I didn’t vacation very well…

***An entrepreneur's recipe for sweet success***

2.5min Read

I’m just going to come right out and say it— I didn't “shut work down” as well as I needed to.

I was on my phone far more than I wanted to. I took one call that I shouldn’t have taken. I went down rabbit holes that I didn’t need to go down. Overall, I’d give myself a C- for my ability to disconnect and be so the my family.

This sucks to say out loud because I really don’t like failing at anything. And while I don’t think this was a “failure”, I DEFINITELY have room to grow.

By the third and fourth day, I think I was in a good little groove of setting my phone down and not worrying about it, but at that point, the trip was almost over.

This next part is more for me, just as a personal checklist of what I could have done better, but I’m sharing it with the hope that it will help YOU better as well.

Even though I delegated and prepped a good amount of time in advance, I didn’t do a great job at setting boundaries with my team. Everything runs through me right now as we’re building, and I didn’t put someone else in my place to assist while I was gone.
I also didn’t let my team know clearly enough that I was out of town, handle it on your own unless I really need to be involved. I THOUGHT I did, but looking back, not really… partially because I’m afraid to step out right now, but also because I thought it’d be manageable.
I said this in my last email (LINK THE EMAIL), but there will always be things that will be pulling you away from what’s most important… over the last week, I LET those things pull me away. I shouldn’t have.
I’ve created momentum with our business but it’s still in the sweaty startup/ messy middle and I’m scared of what will happen when/ if I don’t keep my foot on the gas.
That last point goes both for my business as well as my brand. Even if I was settled with the business stuff for the day, I was constantly thinking about what I should be doing next with newsletters, posts, apps I’m working on, ideas I have, or any other deep dives that come to mind… I’m passionately curious and incredibly ambitious, but there’s a time and place. That wasn’t the time or the place.

Here’s what I would do differently and maybe this will inspire you to make adjustments with your travels as well.

Clearly let my team know that I’ll be out of town and put someone in place to be my “gate keeper”… if that’s possible
Time block. Get up earlier or stay up a little later to get things done that are urgent and pending. Then shut it down outside of those windows.
It’s okay to be curious, have ideas and be super ambitious… BUT you have to turn it off sometimes. Again with the time blocking. Write down the things that pop into your head and then come back to them later… probably after your vacation.
Take my phone out of my pocket and put it somewhere else. Out of sight, out of mind.

Like I said, I really don’t like that I came up short with this, but in the process I learned a lot. Odds are I’m still going to come up short again, but maybe I’ll be a little bit better. Or maybe it’ll be a different season and things will be more smooth sailing. Lots of variables.

The point here is that it really is possible to disconnect and enjoy a vacation. But as an entrepreneur, you have to be really intentional about it. It won’t just happen.

Let me know if any of that resonates.

BITES 🍩

BITE 1 — Binary Business

BITE 2 — Find your way by getting lost

BITE 3 — Mysterypreneur Link

BITE 4 — AI juice 🧃

🍩 BITE 1
— Binary Business

I really like binary businesses. Here’s why—
… but first, what IS a binary business??
Think about it as a black/ white outcome. Yes/no. 0/1 (that’s the binary reference). It’s either you do the job or you don’t. The solution is simply by YOU doing the service.

Your customers have a problem, you provide the solution and get paid. Yes, I’m oversimplifying, but generally, I would advise looking at your next business venture in this way.

Does my customer have a problem that I can easily solve without any disagreement over how it’s solved? If yes, you’re probably looking at a binary business.

Examples:

tree trimming (trees are cut they’re not)
Stump grinding (stump is there, now it’s gone)
Gutter repair (it’s fixed or it’s not)
HVAC (your AC works or it doesn’t)

You see the similarities here?
A lot of home service businesses are binary, BUT that doesn’t excuse other businesses.

Here’s a trick— take this full “bite” and drop it into ChatGPT and ask it to give you other binary businesses outside of home services that you can start with little to no money. Let me know what you get.

🍩 BITE 2
— Find your way by getting lost

I’m reading a great book called “The Lion Trackers Guide To Life” and through the book the author is going back and forth between past experiences and memories he has had that have formed him and a live lion track that he’s on with two other trackers. Great book, easy read, but one thing really stood out here was how often trackers are losing the path. They’ll be tracking the animal and all of a sudden they’ll loose sight of the foot prints or the broken branches or any sign of the animal.

A panic could easily set in. It’s comforting to see the tracks and follow them where you want to go, BUT if you can see the exact entire path ahead of you, you’re probably not looking at your path.

So what do you do? Well, you just have to figure it out. You go back to the last tracks you saw, you go down a path of the unknown a while and see if anything pops up, maybe you guessed wrong and have to go back to the last tracks you saw again and choose a different path… it’s all about iteration. One thing is for sure though— if you give up when you lose the trail for the direct time, you’re guaranteed to never find it again.

🍩 BITE 3
— Mysterypreneur Link

🍩 BITE 4
— AI juice 🧃

For my "vibecoding nerds", this is how you load a dashboard on Claude code to see all your analytics as you build

Kevin Bell 🍩

@kevinasrx

Here’s a full break down on how to set up your Claude Code to see live analytics of what you’re building as you build it. 
It’s a super easy setup, but I take it a bit further and show you how to create a rule in your files for you to just say “launch my dashboard” and for it to

12:11 AM • Aug 7, 2025

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Until next time...

Stay in the fight,

My best tweet this week:

Kevin Bell 🍩

@kevinasrx

Over this last weekend my wife and I went down a 90s movie rabbit hole with our kids. 
It was through this movie marathon that we became nostalgic of a “simpler time”. 
- When the only way to watch a movie (outside of renting it) was when it was “on”. Whatever was “on” was what

2:28 AM • Aug 6, 2025

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Read 1 replies

My favorite tweet this week:

Chris Koerner

@mhp_guy

I've published 200+ videos but have never felt confident enough to say this:
If you are even 1% entrepreneurial, this may be one of the best videos you'll ever see.
I recorded going from idea to customer in <1 hour.
ANYONE could copy this biz. YT version in top comment