[00:00:00] Earlier this year, I rebranded this show to creators that crush because I wanted to highlight creators that make great content and meaningful sustainable businesses. But here's the thing, a lot of people that I was following weren't really talking to content creators, and especially not about how to thrive without burning out.
So I started searching. I was commenting on posts on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Reaching out and looking for folks who were crushing it. And that's when I found Susan Balls in her podcast. Calm is the new KPI. And let me tell you, it quickly became a regular listen for me. It's so good. After a few great exchanges on Blue Sky in LinkedIn, she agreed to join us for this show, and I'm so excited to share this one with you because.
Here's the truth. Creators that crush build calm businesses [00:01:00] with intense and by design. In this episode, Susan and I talk about why most creators accidentally recreate burnout. The four levers you can use to build margin and space in your work. And how she tracks success with metrics like unsolicited feedback and having 16 weeks off a year to spend with her family.
So stick around to the end because Susan shares a mindset shift that I think completely changes how I think about growth, performance, and what it means to actually crush it. Welcome to the Creators That Crush Podcast. I am your host and certified high performance coach, Sean Button, and this is the show that helps you.
Overcome being crushed by your creative business so you can crush it financially, personally, and with joy and impact in your life. So let's dive in. Hey Susan. Welcome to the Creators That Crush [00:02:00] Podcast. How are you doing today?
I'm good. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat,
so I am super excited to chat because we were just talking before we recorded.
I'm a huge fan of your podcast. I believe that content creators need to have intention when they design their creative business and lives. I've been defining a crater that crushes sounds kind of broy, but. A creator that crush is someone that has a successful, profitable business and someone that is confident, joyful, and present in their work.
And you do that through being sustainable. And I think Colin, as a KPI, is one means of crushing it as a creator. So that's what we want to discuss today. You know, why do content creators need to design calm in their content businesses?
I think that you know where you're coming from, especially the angle on Joy, I think is really underused underrated when it comes [00:03:00] to both business and content creation in general.
So much of the messages that we get, so much of the default is the complete opposite of that. And I think when we have creative businesses. Like joy is one of the things that you can really lean into. Like it's supposed to be fun, it's not supposed to suck.
Definitely. So I come from a tech background and there was a like startup culture where like you work all these crazy hours.
I've done the corporate, you know, grant had you mom, like large, big business thing. Where it's like maximizing the amount of time you're in the business. And so how do you think about creating joy when we're all kind of conditioned to like struggle, grit, and bear it persevere. Never give up. Get two hours of sleep a week, that whole,
so I like to think that like my message and folks like you, like we exist to help people understand that.
Just because that's [00:04:00] the default. Just because that's the messages that we are constantly inundated with. Particularly if you end up on, you know, the tech space or the online business space. There's so much that is focused on productivity and efficiency and scaling and grow, grow, grow. But that is the default.
That doesn't have to be the reality. And so I think, at least for me, one of the reasons I exist is to help people unpack some of that and have a vision. For what the potential could be to know that it doesn't have to be about 10 xing your growth or squeezing more into every second of every day, that there is a path to have your company be both calm and successful.
Calm and sustainable, and that those things aren't necessarily. Two sides of a dichotomy that they, you can have both of those things. It just requires a little bit [00:05:00] of unpacking the default, unpacking what we are trained to kind of not even see.
I love that. And you know, falling into those like unconscious like stories or habits or expectations, I'm sure it's all part of like understanding that we're always expected to.
Progress and move forward. And sometimes it's okay to like. Not maximize that part of the experience. Uh, 'cause I was also hearing, and maybe you could speak to this, there's like a tension between I wanted 10 x my business. I think that's a wonderful thing and could have a lot of wonderful implications for my family, for the work that I'm doing, for, you know, helping people out at the same time.
I personally believe that if you're not doing it in a strategic way or a thoughtful way or with purpose, you can't sustain it over the long term. So if I'm always constantly working in the 10 x my business and I never see my family or my friends and I never [00:06:00] work out or I never sleep, you know, all these things that tend to go when we're so focused on, you know, the result.
Yeah, I think there is a little bit of inherent tension, but I also think that tension is one of those things that is kind of made up, right? So if you think about the example we have of calm businesses, they're for the most part, pretty successful from all outward measures. And when you think about the.
