Transcription
Caleb Maxwell from Hebron Films. Thank you for doing this today. Let's just kick straight off. Tell me a bit about your story and how you got started in this industry and what brought you to the stage where you are today.
Yeah, so I started this business, Hebron Films, in 2000—a long time ago, 13 years ago. And I started with a business partner. We started like a lot of production companies. We were video makers, and we just saw lots of local TV ads. We are based in a regional center, Bendigo, Victoria, and we just saw lots of bad ads, and we thought, I had a filmmaking degree. My mate had a camera and a computer, and we thought we could do better than that. So we literally just went around knocking on doors until we got a few relationships going.
I bet this is relatable to a few people where you've got the skills, but like us, we had none of the business know-how. Absolutely none. And I'd be sitting in meetings with potential new clients and just nodding and thinking, making mental notes of what to Google after I left the meeting, 'cause I had no idea what they were talking about, but we just did lots of things and learned lots by making mistakes.
And we got to a point in business where it seemed like we were hitting a bit of a ceiling. We got to about the 250K turnover mark for two or three years in a row. And we just couldn't seem to get past it. I was actually taking home $25,000 a year in salary, which is terrible. It was so bad.
Anyway, fast forward to 2020. I took over the business from my partner. He went off and did something else, and then, yeah, everyone knows what happened in 2020. Covid hit, and it was actually the best thing for us, right? We joined VBA that same year, start of the year or end of 2019. And it was amazing. It was the best thing for us. We had a lot of new work coming in, and we also were doing a—I was doing a lot of learning, lots of learning, lots of implementing of new things, and we just got on a roll, so we expanded to a team of three until 2023, and then back down to a team of two in 2024. But 2020 was a massive year. We—I, as I said, I was taking home 25K a year, and at the start of the year, by the end of the year, I was taking home over a hundred thousand in personal salary. And the business was, yeah, between the three and 400K mark.
Great. And tell me about some of the—what were some of the things that you didn't know? That you learned in the VBA that you then importantly implemented that changed your mindset and the way in which you were approaching the business because you'd had two years of consistently hitting 250K and you jumped up to sort of 400K. What do you attribute that to? What are the—what were the steps that you can recall?
I remember having lots of great ideas and no clue of how to implement them. So I felt like I was lost in this cycle of too many options. I had so many things we could do, and we—I'd go away with my team and have these great brainstorms of all the marketing stuff we could do for ourselves, but it never led to any real action. And there was just—there was some—there was something missing in my mindset or my skillset that meant that I didn't take action on anything, or I—there was a lack of a plan. So that was the first big thing, right? Is that the foundation, joining the VBA, setting the foundation of where we were heading, what we were aiming for, and setting in place some strategic goals that we could just work towards and chip away at, that really brought focus to me and the team. And then it was getting in that habit of consistent and strategic action rather than lots of ideas.
You mentioned that you had a business partner, and I speak to a lot of filmmakers, as do you, and oftentimes we think—'cause I've done it, you've done it—we think that if we just partner with someone, it's somehow gonna be easier, and it very rarely turns out that way. Yeah. What advice do you have for a videographer, a filmmaker who's looking to try and build a company, go beyond just being freelance, who's thinking about working with a business partner? What are some of the things—what are some of the benefits, but what are some of the pitfalls?
I would recommend that someone who's thinking about partnering up with someone else, you need to ask why do you want a business partner? And there's good business partner relationships, and there's ones that are set up to potentially fail or just be really hard. Everybody's different, right? So it's not—not ragging on business partners at all. But the benefits were that you could split the workload. You had multiple people working in the same direction. That's all in theory until—in my experience, we grew—we were really close mates to start with, and then we just grew up a bit, right? And we had different ideas. We matured differently. We wanted to take the company in different directions. We had different ideas about who we were as a business and who we served and who we wanted to—how we wanted to market ourselves.
