173: Cut Your Losses—Even While Pivoting in Public—with Khe Hy

“How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” —Ernest Hemingway

That’s the kick-off quote from returning guest Khe Hy’s recent pivot-in-progress big reveal, taking us behind-the-scenes of his business in a recent post titled, “The $645,099 business pivot.” Khe is the founder of RadReads and former Wall Street managing director. As he writes:

Life can come atcha pretty quickly. (At least according to Ernest Hemingway.)

And while RadReads is far from bankrupt. And I ain’t broke – in January of 2023 our business got hit by a quadruple-whammy.

Yes, a mere 55 days after my proudest moment as an entrepreneur – offering our employees healthcare – I did the unthinkable.

Khe returns to the pod today (as our first three-peat Free Time guest) to share his experience from the belly of the Pivot beast. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Khe’s earlier Free Time appearances, linked in the Resources section below and in this Spotify playlist: RadReads x Pivot x Free Time.

More About Khe: Khe Hy is the founder and CEO of RadReads, an online education company that helps professionals lead productive, examined, and joyful lives. Khe is creator of the $10K Work productivity method and teaches the popular cohort-based course Supercharge Your Productivity. RadReads provides guides, trainings, and coaching for over 36,000 professionals to help them gain back free time, scale their impact and make their little dent in the universe.

Before founding RadReads, Khe spent 15 years working on Wall Street and was one of the youngest Managing Directors at BlackRock. He's been called Oprah for Millennials by CNN and the Wall Street Guru by Bloomberg, and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, TedX, Barrons, Time Magazine, and Quartz.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

• You’re not alone: Don’t feel bad if you caught a momentum wave during the pandemic that has vanished since. It can feel like you’ve captured success in a bottle, and it will continue just the way you’re experiencing it now, but the same circumstances rarely last.

• Borrowing other people’s goals can lead to chasing arbitrary success metrics and other people’s work-life balance. Instead, follow the fun! Ultimately, it will be much more sustainable.

• There’s freedom and surrender in openly sharing your process. Many entrepreneurs are not straightforward about how difficult it can be to maintain and grow a business, and being outwardly transparent helps you be inwardly honest about what you really want to accomplish.

📝Permission: To feel. To cry. To fully experience and talk about what you’re going through. Your humanity in the situation is not at odds with who and how you want to be as a founder and CEO—they are perfectly intertwined.

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Get quiet: What is it that you truly want? What part of my business is driven by ego and “borrowing other people’s goals,” and what part is driven by the pure magic of it? For any friction area where you feel stuck or drained, take a page out of Khe’s business playbook and “follow the fun.” What would following the fun tell you to do next? 

📘Books Mentioned:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

• We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power by Rachel Rodgers

• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman

• Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business by Gino Wickman
  

🔗Resources Mentioned:

• Khe on the web, Instagram: @radreadsco, TikTok: @radreadsco, Twitter, LinkedIn

• Courses: Supercharge Your Productivity, $10K Work Accelerator, Life Operating System, Jenny’s Free Time Business Operations Dashboard

• Rad Reads: The Magic of Doing $10,000 Per Hour Work, The $645,099 Business Pivot, Should we get a divorce? 

• Articles: Business Insider—How Peloton went from a pandemic-era success story worth $50 billion to laying off more than 5,000 workers, Jonathan Fields—The Unfortunate Middle, SignalFire’s Creator Economy Market Map

• Video: The Killers—Mr. Brightside
  

🎧Related Podcast Episodes:

• Spotify playlist: RadReads x Pivot x Free Time

• 129: The $10K Work Framework with Khe Hy

• 163: Leveraging Idea Kernels to Create Content with Khe Hy

• 145: Tips for Training Part-Time Team Members with Kaneisha Grayson

• 131: Scaling Joy While Streamlining Business Overhead and Navigating ADHD with Kaneisha Grayson

• 028: When the Financial Tides Recede

• Pivot 313: What’s the pebble in your shoe? Pivoting from Wall Street to RadReads with Khe Hy

• 12: Belly Of The Pivot Beast: On Bouncing Back From Zero With Adam Chaloeicheep

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