I messed up big ...
Happy Sunday!
It was a wild week. I had a few helpful conversations with a mentor, and I learned a painful lesson … more on that below.
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This week at Bullpen …
We had two conversations with one of our mentors, Howie Stein. We were introduced to Howie by his son who is a member of Bullpen’s talent network. Howie started and scaled several staffing businesses and has been kind to give us advice as to how we can scale Bullpen. A few big takeaways …
Our failure rate on our placements is less than 3% - that’s really good, and we should focus on scaling.
We should NOT separate our account manager and business development roles. They should stay as one.
The next level of growth will come from building relationships with our customers, growing within their businesses, and earning warm referrals.
I purchased a few domain names and built a wireframe for a side project that, if executed well, will be accretive to Bullpen’s growth. My inner software nerd is about to get fed, and I love it. Stand by for details in a future letter.
We had an incredible week with 94 new marketing-qualified leads … our sales folks were busy.
Hard lesson learned …
In the spirit of writing this for my kids, I learned two important lessons this week:
Never trust an unexpected call from a support person
It’s important to have compassion for yourself
On Tuesday, I received a call from a Coinbase support representative. He shared that there was some suspicious activity on my account and as a precaution, they locked my account.
Spoiler alert - the call wasn’t from a real Coinbase support person, and I was about to get scammed.
The scammers were very sophisticated. They even triggered emails to my inbox from an “@coinbase.com” email address. Without realizing it, I helped them log into my Coinbase account, passed my two-factor authentication, and they stole $10k of crypto from my account.
When I realized what happened, I couldn’t stop kicking myself. People fall for this all the time, but I’m not that kind of person. I’m smarter than that. I should never fall for such a scam …
It beat me up for a few days. I didn’t sleep well, and I was distant from my family. Exercise didn’t help either - it seemed to make me feel worse.
With help from my therapist, I realized that I had a bigger problem than $10k in stolen crypto … I didn’t have compassion for myself.
My inability to forgive myself created a spiral of negativity, impacting my work and everyone around me.
With the help of reflection, prayer, and a wife who is an emotional ninja, I was able to reframe my perceived failure as a mistake and forgive myself.
TLDR for my kids … Mistakes happen. You’re going to make them, and sometimes they are going to cost money. The most important thing is that you forgive yourself, learn from the mistake, and move on to bigger and better.
That’s all for this week!
✌️📤
Tyler
Founder @ Bullpen