Kind of ethos of a calm company. I like to think a lot of that comes from caring about the people in and around the business. That ethos of prioritizing care for the employees, for the clients and customers, for the, just being very human about it. We know, like research says that when your employees, when your [00:07:00] team members are happy and cared for, like when they.
Know that you care about them and care about their wellbeing and believe them to be human beings and not a number. Happy employees are more productive employees. You know, a lot of the companies that went to a four day work week, or none of them have had a drop in productivity. None of them have had a drop in revenue buffer, which is one of the kind of original like calm company avatars, I guess you could call it.
Just hit like $22 million. I just saw Joel's post on Blue Sky, like they are empirically successful and it's not in spite of them having a calm ethos, it's because of it. You know, Uber is the kind of quintessential avatar, I think, of the Let's build [00:08:00] it fast and break things. And I'm not sure anybody would actually describe them as a successful company.
They might be a big company, but they keep getting sued. They still, as far as I know, are not actually profitable despite exploiting everybody in the entire supply chain as so I think some of our metrics of what we consider to be success are somewhat artificial. Um. Because that's what we're supposed to think.
We live in a capitalist society and it's all about growing. But I think there are very real examples of companies that are externally successful, profitable, sustainable, and are also calm, and those things aren't actually. In contrast, they are successful because that's their ethos.
Mm-hmm. And, and I think it gets down to like, I think the core of [00:09:00] calm is the new KPI in the idea that what is growth, right?
Is growth getting on fat next to hundred million dollars in revenue? Or is growth getting the next $50 million in revenue without the headaches and cost of lawsuits? Of churn of your employees. 'cause training people cost a whole heck of a lot of money. So
expensive. Like, and it's just, it derails your progress if you lose a key team member and you have to find another key team member, especially if you lost a team member because you did not treat them like a human being.
Mm-hmm. Or recognize the impact they were having on your company
when you work with clients. Who maybe have blib breathe, not calm, the opposite of calm. You know, what are the mindset shifts that you have to unlock for those folks in order to get them to kind of realize that like there's [00:10:00] a different way to grow that is a little bit more sustainable, a little bit more happier, a little bit more, you can feel proud about it too.
I think that's another aspect of what's going on.
Lots of my clients, almost all of them universally have had a business that is not calm prior to this. Okay. But what I find is that almost everybody has a story of hitting burnout. They did the default. They built that business. Maybe they burnt it down.
That's very common. You know, we build it, we build the business. We think we're supposed to have, it's externally successful. Maybe it's not. Super successful internally and maybe not profitable at all, but almost universally it seems that the experiences, you have to do it the hard way before you have the realization that that is not what you [00:11:00] wanna do and then go looking for something else.
And I say this, you know me too. Like my business has always been about helping people run calmer businesses, but that doesn't necessarily mean that mine was always that way either. You know, I have my own story of burnout that led me down a two and a half year path of recovery. And so I think the mindset shift, I don't know if it's just how human beings learn things, we.
That there is an easier way. We tend not to believe them or not to trust them, and we have to go learn the lessons ourselves. So for me, most of my clients have learned that lesson in some way, whether that led to actual burnout or not. They usually have had the experience of running something that's chaotic and frantic and [00:12:00] exhausting, and now they've decided they don't wanna do that anymore.
So I think it's more internal factors than a mindset shift necessarily. Yeah. I think,
I mean, it is human nature to be like that. I would never do that to myself. Like these other people would design an 80 hour work week. I would never do that. That's great.
We also tend to replicate the environment for ourselves that we have seen modeled.
Mm-hmm.
So
if you think about, you know, a lot of consultants and creators and coaches. Most of us have come outta some sort of professional career, whether that's corporate or government or education or what have you. And when we start our companies, we replicate that. We don't know that there are other ways to do it.
And I think part of the learning and growing and the like, the maturity of becoming a more experienced business owner is learning that it doesn't have to be that way. [00:13:00] And exploring what else it could look like.
I'm so glad that you're such a good role model of this out in the world, you know? Uh, just to acknowledge that
it's a learning experience.
Hey, it's John and. Being a content creator is tough. There are so many internal and external factors that get in the way of us hitting play, recording, giving that speech, sharing on social media, that is not really the work we signed up for. You know, we wanna make the thing, but we don't want to deal with our internal self-doubt, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and we don't.
