How Successful Outdoor Living Pros Stay Sane During Their Busiest Season w/ Jon Valenta from General Pavingstones

At the end of the day, the calendar tells the truth of your life. If you show me your calendar, I'll show you what you value and what you worship.

Welcome to the Sales Made Simple podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping

overwhelmed outdoor living professionals, landscapers, and hardscapers just like you increase your closing rate to over 75% without doubling your workload so you can build a seven-figure business that doesn't need you. I'm your host, Joshua Gillow. Let's dig in. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. This week I have John Valenta back on from General Paving Stones and we're going to discuss something that most contractors don't discuss. And we're going to be talking about keeping your sanity through the busiest time of the year, right? The busiest time when everybody's calling, everybody wants everything from you. It's about trying to keep this work-rest-recovery cycle in place, right? When it's not busy in the winter or something, it's easier to take time for yourself, but and to stay more balanced and more of a, you know, in a good position. But when it comes busy season, the days are longer, the demands are higher. Yeah, we're just running fire to fire trying to put things out. And what we're going to talk about today is how to balance all of that out. So, John, welcome back to the show.

Thanks, Joshua. Glad to be back again. Always enjoy our conversations. Hope the listeners do too.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know that for so long, dude, it's been like I would just especially spring, right? Winter, we never plowed snow. So it was like spring came and we're like, all right, good. Everybody's excited. They started just buying things. And then we're, you know, figuring out our schedule and designs and getting proposals back. And it went from not so busy to ridiculously busy. And after that, you sold projects, which was good. The next thing you know, it's like, well, how am I balancing all this? Like, I have only so many hours in a day, right? We've got 24 hours in a day. Everybody does. How am I balancing this off? And the truth is, John, I wasn't balancing it off, right? I was robbing from my family and everything that didn't yell at me to take that time and then put it into the people who were, right? Trying to take things from the loudest noise and trying to make some quiet time. And what I found along the way is that there were so many times that I would, well, I would rob myself of my own stability, my own mental health, in order to make sure my customers were happy and to constantly be doing that. And what I've realized over very, very many years and many, many times that I had to go back from square one and start again is that I had the idea of work nailed down. I had the idea of rest nailed down. Your body, eventually you go to sleep, right? So you like your work, you're moving, you rest, you stop moving, and then you just keep repeating that six, seven days a week. But how do we actually recover? How do we as men and women in this industry, how do we know that we're recuperating and physically, mentally, spiritually, with our families, with God, with ourselves. How do we know we're doing that and doing it