The pitfall is if you have a business partner that is just doing exactly the same thing as you are—this is my experience—or we would just—we had the same role, we had the same job. So at the end of the day, the buck stopped with nobody. Nobody was held accountable. Nobody was responsible because there's two people, and it was always—responsibility was always deferred to the other. And you never owned a part of the process or a part or a role in the business; it was always split two ways. It's really hard to make decisions with a 50/50 partner, right? You—if you have different ideas, what do you do? So my advice with getting a business partner on board, you've gotta ask, is it—do I want a business partner because I don't think I'm enough? Preaching to old Caleb here. Do I just think—is there like a self-value deficit somewhere where I think I'm not enough to be a solo writer or solo business owner? I—but then also asking what there is strategic reasons why you would get a business partner. Do they bring something to the table that's completely different to me and is—could be put in a different part of the business, like separated? It's really tricky from experience to—to have a—bring a business partner on board who is also a filmmaker and is just—or a producer and is just doing the same thing you are. You're fraught with danger, I say.
I agree with you. I've had two different businesses with two different business partners, and both times it's been an absolute disaster for all of those reasons. Plus, I think the thing that always—you know, I have an expression with creative businesses, which is getting the crayons out. Yeah. When we have an idea of starting a business, all we see is the upside. We only think, oh my God, if we just put our resources together and we do this thing, we'll both be rich. It'll be dead easy. And in my experience, I—one person always does the lion's share of the work, and the other person has a bit of an attitude about being asked to do things, and it causes an awful lot of friction. And there's a couple of people we know who do have a business partnership, and they are—they work very well as a business partnership because one just does sales and one does the creative, and that's a great mix. But I still know that business—there's some challenges because you're suddenly not able to be in control of where the money is spent, how the money's distributed. And oftentimes in business partnerships, both business partners want a lion's share of the salary. And if the money's not there, you can't take it. But that doesn't stop people drawing money. And I've had business partners draw money out of a bank account without my knowing. I've had other business partners who have literally thought they were the brand and they all they had to do was show up. And yeah, it's definitely a very messy situation. And what I would say is if you are going to go into a partnership, you must draw up a partnership agreement that lays out every aspect of what happens if one of you dies. What happens if one of you wants to leave the business? How are the shares distributed? My personal preference is to own 100% of the shares and work with strategic partnerships, joint ventures, where you do profit share or you do some kind of other benefiting kind.
So moving on from partnerships, I'd love to know some of the lessons that you've learned along the way in running your business because I think inside the VBA we talk a lot about this. The business journey—it's just super hard. It's super challenging. And just because you've done one month doesn't mean you're gonna do the next month. What are some of the lessons you can reflect on that you'd be happy to share for someone who's perhaps in that earlier stage of business?
Yeah, look, right up the front, I've had so many lessons learned over the journey, and they'll—you never stop getting lessons or problems presented or opportunities or challenges that you never—they never stop. You just—I've found you just develop the muscle of being able to solve them better. It doesn't get easier; you just get quicker at solving problems. The start was really about transforming the way I—I saw myself and my role in the business. My first employee that I hired—it was a disaster. Absolute disaster, 'cause I was just a—I was just an operator. Like a—I was just a cog in the wheel. Like I was producing videos, and I hired this guy 'cause I needed some help, right? I had too much work on, and then I just expected him to be me and just step into the business and I do. So there was a big learning curve that I had to go on in how to manage people. And that—that—that is very different to—you can't just bring someone into the team and expect them to be effective; like you've gotta set them up to succeed. And there's a whole—that's a whole conversation itself. Right. But the—I reckon some of the key learnings and lessons that I had at the start were just being more strategic. Like we—we talk about the big things like niching, understanding your customer. And probably before that is just owning the business side of your business rather than trying to continually look at yourself as a creative only and avoiding sales, getting good at sales, getting good at numbers, data—those are things that I avoided 'cause I thought, no, look, I'm a creative. I don't need to be good at those things. But if you wanna scale a business, you've gotta make it a business. We—I went through a process of—guided by the VBA foundations—of identifying where the money was coming from, finding out how—which type of client I wanted more of, breaking down the profitability of projects, and then going through a process of presenting and speaking to my ideal client more effectively so I could get more of them. And there's a whole range of different—that looks different across your whole business, from your website to your—to how you communicate in a sales conversation to processes and systems. But that was some of the key learnings that really laid the foundation for us to scale.