Always know too how to navigate the platforms to make sure that things that we're doing are maximized right. And thinking in my creative career, you know, I had 700 YouTube videos and zero audience growth. I really wish I would've had [00:14:00] someone to bounce ideas off of to. Say, Hey, I'm struggling with this, and maybe pull apart what's not working and why are you doing the same thing over and over again?
Or why are you trying all these things and nothing's working? You're missing a particular angle. You have a blind spot. You're not addressing something is amiss. And I would've loved that comradery with someone that was advocating for me and really cared for me. And. That's why for listeners of the Creators That Crush Podcast, I'm offering a free 30 minute creator strategy session because I'm a certified high performance coach, first and foremost, and what that means is I am trained in a proven science-based process to help people break through their normal, consistent results.
In a way that's sustainable, that does not burn them out, that does not injure their health or harm their relationships along the way. So I know that this process is [00:15:00] a fire, and what I wanna do is help you. So if you are striving for something as a contact creator, or there's something you are struggling with as you are on the path of building your creative empire.
I had love to talk with you for 30 minutes on whatever that is, and help you develop a plan to either help you break through what's holding you back or to see the next steps going forward that'll help you realize your vision because. We can't do everything on our own. There's only so far we can get on your own.
I have 700 videos of YouTube, of me going alone and not making progress. I don't want that for you. So let's hop on a call. If you go to sean butter.com, you'll see a big old button for a free 30 minute strategy session. And on this call, what happens when you hit that button? Is you'll answer three questions on a forum.
So what, what are you struggling [00:16:00] with? What are you trying to achieve? What have you tried? Super simple. You'll schedule time for us to talk, and then I'm at call, just 30 minutes of me walking you through a mini version of the coaching process to help you build a plan, to help you break through, to help you get results at the end of that call.
There's nothing for me to sell, right? I am doing these calls for this audience, for you guys right now. Just want to connect with you. I wanna know what you're dealing with, what struggles you have, what aspirations you have, and I just wanna get to know you too. Like I think it's really weird for me to be talking to a camera and a microphone.
And it being a one way conversation. So I'm really interested in getting to know y'all. And two, I want to fine tune this coaching process for content creators. So that's what I'm getting out of it. And like I said at the end, I'm not gonna sell coaching or anything. It's just [00:17:00] gonna be, hey, get to know you, get to understand what you're going through a little bit more and get to test out my idea for this high performance coaching for contact creators and everyone.
Theoretically is happy. So if you're interested in that, go to Shawn Buttner dot com. I'd love to help you with that, and we'll see you on the other side. Let's get back to the episode with Susan. Do you ever see those Demotivational posters? Like my favorite one is sometimes God puts you on the planet to be an example of what not to do.
I think
about that. Yep. I was very much that for most of my professional career,
so I know when I deal with clients that have burnout, a lot of the tricky work of coaching through burnout, and maybe you've experienced this too, is getting people to realize that, and this is not the pop most popular opinion about burnout, but they've chosen it.
And so a lot of times [00:18:00] I think dealing with burnout is, is training people to make different decisions. Could you maybe go through some of the big decisions you've made in your business, maybe. Calmer business. Kinda doing the opposite of, of things that you've definitely chosen to be like, if I do this, it'll lead to more happiness in my life, more calm, uh, versus sadness.
Yes. So for me, I think that there are really four main levers that you can pull in your company to create a ER company. I call this the calmer framework. So the first lever is management style. And this is kind of exists on a spectrum between authoritarian and autonomous. So authoritarian. That's the default.
That's what we're, that's, you know, the kind of mm-hmm. Corporate work environments we are describing where somebody is likely micromanaging, the manager is making all of the decisions. You have no choice of your schedule, your [00:19:00] what you're working on. Any of those things are not within your control versus.
What I tend to think is a little bit more calmer management style, which is more autonomous. So we're focusing on as the leader, giving clarity so that people can control their work because happy employees generally have autonomy to choose how and when they go about doing work. Mm-hmm. The second lever is values and people.
