So today, in less than 5 minutes, I’ll give you:

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🧘 3 Benefits I Got From 2 Days Without Screens

👨🏻‍💼 How that is Helping Me in Business

💵 3 Things I Learned from an SBA Lender

1. Presence - The whole weekend, I felt a lot more aware of the present moment. Ultimately, it made me a better conversationalist to whoever I was around. Often times, I will be on my phone finishing a text or email or social media post, and I neglect to interact with someone around me because I am focused on that. Because I was keeping myself off my phone, I was interacting with the people around me and soaking in the conversation way more. Altogether, this felt good for me on a human level. In business, I’ve always noticed I make the best connections when I am in person, and giving my entire presence, and this was a great reminder that I should make the time and space to put down my phone and give my attention in networking events, conferences, and the like.
2. Anti-anxiety - I tend to have a consistent level of stress or anxiety that just runs all the time. In some ways, this is good. It gives me a sense of urgency in business about things. In other ways, it’s not healthy. Being off of screens for a couple days undeniably reduced my anxiety a lot. I felt a lot more consistently calm, collected, and relaxed. While it’s not practical to never use screens, this was a great reminder that I should try to reduce my time on them overall. Because I was more relaxed, I was able to approach a lot of what is going on in my business through a different lens. I wasn’t working much during this time, but I definitely always think about business, and this allowed me to approach it with a different perspective that I think helped me reframe things and focus on what’s important.
3. Focus - The level of focus and attention span I had during this exercise definitely went up. Because there was no option to use my phone to get some little task done or check something, I felt that any other task I put myself too got a lot of efficiency from me, because I was able to lock in on it. I particularly got a lot of reading done (stay tuned for a future edition where I share some of the learnings from it). The applications of increased focus for business are massive. I always get great work done when I let myself get into a flow state of focus, and it was great to see that taking a little break from screens can ease the transition into that flow state.

1. Buying an existing business is a lot more likely to be successful than starting an entirely new one. She backed this up by telling us why the SBA is more likely to lend you money for an existing business. Ultimately it’s easier because it already has shown success.
2. Industry experience is vital, but previous business ownership may be king. I asked her whether you need to be experienced in a certain industry to get SBA lending to buy a business in it. Her answer was yes and no. You can have transferable skills that make a reasonable case for you to be successful in a new industry, as long as there is crossover from your experience. This broadens the scope of what new businesses I could buy and run. If you have experience managing people, you can make a case that a lot of service-based businesses would work for you, because a lot of what you need to do is provide leadership.
3. The importance of a business plan - she said that to get SBA lending to buy a business, you 100% need to have a good business plan written out. Even if it is an established business that has been around for a while, you need to have a business plan that supports your continued ability to run it effectively. She said that in particular, if the executive summary of the plan doesn’t catch her, it’s already over, because she has to process so many of them.