in control of my own time, but also not being in control of my own money. Right. Somebody else was making the decisions for how much money I was going to be making. And that made it.

even worse. 

Michael: [00:15:16] Yeah. 

Emily: [00:15:17] It's not fun. It's not fun. Yeah, 

Michael: [00:15:20] monetary, you know, it's, it's the biggest motivator I find when, when you split off into freelance, right? it's, you and no longer. And a lot of cases when you, have a job, right. Or you're restricted to how much you make, generally speaking as if you're a salary worker, you generally, it's, it's difficult to get overtime, right? so you make a fixed amount. and what you do is you put in as much work as you can, or as you're willing to 

In those weeks in those work weeks and you try and make sure that your boss is happy. Your clients are happy. Everybody around you is sort of satisfied with your work, but you also know, that when you're budgeting financially, you're budgeting on a fixed income.

For the most part. When you go into the freelance sector, it's a totally different ballgame. If you say, Hey, I really want to buy a new, whatever. It could be A new game system, a new car, a new piece of designer furniture. You can almost track that back to exactly how many hours or what you're going to have to sell, to be able to pay for that thing.

And there's this mindset that if you want to spend a little bit more money, or if you just need a little bit more money for whatever purpose you you can kind of track that back to being Like yeah. Okay. I'll work this weekend. So if I want to, if I need to pay off this big expense, that's probably about six to eight hours of 

billable time.

So I'll just throw that on Saturday or. Sunday. and then that, that sort of habit kind of gets ingrained into you, that you can always make more money. the problem, isn't a limitation on money. It's a limitation now on time and it's just such a trap because it never ends, especially once you have to be able to make salary for other people.

Emily: [00:16:53] Oh, exactly. Okay. So let's talk about delegation now, because I think that's where so many business owners. Get in their heads. Like I'm the only person that can do this. I literally only just figured this out like a month ago. So like, I'm not one to talk, but you started delegating years ago when you delegated things to me.

And this I'm hoping was a way that you were able to overcome some of the burnout you may have experienced previously. So talk to me a little bit about what delegating has done. For you to manage your time a little bit better. 

Michael: [00:17:31] It's it's something we all have to do. We have to be able to delegate as business owners because we have limitations on our own time and what we can commit to doing, but 

it is incredibly difficult. And when you're in a creative field or your freelancer, especially, and you've, you've gotten used to the fact that, you can do things that are very difficult to hire out to anybody else.

But whether that be true or at least in your own mind, you know, it feels easier. And it feels like it's going to take less time, to just do everything yourself than to have someone else do it, or go through training or go through hiring or even finding the right person feels like it's going to take more time than just doing the thing yourself. And it is So so difficult. I've been really actively trying to do it more and more over the last couple of years, because There is points where you're just, you, you've got no steam left. You've put in those, you know, 40 hours over three days kind of weeks. And you're just absolutely out of energy. And, you know, you've got deadlines approaching or you've got things that mean that you can't go and say, you know, I'm going to take the weekend off or I'm going to go relax and do whatever. you you 

have to find people to hit those deadlines And that, that sort of forces you, to do it. But again, it, you know, as, as I've worked with you and I've worked with So many just amazing freelancers, when you find the right personality, you find the right person to delegate to, it is such a stress relief that you can.

Take a task in a sign it off to 

someone else and be Like I'm here to help you but like I'm going to let you run with this, and I'm going to empower you to do the thing that 

you love to do. And I'm going to try my best, not to get in your way at all.

Emily: [00:19:07] Which is hard. It's a hard thing to do. Like you said, you build habits of being in control of the things and, and feeling like if I don't deliver every single piece of this, the client's going to be like, how dare you, but that's not true. That's not true at all. The truth is that your client is paying for a service or the people who are paying for your content.

They're paying for you to be the personality of your content. They're not necessarily, they don't care if they give you like five bucks. A month for Patrion, whether you edited it or somebody else edited it, edited it and did it, it, that is the end of that statement. 

Michael: [00:19:46] it's so true, right? It's about value.  no, what they're getting in return, they don't really need to know or care how the things made it just, they need to know that what they're getting is what they paid for and what they wanted and sort of like what you've presented them, whether it be.