I'm also curious about the topic of money. I—I've observed that—and I've both spoken to a lot of people potentially looking to join the VBA and, yeah, and had pre-conversations. And the thing that keeps coming up rather consistently is this expression when I asked the question, how much money do you wanna make? And almost every single time the answer was something along the lines of I don't wanna be greedy, I don't wanna be a millionaire or anything, but just enough to be comfortable. I—that—that's an interesting topic. That's the first part of the question. The second part of the question is when you—as you have in the time I've known you—gone from just you and Sammy to you and Sammy plus three children. Yeah. Your priorities changed, and so does your—I think—attitude towards money. Can you talk a little bit to that sensibility around why we—why creators have such a fear of money? Yeah. And then the second part of that is, what happens to you when life starts to become very real and you start to bring humans into the world?
Yeah. Yeah. It was all very well and good to make $25,000 when I was living with friends and me and Sammy were—we were just on our own and cruising through life as younger people. But yeah, life gets real pretty quick. And I—money's a great subject, and there's a lot of emotion, family, culture, history that plays into how you treat money or how you talk about it and how comfortable you are talking about it. I've got really comfortable in talking about money because I see it as just a tool, what it is. There—there's a great wise passage that says the love of money is the root of all evil. And there's this perception that people can have where they're avoiding talking about it or they avoid thinking too much about it. And yeah, there's probably a lot of psychology that could go on with that. I think also on that particular passage, people get confused by what that passage means.
Yeah, they do. The love of money is the root of all evil. Yeah. It's not money, but the love of money. But money's a fuel source. Yeah. It's 100% required. If you want to—if you want to scale a business to whatever level, like even I—even if you think, look, I just—I reckon I said that—those words to you, Dan, on—on our call, incoming call in the VBA when I first started. Look, it's the answer you give when you don't know what to say. I don't wanna be greedy. I don't know, maybe this, maybe that. Probably because you haven't really ever thought about it in the time, 'cause I think in video we often say, I get to do what I love every day. Yeah. So I do—I do it for free, but of course that's not a scalable solution. It's not sustainable either. Like I put a lot of energy—a lot—like all of my energy into growing my business in the first couple of years at the sacrifice of my life, at the sacrifice of my relationships and my friendships and my—and it was—it was terrible, and I had the energy for it, and I had the enthusiasm for it. But as soon as you like—it doesn't have to be many years of making 25 grand before it grinds you down and you are burnt out. Like you've got no more creative energy to put in, and suddenly the thing that you really loved doing, you hate it. You have to go to work every day and make videos, and you got into it 'cause you loved it, but now it's the thing that you don't wanna do and you avoid thinking about. I've been through those cycles where I just hated coming to work. I didn't wanna come to work. So you can't think, look, I—I—you'd only do it for free if you were getting an income source somewhere else. You need the money; you need it; you just need it. And the journey I went on was really owning that and understanding that money is an essential fuel source. And it is just a tool. If it's in its right place, then it'll serve you. But there's so many people out there that are serving money. They're just—they're literally either they are not treating it with respect or the attention that it needs to actually for them to gain more of it, or they're just tied to it and they're all about it. And it—they're a slave to money. So you can't be in either of those camps if you wanna actually win and grow.
Now when it comes to working with someone like myself in the VBA—a journey you've been on for, I think, over four years now. I remember when we first met, you told me that your business partner was very anti-coaching. He just saw no value in coaching. Yeah. Whereas you have been in the army, you are very involved in the church. You've been involved as a coach and a leader. Yeah. And I think you had a different view. Yeah. But I'd love to just address this topic because coaching has an investment in time, effort, mindset, and financial. Yep. And I don't want to avoid these conversations because the VBA is not free. It's less than you think and more than worth it, in my opinion. Yeah. But I'd love to hear from you, someone who was making 25 grand a year, who was going to invest a significant sum, yeah, in a certain degree of unknown quantity. You didn't know who I was from a bar of soap. It was your employee, Bailey. Yeah. Who saw something I posted on LinkedIn and said, I think you should check this guy out. Yeah. So talk to me a bit about that journey. What were some of your thoughts and concerns? What were some of the things that you—were you worried about? What—what is really going through your mind when you're in this kind of position of stuck, need some help, not sure where to go, and you're gonna invest the cost of a camera and some—into some coach who's promising to help you solve all your problems.
