Consistency is Underrated

Meet Host, Mary Grothe

Mary Grothe is a former #1 MidMarket B2B Sales Rep who after selling millions and breaking multiple records, formed House of Revenue®, a Denver-based firm of fractional Revenue Leaders who currently lead the marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps departments for 10 companies nationwide. In the past year, they've helped multiple 2nd stage growth companies between $5M - $20M, on average, double their MRR within 10 months, resulting in an average ROI of 1,454% and an average annual revenue growth eclipsing $3.2 million.

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Mary Grothe: Hey everyone, this is Mary Grothe - Founder and CEO - and you're listening to the Revenue Radio® podcast brought to you by House of Revenue®. Each week, we'll talk about common revenue challenges and how to get past them, share real-world experiences, and get a glimpse into my life as a CEO scaling my own business. If you're a struggling entrepreneur, or just an entrepreneur looking to be inspired, this podcast is for you. I'll give you honest, unfiltered, and practical insights into growing your business and getting past your revenue plateau.

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I'm back from vacation. Sorry for not letting you know I would be gone for a week. I thought about it after the fact. I'm thankful for the week off. We had spring break my family, and I drove down to Waco, Texas. We stopped in Amarillo for, gosh, just an overnight. It's halfway between Denver and Waco, so Amarillo was a half stay. Then drove to Waco for a week. We got an Airbnb that was absolutely in their zone. Then, did the same thing on the way back. What did we do while we were in Waco? Unplugged. I worked maybe one to two hours each morning and then took the rest of the day off. I hopped onto a couple of slack messages as I needed to. It was tremendous for me to step away.

We, as a company, take the week between Christmas and New Year's off. We take a few days before that. I think we ended up getting about 10 or 11 days off. That was the last time I had a nice chunk of time off. Of course, it wasn't that long ago. It was two and a half months ago, but I didn't realize I had been running super hard since the beginning of this year. It felt great to take some time away, invest in my family, invest in mental health, bubble baths, and decompress, which was a beautiful experience.

As a CEO and an entrepreneur, it is hard to take time off. I've caught myself saying things like, I love my job so much. I just get bored after a day of not working. That is the truth. I do enjoy my weekends. It's always the perfect amount of time. I usually crank out three or four hours on Saturday morning, then maybe an hour or two on Sunday. It's just enough to allow time for rest, but it's been a lot more than that recently. It's been like all day Saturdays, Sundays, and again working into the evening.

I really did build up a need to take some time off. I love what I do for work. I love our team. I love our employees, our clients, and all of it. It's just so empowering and fulfilling for me. It is hard for me to take time away because I miss the work so much, and I hate not being in the know. I'm back, excited to record for you all today. I have two topics in one episode. I think they're related. We'll talk about both of them and what is present for me when I think about it.

As a visionary entrepreneur, I'm a person who is constantly inventing and always thinking. I'm always creating new ideas. I get bored quickly. One thing gets put in motion. Once it's consistent and running, I just want to start the next. Unfortunately, that shiny object syndrome can hurt the business reaching the maturity of being a small business and being out of startups scale.

There's a lot to be said about consistency. Consistency really is underrated. There's a lot of beauty in consistency. There's beauty, rest, and simplicity, but you can still be powerful. Being consistent doesn't mean that you are boring. Being consistent means that you can continuously produce results. I mean, how do you define consistency?Doing the same thing? Or is it on the leading indicator or the lagging indicator side? I look at consistency on the lagging indicators. We always win, but potentially, how we do it is what's leading up to that end result might be slightly different.

I believe consistency is underrated. I do think that consistency is underrated, just doing the set of same things over and over again well. In the eyes of a visionary CEO, I'm always inventing. I have constant iteration innovation in our processes, how we go to market for our clients, and how we take our clients to market. I'm always looking for a new way to do something. The challenge is I can survive running a million miles per minute, but my team can't. We will continue to reach these periods of burnout if I don't embrace consistency.

Even though consistency can be a significant focus, it doesn't mean that there aren't ups, downs, or turmoil. It allows us to find peace, joy, and stillness just by doing great work consistently over and over again. I think about the messy middle. That's when we want to quit. Even when we're embracing consistency, or maybe we aren't.

Let me just put this out there. Maybe a messy middle drives us to want to quit when we're not embracing consistency. Oh, I think I just taught myself something live on air. Well, not really live but on air. The messy middle is when we want to quit. We always remember the beginning, the end, how it started, and how it ended. Do we really remember all the details about the middle?

I was watching college basketball. I'm not a college basketball fan. We were just in Waco, which is home to the Baylor Bears. We did a cool boat ride and had tour guides telling us a lot of history. And then, we even walked the campus and learned a lot more about him. I'm not a huge college basketball fan or college sports fan. But as we were driving back, we stopped in New Mexico on a road trip. The Baylor Bears are playing well in the last two minutes of the game, which is in basketball terms because they just follow each other every two seconds. The last two minutes take a long time. The Baylor Bears fought to get it tied, and they went into overtime. Unfortunately, they lost.