Your own time that's doing it, or whether you've be, you've got A great person, that's going to do it on their behalf, but there's just, you know, there's only so much time in lab in life for doing, you know, editing tasks or doing coding things or data entry. it, it just, it, doesn't work to do it, all yourself.

Emily: [00:20:17] it does not. Speaking of things that don't work, what else has worked for you in overcoming burnout? 

Michael: [00:20:25] I've started really weighing what tasks cost a lot of energy and what tasks give me more energy because there are some tasks, you know, as we talked about like editing, editing, even in the video production space has never been something I enjoy doing. Operating a camera, shooting things planning, strategy, writing, storyboards, all that stuff is more fun because it's more strategic.

I get excited about it. And then when I do tasks like that I find that I actually have more energy coming out of them, or at least I'm feeling much better about the process. And then what would happen is we get it in the editing suite and then I'd be like, great. All of these shots, everything we've put together, this whole plan is going to come together.

It'll be all. Be super exciting. And I love, the output of it, but the process of actually editing it when I used to do it all myself was the most draining task in the world. It's like data entry to me. It's just, it feels like copying and pasting and moving things and not to devalue the editing field. It just didn't speak to me.

Emily: [00:21:24] That's so funny. Cause that's like, I love, I love editing video. Okay. Caveat to that. I don't love editing things that don't require a lot of creativity because I like to edit things in really bizarre, weird ways. If you want to see an example of that, go check out the hatch. It's the big chick energy podcast slash it's also video.

You can find it on YouTube, big chicken, or just sketch. That does an example of weird video editing. That gets me super jazzed, which is. Basically what you're describing, like things that give you energy, how do you identify those things and how do you do more of that in your life? And then how do you say to yourself?

Okay, I'm going to let go of the things that I don't enjoy. I'm going to let somebody else take it of it. This is like, this is rhetorical because we had discussed sort of the different ways that we've been able to do this, but yeah, for you listener my dear wonderful friend, I want you to go home and think.

Go home and think about it. I don't know. Maybe you're already home, but think about how you can find the things that you hate and stop doing them so that you can overcome burnout if you happen to be experiencing it or so that you can avoid it at all costs. Cause it's a misery. Anything else that you've done Michael, to, to not be burnt out or to avoid it? 

Michael: [00:22:35] I've tried to, I've tried to really get a handle on what actually makes me happy in, in the projects that. I do. And, and it, it's easy to say, like, you know, I love working on like projects that are super success like that are super successful or are tons of fun with like the coolest clients that are doing the most interesting things But the reality is we can't actually always do that, Right. We can't only take on super fun clients and super fun projects all the time. I, as much as I wish I always could. It's just not. Practical for the 

real world. But what I found that was really interesting is really just trying to get a handle on.

What actually makes me enjoy those fun projects and trying to apply That into the less fun projects. And getting an idea of 

also what is in the project That also brings me 

the most value because sometimes the best thing I see or the best value that I get out of something is. when we're able to present it or get client feedback.

So even if we're doing things that are sort of more, you know, bread and butter kind of work, or just like some of that More mundane sort of projects. What I try And do is have a lot of fun with the way that we present it to the client. 

And then even if the actual content of it. is fairly simple work, like it's just, it's that it's just not that exciting.

But when we make the client presentation, a lot of fun, they get excited about it. They get happy about it. that it brings me personally a lot of value because I'm like, Hey, at least I put a smile on someone's face today. They had fun, which is great, which is what we want to do in marketing. We want to have, make people have fun and enjoy the experience, whether it. be clients or customers or, or end users, but understanding what it is personally that I enjoyed about the process really helped me get a handle on what I should be thinking about at least like mindset and wise, when I'm approaching projects of where.

Where I'm going to sorta like, get my head around that. it's going to be all for the client presentation or it's, it's going to be about being able to see the dashboard at the end of it to be able to put those, like those metrics, those milestones, and watch those graphs go up, like whatever it is that gets you excited about it. to try And make sure that you don't lose sight on those when you're doing work of any type.