Yeah. To start with, we—I had to go through a journey of trying to do it on my own before I could realize that I needed help. And I got to that stage. And like you said, my—my business partner, yeah, for one reason or another, I don't know—pride, I don't know what it was—just didn't want to. And so I was looking; I was open; I was keen. And Bailey found you. And even though I knew I needed help, I couldn't—I knew I couldn't do it on my own anymore. I'd tried it enough, and it wasn't working. I needed some external input. I knew the value of coaching through, like you said, the army and having—and church and discipleship; I know what the power of having a mentor or having a leader speak into your life and help guide your decisions and help you avoid mistakes, future mistakes, all that kind of stuff. But even then, like when I had no idea what the VBA was gonna cost, but we came along to one of—one of your in-person events that we got the opportunity to—I'd listened to your podcast, actually was one of the first things I did to check out, who is this guy, Dan Lenny? What is—what value is he gonna be able to bring to our business? I just got so many—I really resonated with the way you saw the world, the way the—what you were sharing and speaking about in terms of guidance and the way you saw business. And you spoke directly to me, right? Because I—you—I—video business. I was a video business needing help, and you were a video business offering help. So the challenges that I had to overcome really—even though I wanted a coach—was still a commitment and a decision to be vulnerable, to be open to someone coming in. There's a bit of fear attached to, and a bit of self-consciousness attached to the thought of someone coming in and telling you you've done it all wrong. And—and you've got all these issues, and I—my business was a mess, and I knew there was lots of issues, but there was an apprehension to opening that up and showing someone the mess. So that was one thing I had to overcome. The money thing was big, right? 'Cause I hadn't—we'd bought cameras and stuff. And that's an easy thing for video people to do is buy gear. That's easy; that—you buy gear you can't afford usually. But the thought of investing in myself—it—that's a lot deeper. That's a lot deeper. And it comes with a lot of emotion; there was a bit of a process I had to go on, and you actually led me on that beautifully of going, if I don't do it now, when are you gonna do it? If not now, then when? And if not then, who? So I eventually just took the step, and it was a bit of a leap—a leap of faith, right? I couldn't necessarily on paper afford it. It didn't take long for the revenue in my business to increase. Like you—you look at it—I looked at it in a monthly—how long is this gonna take me to get a return on the investment? And it actually was a lot quicker. Like we—we had a few big wins early on, reduced expenses, sharpened up our operation. I was open to you seeing the mess and getting feedback from yourself and others in the group, and it paid itself off in no time. And I think I actually—I don't know—I think it might be well for 2024, and you joined, I think, 2019. So that's fact, the fifth year of us working together. And for anyone watching this beyond the first year in the VBA, there is no tie-in; there's no commitment other than a monthly fee. And I'd love to ask you, 'cause I actually don't mind if someone watching this coaches with myself, you, us, the video mentors or goes with someone else. So I know with pretty much everyone in the industry, they all offer something different. And if I'm not the right person for you, that's totally cool, but I think it's important that you get some kind of coaching. But we've become great friends. But as I say to people when I'm talking to them about the program, I've become great friends with these guys. They don't pay every month for a mate. No. So I'd love for you to share—why are you still here? Why is it after five years you still choose to be part of this process and still invest every month in—in being part of that? Why is that? Are you crazy? Like people will be asking themselves that question.