So we're thinking on a spectrum from exploitative to empathetic, and this is what we were talking about before, focusing on it being very human focused. And then business design. So we're thinking involuntary to intentional, and that's really what we're talking about right here, is making intentional choices so that you can design a business that works the way that you wanna work, the way that works for your life that supports you versus you existing for the company.
Then the fourth lever is how we're using efficiency. So I like to say you can use the goal of [00:20:00] efficiency for good or for evil. And in kind of the default company, we are using efficiency to max things out. We're using it to try and shove more stuff into our day. So we're trying to be really efficient so that we can do more versus in a using efficiency to builds using efficiency to build space.
So that we can do other things. Uh, I like to think the word, the word margin and the reason I named my company, but not beyond margins is because I like to think beyond just the profit margins. Margins literally mean space, whether that's financial resources, time, margins is what we're aiming for. And so for me, one of the main levers I tend to use is that business design lever and thinking intentionally about what kinds of services do you wanna offer, what kinds of products are right for you?
What [00:21:00] industry do you wanna be in, how do you want to deliver those things? There are literally thousands of ways that you can go about designing and building your business. As long as you're intentional about that and you're making the choices that are the right choice for you and your business and how you wanna live your life, you ultimately will likely end up creating a business that has more margin that is calmer.
So for me, when I, I was coming back from burnout and spent a lot of time thinking about what do I want my business to be about? Like I am clearly burnt out. I'm not doing okay. When I come back,
yeah,
what do I want that to be? And for me, that ended up being the word calm. I wanted it to be calm, and so that influenced how I chose to offer services.
Do, um, most of my work in intensive styles, so like we are doing a done in the day off or, or we're doing a half day intensive where, you know, it's one, [00:22:00] it's done, you get results. And I then have control over my schedule because I am not somebody who likes, I like sprinting. Like I am a, I am a sprinter. I am a bachelor.
I like being really, really deep in focus. And then taking a break. And so I really took that into consideration when I was thinking about how do I, knowing that I know that about myself, how do I design my business to lean into that, to accommodate that instead of to act in contrast to that.
Okay. Does that make
sense?
Yeah. You're trying to find alignment, right? I, I think that's something that's currency that I talk in with my clients is it's. What are your values? Where do you find, like asking this question usually is really fun is like, what do you find fun in the things that you do? It's like, oh, I really love doing webinars, but I really hate doing.
The other things other, it's like, why didn't you do the fun thing more?
Yeah. One of the questions I like to ask [00:23:00] is, what feels easiest?
Oh, yeah.
Because most of the time that's not what we're going with. Right? And so I like to kinda ask, you know, if there's more than one option, which one feels easier to you?
That answer's gonna be different for everybody. But ultimately going with things that are easier is inherently. Calmer.
Yeah. I've been testing, I'm not sure if I heard this anywhere or not, but like the things that we resist will not persist. You know, just kind of drilling that into what I'm doing in my business and just trying to figure out where do I like to play and so on.
That if you're working with someone that's maybe new to business or is like creators, there's a lot of creators that you know, can get millions of views and have zero business. To sustain, sustain the creativity long term, which is not calm or it's not sustainable, it's not performative in my views. How would you walk someone through really discovering what [00:24:00] their maybe like powerful one services to start out with, to, to really dig into?
So I think it starts with what feels easy, what feels fun in reality, you can't do. Everything and expecting to do everything is how people end up burnt. How they end up really overwhelmed is they see really big creators that seem like they're. Just them when in reality they have an entire production company, media company apparatus behind them, right?
Like they've got a YouTube editor and they've got a podcast editor and they've got a whole social media agency that's running. You know what I mean? Like that's, but on the surface, if you look at them, it looks like it's just them. So until you like really dig underneath the surface, you're setting expectations for yourself that are completely.
Unrealistic. The most important thing is to focus, [00:25:00] tackle one thing first and focus on just one thing, because then you're not trying to do all of the things and you're getting really, really good at one thing. The better you get at the one thing, the easier it actually gets. Right? So when you're doing a podcast, the first 10 episodes feel really, really, really hard.
Mm-hmm. Feels completely natural. You've got systems, you have processes, you've done the reps, and so it's so much easier to then add another channel or add another focus after you've really streamlined and systematized and gotten good at the one area. And so for me, the thing has always been. And I still hate it when I say this.