Emily: [00:24:39] Yeah, exactly. I'm picturing your presentations to your clients. You're just like throwing jelly beans at people and you've got like a golden hat on and you're like, this is your new website. What do you think? And they're like, yeah, more and more. And that's why they keep hiring you. Is that what your presentations are like? 

Michael: [00:24:55] I try and find fun ways to do it lately. I've been trying to incorporate just next level animations and how we present it and throwing in just really funny, cute graphics at random times. So that as soon as I know that they're. you know, they're starting to like lose, lose the excitement. I just throw in a random kind of like cute stock photo or something that, makes people laugh.

And I'm like, great. Let's let's have fun with it Or, you know, and when, one of the examples we did when we were doing a pitch presentation and it's a P it was a pitch presentation. We did. that was for a, sort of like a, an 

industrial project that was really, really boring, but what we did for fun to try and like live it up, especially in terms of like making it a little bit more compelling to the client we were pitching a municipality and we went and we actually recorded.

Testimonials from residents in the municipality, because we got there a little bit early and put that together into like, sort of a fun video about what the, what the actual residents think and what they want, and sort of had fun with that edit. So When we went into the pitch meeting, we're like here, We listened to your residents.

We don't even live in your new we made a spalletti. We just went there and did this presentation and talk to the people before the meeting, put it together last minute, put it up. And it was so much fun. They, they loved it. We had fun kind of producing it and it's not at all stressful editing a video 15 minutes before, right.

Big project presentation.

Emily: [00:26:10] not at all stressful at all, but that is a really cool way to land a client. That's awesome. I love that you are finding. The areas in which you feel most creative and just doubling down on it. And is that not the ultimate creative thing that you can do? Why is my voice a radio announcer? I don't know.

Maybe that's my weird creative thing. So that's cool. That's awesome. Yeah. I think follow the fun. Find the fun. Whenever you're having fun. That is a good way to navigate out of burnout, avoid burnout. All of those fun things. A couple of ways that I avoid burnout are too. Literally time block in my day, we talked a little bit about this.

I don't know if you started doing this, but like I have like full blocks in my calendar of like this. Thing's going to take me this much time. And if it takes longer than that, I'm fucked. But at least I have it like blocked in my calendar so that I can start with sort of an idea of how long it's going to take me.

And then I don't get into that, like working super late every single night, or like feeling that. Immense overwhelmed. So calendar blocking is like so essential. I talked a little bit about this a couple of episodes ago to managing chaos. When I talked to my friend, Chris swale about that other things that are really helpful is just like, like exercise.

And I know you started doing some running as well. How's your running going? 

Michael: [00:27:38] it's actually not going too badly. I mean, in the last, two weeks, not great because I've just been dealing with other things but however,   I, uh, spent the winter. I bought a treadmill in January and I was doing one of those like couch to 5k things. And it was actually doing really, really well. at it up until the last two weeks.

But prior to that, I was running three days a week, which was an amazing recommendation by you to do some more exercise. especially when we're stuck at home. Right.

Emily: [00:28:04] Oh, heck yeah. Oh, man, you got to exercise. No matter what. It's so good. I got one of those. Like I got a fake Peloton, not fake Peloton. It's just like, uh, a foldaway bike off of Amazon. And then I got the Peloton app and then I started like cycling with that in the winter when I couldn't get out to run.

But also my knees are super busted, so I probably can't run forever, which is really sad, but it's

like, it's so key to be able to have exercise and like fresh air and get perspective. You have to be away from the things that are causing the stress, like sitting with it, isn't going to make it better. You know what I mean? 

Michael: [00:28:38] Absolutely. It's funny. When you say a fake Peloton. I literally just pictured you like, duck taping your iPad to the normal bicycle 

Emily: [00:28:46] That's basically, yeah. That's basically it. That's basically what I do. That is how I get my exercise so much tuck tape. Oh my

Michael: [00:28:55] I find too, you know, one thing that has it's actually like made a big difference. It's sort of going analog as a digital person. It's like, you know, things like bullet journaling and stuff like that I find really helpful to like, 

slow down, right. To, to also be able to justify why you're doing things, not just like what you have to do, but like why is it important?

Emily: [00:29:11] Yeah. You got to go back to your why, if you don't have a why you're fucked and that's just the cold darn hard truth of it. Okay. I want to ask you one more question before we get into plugs. I want to know if someone came to you, someone like a friend is texting you and they're like, I feel burned out.