Sure. You've learned it all by now. Why would you continue to keep going? Yeah. He can't be a very good coach if you're still there five years later. Ha. Yeah. And it's a really easy—I've actually had someone say, oh man, that's a really easy perception to shift because people are so focused, and they expect that there's a destination that they're gonna get to, and then they're gonna have everything sorted. They're gonna know everything; they don't need any more help. That's just not the case. Like I said earlier, you never stop getting problems. You will never stop learning. And if you do stop learning, then that is your downfall. And like I experienced it fairly recently—six months ago—I—I got to a stage where I got a little bit complacent, and things were working really well. We made half a million dollars in annual revenue, and I'm just like, it's all high fives and bum taps all round. Then I just took my eye off the ball of learning—what else? What are my weaknesses? What do I need to develop? What do I need to continue with? Look, I ended up in an absolute ball of misery, little puddle of mess. And if I hadn't have had the VBA, the community around me during that time, we had some economic environmental shifts that just exposed some of the weaknesses and flaws in how I was running business in our business structure. I think just to pause that, just for context, you had two or three projects that were dialed in, deposits taken; they were all good to go. And they got delayed by two or three months each. And I think it's important to mention that even when you've got the projects locked in, things can change out with your control. And I think that's what you're about to talk to—is the fact that I just wanted to mention the detail. Yeah. This wasn't some crazy ball-dropping exercise. You bought a bit of gear when things were good. Yeah. And you were like, we're cool because January's sorted. And then January became May. Yeah. It was terrible. Yeah, it was really terrible. And it only took a few things to happen for everything to change. The upward trajectory that we were on was suddenly a downward trajectory, and I wasn't prepared for that. Yeah. And look, the—I've learned a lot of lessons through that, but I knew before that that journey in business is just that it is a journey, and like in life, if you—if we didn't have a guide, if we didn't have a community to walk this journey with, then we're just exposed. We're just a bit more vulnerable to what we can't see. And so throughout my whole—we connect weekly in a group coaching call. You are on hand. We have in the Elite program; we have in-person events. There's so many connection points to one—bring me accountability to get an outside perspective on the choices that I need to make—every regular choices throughout business and opportunities. I get to bounce those opportunities off a group of people that will be able to give me external perspective. It's like I have my own board kind of thing. They all understand video business, and they're all on their own journey. You have walked the journey and are now guiding others. So that this idea of why would you still need a coach? I'm never going to stop needing a coach. And it's not because I'm deficient or lacking in any major way. Every single person needs external perspective brought to their life. It's just—that's just who we are as people. Yeah. And I—I still have a coach. I will never—I don't think there's been a year in the last 14 years where I haven't had a coach or mentor who I've spent probably in excess of $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 a year with. And if you haven't invested in yourself, it won't make any sense. But I'd love to just talk a little bit about this notion of community. The word community's banded around a lot. Yeah. And there are different types of communities. There are communities on Facebook, free groups on Facebook where freelancers get to talk about how bad the rates are. And I've observed—and again, no judgment—but I've observed a little bit of the hard—saying there's no work. And everyone's—there's no work. There's no work. There's no work. Everyone believes there's no work. It's like watching the news. I'd love you to just share a little bit about your journey in—we have three communities. We have a free community; we have a Hub-level community; and we have the Elite community. Can you just talk a bit about what you observe, both as a coach in some of those lower-tier communities and also as an active contestant, if you will, in the Elite—Elite journey?
Yeah. Yeah. The—there's a couple of unique elements of the communities, and it's shared across the board. In the—it reminds me of when you're talking about the herd mentality; I can just imagine a bunch of—and no disrespect intended—but a bunch of dodos from Ice Age running around just jumping off cliffs blindly. If you are surrounded by people who—who are just seeing the downside, then that's all you'll see. It's the downside. But the VBA communities are growth communities that we are all in here on a growth journey, and we are committed to that. And that's like a prerequisite to coming in, right? You need to be one who is willing to take action, and you need to bring some positivity and some contribution. The contribution element is really important for me. Creative communities can sometimes—how do I say this?—we can sometimes be a bit self-conscious about competitors. When you see someone—someone else in your industry or even in your area doing really well, there's an opportunity for comparison and for a little bit of envy or—everybody will relate to this, right? But that's not present in the VBA, which I just think is wonderful. It's remarkable. We all make a commitment to contribute to the group and really celebrate each other. And it's a culture of the saying, a rising tide lifts all ships. I—my ability to celebrate someone else frees me from comparison, even if they are an equivalent, sort of type of business in my area, even. It is truly remarkable. The distinguishing factor for me for the community is the fact that we—we don't have competitors. We don't treat each other like competitors. We're collaborators; we're friends on the same journey. We're
All very fairly similar, eerily similar in some of our life stages and things, but we are all going in the same direction, and we love it when we see each other succeeding. I think it speaks to the abundance culture, which, you know, yeah. That, that is fostered inside the community.