I didn't really need to see what happened during the middle of that game. I know it's always fun and exciting when the game starts out. But what happens in the middle is usually just messy. It's a lot of back and forth. What really matters is whether you pulled out the win or not at the end.

I look at how we work at our company the same way. I feel like our middles can be messy, but we always pull out a win. Sometimes in the messy middles, I will be driven to want to quit, get frustrated, get burned out, be exhausted, and don't see an end. I just want to wave the white flag. It's tough being a CEO. It's tough being lonely at the top. Where's my boss? Where's my mentor? Where's my champion? Where's my advisor? I have some of those people in my life.

I think about how our leadership team pours into our people. Who's doing that for me? Thankfully, I have a coach. I have an advisor. I am part of a CEO group. I read, and I do all that stuff. I don't have a boss. I come from being a sales rep. I have had great sales managers throughout my career. They were always somebody I could go to, talk to, and literally say anything to. They talked me off the ledge. They'd celebrate the wins. They'd help me through the messy middle, which would be great.

When you're the CEO, you lose that. You don't have that person that's always in your corner every day. You can just say whatever is on your mind. I have a whole topic for another podcast episode, or maybe I blended in here. We do three topics today. As a CEO, you can't just say what you think. You can't have a lot of safe places to just vent to share ideas. The words that come out of our mouths can be terrifying and intimidating to people. They can be interpreted the wrong way, completely misconstrued, and elicit fear. It's not good.

As a CEO, we have so much power. When it's messy in the middle, and we're trying to figure things out, maybe we're trying to find that consistent pace and embrace consistency. We're also like, "Hey, what we've been doing hasn't worked." We've got to iterate, innovate, and bring something else through. That can be scary. Leadership is hard. When you're steering a ship, we've got 20 some people now. Every time we make an announcement, I have to put myself in 20 different people's shoes. I think about how each of the 20 of them, based on their role, tenure, friendships inside the company, age, maturity level, and experience level.

I have to use their filter and think, how will these words be heard because perception is reality. I can have their good intentions. How it's received is what becomes a reality. How I've perceived them becomes a reality. Even though my heart is pure and my intentions are for the greater good of everyone, it's tough for everyone to know everything going on. Trust me, there are difficult situations. We need quick turn navigation, and we got to make a decision.

It's tough being in this seat. You have to make a string of tough announcements or difficult decisions. Then people start to grow weary. When's the next announcement coming? What else is happening? Or what's wrong with the company? I think a lot of these things just come in waves. It can be challenging to navigate into work through. It is hard. If I haven't said that as a CEO, I'm rambling. Obviously, I'm out of practice since we had no podcast last week. Maybe I still have a little bit of vacation brain.

Let me try to sum up what we've talked about so far. I'll put a bow in this to make this a shorter episode. The realization for me is that consistency is underrated. There is some element of consistency that I think is really honored by people. As a visionary CEO, I'm constantly innovating, inventing new ideas iterating. I want to do things better, faster, more efficiently, with more productivity, less expense, and more profitability. I'm always fine-tuning. I always have my eye on that.

As visionary CEO, I can run a million miles a minute. Moving too fast and constantly changing things is a challenging environment for your team. Bring consistency to the forefront, find ways to be consistent in all things, communicate, meet cadence, process, expectations, and deliverables in the way you do work. Creating that vibe of consistency will give people a safe place to operate and do work. You have to tell me when to make changes and find a way to do it. It's not super frequent unless it's urgent. Maybe more so done quarterly or bi-annually. There are some bigger changes, really thinking through how they impact everyone in their roles.

Then, attaching that comms piece to it. The comms piece is very difficult. It is so hard for me. I used to be able to when we were small. I could say whatever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, and people just got it. That's different when you're three or four people, five or six people versus twenty-seven. You also have varying levels of talent and maturity on the team. They may not have fairly strong reference points to take comms from a CEO to really digest it and understand how it applies to them. Of course, it can create fear.

We live in a very fear-based society, and it's difficult. The columns component is tough. It goes messy in the middle. The messy in the middle is just like man, as long as we can pull out a win. At the end of the game, maybe nobody will go back, replay the tapes, and remember how difficult it was in the middle of everything. We start off strong and finish strong. That messy in the middle is just hard.

There are moments when the going gets tough, especially as a visionary CEO. I want to just jump in, fix it and solve it. I may not be as great at implementing long-term fixes to solve problems. Thankfully, I've got an amazing team with my COO and CRO dedicated to solving those components and making sure that we come out on top.

There's the council for today. Consistency is underrated. There's usually a mess in the middle. Getting the comms right and having a united front can be a great approach to getting to the next level. Oh, don't forget to take a vacation.

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Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being on our show or want to learn more about how we can help you scale your company, connect with us at houseofrevenue.com or with me Mary Grothe spelled G-R-O-T-H-E on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

Connect with House of Revenue® on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

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