What do I do similar to how you texted me several weeks ago? What is your advice to someone who's hitting the burnout threshold? And why do you believe it's important? to keep burnout in check as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a content, 

or 

Michael: [00:29:44] I guess I can't say just do it I didn't call Emily, but that probably doesn't work. Does 

it? 

Emily: [00:29:48] to this podcast? 

Michael: [00:29:49] Listen to this podcast. That's what You gotta to do. No, you don't you know what it is, it's sort of like a most important thing is just identifying, you know, why you're doing the things you do to kind of keep that motivation up and really sort of evaluating what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, because it's amazing when you go through and you sort of think about What What you filled your entire Workday or your evenings or your weekends. and being very realistic with yourself about what, your goals are, if does working that extra 10 to 20 hours a week, actually drive much value for your business or

for yourself. And if it does, can you delegate That work out in a better way? Or is, is are you working towards an unattainable goal? Are you just working for the sake of working.

Emily: [00:30:35] Oh my gosh. That brings up a really good point. when I'm in super hyper focused work mode. It is so hard to stop and it's just working for the sake of working. Cause it's like, if I stop something's bad is gonna happen. Something's bad. Something bad is going to happen.

And I think that can happen a lot for those of us who have a little bit of a sway to the perfectionist side, or like some of those just anxiety feelings. Like if 

Michael: [00:31:04] you know, those people that put out a quarterly website for 

Emily: [00:31:08] Yes, those cut like you very much like you. So this is just about you. so all that to say, don't work for the sake of working. Don't work yourself into burnout. It's not worth it. You will feel like garbage. And if you want to get out of it, I would say, you know, from my perspective, the antidote is like Michael said, find your why, and also go outside and literally just stop working.

Just stop. It's okay. You have the permission to stop doing the thing right now. Anyway, I want to hear Michael about whatever you have coming up. Maybe you don't have anything coming up, but the thing people should know about where to find you, perhaps a website address or an Instagram handle, or perhaps some of your content, where can people find you? 

Michael: [00:31:57] I mean, you have to check out our newest website that's being released or it's going to be released soon. But re you know, we're really what we're, we're all about is trying to help people just accelerate their growth and of, and really just build marketing momentum for their business. It's been a big driver and I just I'd love to hear from anybody interested in helping their idea, kind of get to a next level and improving that customer experience about what they're trying to do.

So our website is helium.marketing, and I love just reaching out to people. So I'd love to set up a time to chat to anybody That's interested in Marketing 

Emily: [00:32:31] That's true. You're a very good networker. You're an extrovert. I'm not, this is great. 

Michael: [00:32:35] the 

sad thing is I'm actually an extreme introvert. 

Emily: [00:32:37] I don't believe that. 

Michael: [00:32:39] That's why I got into marketing in the first place. It was great. You can sell things. without talking to people.

Emily: [00:32:43] Oh, my gosh. Well, it's true. I, I can't deny that. That's funny though. 

Michael: [00:32:48] It's that idea of You have to sort of train yourself to have skills that will help you succeed. Right. So for for me, it was, it was learning how to be an extrovert, but it actually, as we're talking about it, working in sales takes energy. It doesn't, I'm not extroverted. I don't talk to people to get more energized.

I'm internally energized. so I sit back and I think, and I ponder ideas, but at the same time I've learned this skill and I just like talking to people.

Emily: [00:33:15] Yeah. Yeah. You do that. Got to say you've built yourself a great business. That's pretty awesome. Everyone go check out all of Michael's stuff. Helium, Doug. Marketing not.com. That's it? That's the URL. That's where you have to go find all the cool things. Apparently there's a new design coming out very soon.

That is something cool to check out. You know, what you should do. You should also have like an archive, like helium through the years and unless you've deleted all of these sites, but that'd be kind of an interesting art installation, perhaps when we're allowed to go outside again. Well, this has been.

Magnificent. Thank you for all your insights on how to not be a burnt-out entrepreneur. Thank you so much for being on the show today. 

Michael: [00:33:58] thank you for having me, Emily.