Yeah. And what's important to mention is that I created the VBA communities for me because when I was building my business, I had to go to different coaching programs that were generic in their nature. And one of the great things about attending lots of different seminars, coaching programs, masterminds, is you get to see how the things that you like and the things that you think, “I’m not sure that really quite gels.” And there’s one of two routes you can take. One is go and find the program that best suits you, or you wanna start your own. And I was given advice to start my own, ‘cause at that time, that was really only myself and Ryan Coral who were doing anything remotely coaching related. And the first thing I did was we went on each other’s podcasts and we hung out. And it’s because some people will like Ryan, some people will like me. And like we’ve always both said, that the purpose of us doing this is to get more people to invest in themselves, and that’s our purpose. So I think that feeling of purpose is very strong.
And I’m just wondering, for someone who’s gonna be watching this and they’ve never had this frame of purpose or culture, how does being in an environment like that benefit your bottom line? How does being in that environment make you a better business owner? Make you serve your clients better? Can you tell me a bit about that notion?
Yeah, definitely. There’s the funny thing that we do in business where we separate the business and running the business from ourselves a little bit. You run into that notion, but what’s really required is personal development. And we know that having—I know that having been on this coaching journey and in the community, we talk to lots and lots of different people. They come in for the business skills and often stay for the community and the personal development that they can see happening within themselves. So that is a really key element of growth, from my perspective, is the requirement and the understanding and the embracing of developing, and that has an enormous impact on the bottom line because you can’t separate your business from who you are, from yourself. And if you can continually develop, the business journey is just full of areas for improvement, right? There’s just so many. But as you make some of those improvements in the way that you—sales is one of my favorite things, right? But sales comes with a whole lot of a whole lot of baggage with a lot of people. They don’t want to come across as sleazy, or they don’t wanna come across as attached to money. They’re creatives, they just wanna make cool things. But as soon as you redefine that perception within yourself, then you’re gonna make more sales. And there’s the bottom line. It, everything that we do is in pursuit of growth, but it’s not all superficial skills-based stuff.
It’s such an interesting point you raised because it—I’m still on my journey, I don’t have all the answers, but one thing I’ve noticed, and one thing that I’ve found the VBA has encouraged me to do is be more me and lean more into the areas that perhaps I might feel a little bit left of center when it comes to running a business, but I know from my own journey they’re absolutely integral, and that’s something that I found to be very interesting. And I think that a lot of videographers when they’re starting out almost feel like they’ve gotta be a character, they’ve gotta perform in a certain way. But actually, how have you noticed that becoming more you and leading with that in your marketing, leading with that in your personality, that what you have when you have business conversations?
Yeah. Tell me a bit about that. How has that benefited you?
Yeah, I’ve actually noticed and have said before that I think we’re in the age of authenticity. People—people can smell marketing BS a mile away. And like the things that people have done that worked, they don’t—they’re not working anymore. People just wanna connect with other people. They just want to deal with someone who’s gonna show up as who they are and not have this business facade on. And so I lean all the way into who I am and I just—one of my biggest goals in every interaction I have in business is to connect with that person. And that’s, I reckon that’s one of my superpowers in—that’s helped grow this business is because people just work with people they like and they want to hang around, right? They, if you connect with someone, you push past this business facade thing and you get you get a real genuine connection and a human connection that they’re just gonna wanna work with you and they’re gonna find a way to do it. And yeah, the being authentic is one of the most powerful things you can do because there are so many people who are not being authentic and that, and it’s not detracting from anyone else. You, there’s only one Dan Lenny, and there will only ever be one. That’s the way to uniqueness, right? Is just be more you. And that’s just the way I see everybody. Like I’m, there’s only one Caleb Maxwell. I don’t need to be try and be anyone else or be the picture of a perfect business leader that I think is external. I just need to be me and no one else can do that.
I agree. And I love you for who you are. And I see that with absolute heart. The, I think one of the strongest cultural values inside the VBA is love. And love is not something people tend to talk about in business.