Learning to let go of urgency a little bit. Mm-hmm. And be a little bit more patient. Things take so much longer [00:26:00] than we think they're going to. Mm-hmm. And most of the time we think things aren't working. It's because we haven't given it enough of a shot. We haven't given it enough time. We haven't done enough reps of that thing.
When you start then setting expectations that you can do eight things when you're still learning how to do one, that's where we get overwhelmed. But if we focus on one thing, one channel, get really good at that before you're adding other things. That gives you margin. It builds margin, and it builds a calmer company.
Most of the big folks that are big now have been doing it for a decade, and they started with one channel.
Mm-hmm.
Ali Abdal started on YouTube. Jay Klaus started a podcast. You know, he was behind the scenes of Pat Flynn's business. Like he had a lot of experience starting his own business, but he's still been doing it like a decade almost.[00:27:00]
And he's not yet. He's on all the channels now, but he didn't start like that.
And he has a team now, right?
He does have a.
I'm guessing maybe you have more experienced business folks coming to you for your business, but how much time do you put on like, Hey, I want to do a newsletter. Like, great, like on top of everything else you're doing, you wanna do a newsletter, you need to stick with it for three months, a year, 30 years.
You're like, what? What? How do you know, I guess, how would you measure, is this worth continuing to keep my business calm?
I can talk to my experience, which was I started a podcast because the thing that felt most natural to me was talking, not writing. Mm-hmm. Writing has been a bit of, of a struggle for me.
Not that I can't do it, but that it is not naturally how my brain thinks. Like some people mm-hmm. [00:28:00] Naturally think in writing like Tara McMullen, Zel, like they are writers first and foremost. And other channels come later. And for me, I was trying to decide like, I know I need to pick a platform. I need to be a little bit more visible.
What do I want? What feels fun right now? Which is why I picked podcast because it felt like my natural medium and I committed to it. I said, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna focus on just doing it. I'm gonna put out an episode every single week, and I'm gonna do that for six months and I'm gonna look at zero stats.
Until then, I'm not gonna evaluate the decision. I'm just gonna focus on the process. I'm gonna focus on getting it out. I'm gonna focus on becoming a better interviewer. I'm gonna focus on making sure that my production process is really streamlined and I'm not gonna see if it's worth it. [00:29:00] For at least six months, and when I hit the six month mark, I started to get little glimmers.
Like people would be like, oh, I've heard your podcast. I love it. I shared it with my friend. And so at the six month mark, I said, okay, there's, there's some signals here that are telling me this is working. I think I need to give it another six months. And five years later, here I am. I love that. But I also didn't have a newsletter because I didn't wanna deal with writing a newsletter.
I wanted to focus on the podcast and the podcast being my main channel. So I focused on the podcast and then when I felt like I had nailed the podcast, I had got production process, my editor and I, you know, are working in sync, all of those things. Then I thought, okay, I have the capacity to add something else.
What else makes sense for my business, still feels fun and not overwhelming and that at that [00:30:00] point I added LinkedIn as a channel and I did LinkedIn plus the podcast for like two years. And then honestly, it was only a year and a half ago now, maybe almost two years, that I was like, okay, cool. Now I feel like.
A newsletter is something I'm interested in and started adding that, but I still don't do any more than those three channels. Then that keeps things calm because every time I built a system, I created the capacity to do the thing. Honestly, on a lot of them, I created a backlog before it even launched.
Nice.
Right? So like when I launched the podcast, I had eight episode. When I launched the newsletter, I had eight email newsletters ready to go, so that if I struggled with the workload, if I started to hit a wall, when I came into like having ideas, I had a buffer. So [00:31:00] really, I think, you know, commit to something for six months, give it a test.
Figure out when you start. What your version of success for that would be, right? Because your, your definition of success is gonna be completely different than somebody else's. You know, when I started my podcast, my podcast, the goal was close new clients. It wasn't build audience, it wasn't, you know, advocate for my ideas.
It was, I wanna close clients. The point of this thing is to close clients. So I was evaluating, is it closing clients? Not. Are my download metrics huge? Or you know, do I have sponsorship deals because I wasn't even taking sponsorship deals, right? So when you decide on an experiment, and I tend to think of these things as like, this is an experiment.