No. And I don’t wanna—I don’t want people to get confused here. It’s not—we’ve got some very financially successful businesses in the group. We talk about money all the time. We, we are talking about specific business things, practical things, but you’re right, like there, there’s something different about the VBA in that we also talk about all the other things because a business—it’s a holistic kind of approach that we have to business. We don’t just treat the business and then your family, your personal life, your thoughts about yourself, your perceptions of the world are all over here. It is intertwined. And it is so integral to treat a business journey in a holistic way so that you can—that’s why we start the VBA process with a vision board. We set the vision of where we want to go so that we can attach our our direction and our desires to something tangible and we can actually give that a frame of reference. We can bring it into the world rather than just saying, “Look, we want to—we wanna make a million dollars.” What do we—why would you wanna do that? So we, we set that in front of us and we lay it out in the real world and go, “This is what I want. This is what I want on paper.” And then we build from there.
A lot of members in Elite certainly are either married or in committed relationships and are either buying their first home or starting a family, or evolving their family. And I’d love to—and I’ve been lucky enough to meet Sammy on a couple occasions and little Quinnie. You’ve had two more since then.
Yeah. But I’d love to know what Sammy thinks of this and you in this journey, because she’s the person you are closest to in the world.
Yeah. And our wives, partners, they’re often the ones who have the greatest love for us and want us to be safe. But also it can be a challenge being married to someone running a business because you never really switch off. Yeah. I just wonder if you’ve had conversations with Sammy, she’s said things to you about your journey inside VBA.
Yeah. What has she observed over the last four or five years? If I, if ever I talked about—which I never have, but if I ever talked about maybe I should leave the VBA, I don’t think she’d let me. Sammy loves me, thank the Lord, but she knows me and she knows all my weaknesses and I can come across with a very positive front, but she knows that the VBA knows me. They’re the—they’re who keep me accountable. My community, me—all my good bits and my bad bits and so yeah. And we celebrate all of them.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And it’s all okay ‘cause everyone has ‘em, right? Everyone is a multifaceted human person with lots of lots of things going on. Sammy really appreciates that she’s not the one that cops all of the the whole, all the struggles, because while it’s not easy maybe being married to a business owner, it’s probably not easy if they don’t have another outlet where they can process things, where they can share the challenges, where they can vent, where they can do all that kind of thing. If you don’t have someone like that, if you don’t have a community or someone who gets it that you can let all that stuff out on, you’re most likely letting it out on your significant other, which is just no good. And that’s probably where it becomes hard. So Sammy’s pleased, she’s on team VBA all the way because she’s—that’s—those are the guys that you can process everything with. I don’t need to know all of the challenges and that’s sometimes really not welcome to know all the really stressful situations ‘cause she doesn’t need to share and carry that burden. That’s mine to bear, but I equally need help with that. And that’s where the VBA comes in.
Yeah. That’s awesome. Just to wrap this up, what advice would you give maybe younger Caleb or a version of a Caleb who’s sitting out there in the internet just now who’s running a business who’s having some challenges? Are there any—is there any advice or perspectives you would share with them knowing what you know now, having gone through this journey for five years and what that’s—how that’s enabled you to become the version of who you are today?
Yep. Yeah. You’ve—the journey in and I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of other members in the VBA video businesses do really well and grow really well, and I’ve been able to see it in myself. The ones that do really well are the ones that are committed to changing. They’re committed to uncomfortable and consistent action. And I, advice I would give is you need to lean into change. You need to be okay with being uncomfortable and doing things that are hard and change, because if you’re too precious about things or you think you always know best, take a pill of realism and suck it up and go, “Look, I, if I’m going to get help, I need to submit to the advice that I get. I need to be humble and I need to take action on what I’m being guided to do.” So the things that helped me the most, they were really simple. Like the things in the foundations kind of area of the VBA, they’re pretty straightforward. But they still require you to show up and to take action on them and just do it quickly. That’s the best advice I can give is once you’re given a direction or given a piece of work to do, just get in and do it and become okay with being uncomfortable because that’s just part of the journey.