This is something I'm testing. Figure out at the beginning what measure of success is. What are you measuring against? And then how long do I think this thing is gonna take? And then. Or your [00:32:00] project management system, like put it there to remind you to check in on whatever that measure of success is and then completely ignore it and focus on do the thing, do the process.
Focus on getting good.
So you mentioned that calm is margins too, and and time and resources financially, like how does that show up in your business? Do you have like for you and your team, like on a whiteboard, like we will get. To, um, go home at five o'clock to see your families or like, how does that look like in a, as a, because KPIs are like the high level goals, so how do you, how do you communicate that through your organization?
I think it looks different in every organization. Think of calm more as a North Star. That's what we're aiming for. But what that actually is is gonna be different for every founder, for every creator, for every organization. Calm is really more, to me, an ethos [00:33:00] and a North Star. That's what we're aiming for, but what that is on the detail is gonna be different.
How you measure that is gonna be different because it's informed by what is important to you. So what are your goals? What are your intentions? Where are you on each of the levers? So one of the series that I do on my podcast is Calmer KPIs, and the point of that is to highlight different or unique KPIs that calm companies are measuring.
So it might be content focused. So I did an episode with Kendall Cherry where she, her column KPI was on fewest pieces of content, like that was her goal. Oh, cool. That's what she set. She's a copywriter and her goal each month was to write fewer than six new pieces of content for her own business. Jay Azo has a metric called unsolicited response rate that measures resonance.[00:34:00]
So he created a six point scale, I think it is to measure whether or not his content is resonating. So for both of them, those metrics mean that they are running a calmer company, that they are focusing on the thing that is important to.
A different company. So it's all about figuring out what's important to you, what matters to you, what does calm look like to you, and then working backward like we talked about, what does success look like in that picture? So like last year for myself, I set a goal of taking 12 full weeks off from my business.
I measured it, I tracked it. I checked in with it periodically throughout the year, and that was my one big metric that I was measuring last year. And this, this year I upped it to 16 weeks. Nice. So I think it looks different for different [00:35:00] people. For me, rest is really important in this season of my life.
So that is what I need for it to feel calm. And so it's gonna look different depending on what's important to you, what your company structure is, how you value those things. And it's all about calibrating each of the individual levers to fit your company, to fit this season of your business.
So yeah, the episode with Jay Kazu is really amazing.
So if you're listening and you haven't checked out comm's, the new KPI check out that particular episode. It resonated with me. So we're kind of getting to the end of the hour, so I'd like to wrap up with two questions. First one is, what have you found surprising or beautiful in helping people in companies make calm their new KPI?
Oh, I think the best thing is kind of watching somebody realize that they can define their company for themselves. We are [00:36:00] designing something that actually works for them. Feel that business. Mm-hmm. For the first time. And they're like, I picked up my kid at the soccer game and I never would've been able to do that.
I stopped working on the weekend. Or, you know what I mean? Like you can see what matters to them and see a genuine impact on their actual life. That's pretty freaking cool.
Awesome. I love doing these interviews because people love to help. Everyone that I've interviewed has got a heart of service. I.
That's the thing that kind of lights 'em up. So it's just so cool to to see you doing that work out there. Final question before we get into where people can follow up with you is, what did you love about our conversation today?
I haven't gotten to talk about this with somebody that is kind of in the same space.
It is always so cool to see how, how you're thinking about it. Like what are the words that you're using [00:37:00] that resonate with you? Mm-hmm. And be able to really, like, one of the things I just love about podcast in general, whether it's as a. Is the getting new ideas. Mm-hmm. Like it's always so creatively energizing for me.
And this was absolutely that. So thank you.
Heck yeah. Awesome. That means it's working. So with that said, then, where can the good folks listening, what's the best way to follow up with you?
So, checking out the podcast if you're a podcast listener. Podcast is obviously a channel you like. Calm is the new KPI.
You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Uh, but if you are more of like a written person, I send a newsletter every week that you can sign up [email protected].
Awesome. Or
just send me an email, hit me up on LinkedIn. That's how we met.
Yeah, no, totally. So Suzette, thank you so, so much for your time and sharing your knowledge today on the podcast.
Thanks for having me. [00:38:00] Well have the link to your podcast. In the show notes. With that, we'll see you guys on the next episode of Creators The Crush. Thanks.