How to Maintain Your Sanity While Growing a B2B Business with Mark Hartmann

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Being an entrepreneur is a roller coaster ride; exhilarating in both good and scary ways. In this episode I discuss how to keep your personal and professional sanity while growing your business with guest, Mark Hartmann.

Mark is a mergers and acquisitions advisor selling businesses valued from $1 Million – $25 Million. He’s the author of “Sweat Equity Payday”.

We dive into topics including:

Mark’s origin story of becoming and entrepreneur and keeping his sanity.
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The importance of focusing on and finding your niche for your services.
Why Mark believes most people strive to become entrepreneurs.
Guidelines to keep your personal and professional sanity while the grind is going on.
Work-life balance in the entrepreneurial space and how it can affect your world.
The benefits of having that ONE thing you’re great at and building a business around it.
How to determine your unique addressable market to go after for clients.
How to know when it’s time to add a new industry to your target market and how to do it.
The difference between hunting for new clients and getting referrals as a growth strategy.
The importance of becoming a thought leader in your industry and how to do it.
How to figure out which social media platforms you should invest your time on.
How to keep on keepin’ on during the tough times when you’re an entrepreneur.
The one thing, above all else, that you must do to keep your personal and professional sanity as a growing entrepreneur…

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

Mark’s “Keeping Your Sanity” Origin Story

Mark built, scaled and sold an insurance cost containment company that was on the Inc. 5000 list three times in a row. Here’s the important part: The company was bootstrapped and during that time there were plenty of crazy days. Mark sold the business in 2017, and since then he’s been focused on doing mergers and acquisitions.

To talk about those early days of growing the business and keeping everything together, Mark says it was wildly crazy. At that stage Mark was still a solopreneur. He would go out in the morning, have a morning meeting with a client, have a late lunch meeting with a client, try to get cocktails with another client, and then home to prepare to start again.

Mark has stayed in more Fairfield Inn Marriotts than he’d like to admit. He’s driven home from Indianapolis, Indiana, back to New Jersey, when things were tight with money with the business. Mark didn’t want to pay for a hotel room.

Growing a small business, being a solopreneur, is tough to say the least. Mark says most of what he learned, he learned by doing things absolutely wrong. Mark has read many great books and spoken with many great, smart entrepreneurs he has been fortunate to meet. That said, he has made more mistakes than he can count, and he has survived.

It’s part of being an entrepreneur.

Common Entrepreneurship Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Mark says: A lot of times when you’re growing a business, you sweat the small stuff. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Think about the things that are most impactful on your life. Mark judiciously monitors his calendar, even now. He does not allow anyone to waste his time or to spend it on anyone other than himself. He’ll sit around and “waste” a Friday afternoon in the summertime. That’s him spending it differently by choice, not letting somebody else decide how he should spend his time. So judiciously manage your calendar.

That took Mark an enormously long time to figure out, and he believes that lesson alone leads you to being more laser focused. You can’t be everything to everybody because then you’re nothing to nobody. That is something else that took Mark a long time to figure out as well. There are riches in niches.

Another piece of advice from Mark is to do one thing and do it really, really well for your clients. From there if you decide to add services then do another thing, and do it really, really well. That time period between offering the first thing and offering the second thing, it’s not a short period of time. It could be years. You must develop a following, in Mark’s opinion, around that one thing that you do really well. Because otherwise, if you try to do seven different things for seven different clients, it’s going to drive you nuts, and you’re going to have a lot of sleepless nights.

If you do that, you’re going to wake up at 3:00 in the morning thinking about projects A, B, and C. Mark can tell you from his own experience that when he offered everything to everyone, it was a mess. Until he scaled back and said, “We’re just going to be laser focused. Right now we’re going do these things. We’re going to do them very, very well,” and until Mark did that his own quality of life was horrible.

Mark’s not going to deny that.

How to Get Laser Focused on One Niche at a Time

Mark believes there is no “silver bullet” to quickly finding your niche. Every B2B business solopreneur is different. Market forces are the best indication of whether or not you’re being laser-focused. Look at your competitors, people that are the same as you and people that are maybe a little bigger than you.

What are they doing? What are they doing really, really well? How are they positioning themselves and why are they positioning themselves that way? Do that market analysis and start your planning with that. Let the market give you the best idea of where you can best fit in and decide if where you fit in coincides with what you’re willing to offer to the marketplace. Mark believes that is something that you must do some soul searching and if it’s not a fit decide, “The market wants me to go there, but I don’t like that work.”

That’s one of the problems. You must reconcile that, and everybody’s business is going to be different, every industry is going to be different. Until you can actually come through and say, “Look, I don’t like this, but there’s an opportunity to do this, and if I laser focus on this, I can, I can make a lot of money and have an awesome quality of life.”

Let’s just be honest, that’s why most people are solopreneurs. That’s why most small business owners are small business owners. It’s to escape having a boss. It’s to control their own destiny. It’s to be in a position where they can choose who their clients are.

You don’t have to be told by their boss, “Work with so and so” when you think “so and so” is a jerk. You can control your own destiny to some respect. That’s an important thing to reconcile in your own head is the psychology of a business owner is to make that conscious decision and say, “I’m going to, to go down this path, and it’s because I like the work, it’s because I can make enough money to support the lifestyle in which I want if I’m a solopreneur, and, um, there’s a boatload of clients who will value what I do.”

And that’s just the beginning of the story!

Listen to or watch this episode for the rest of the story and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

About My Guest

Mark Hartmann, MBA, is the author of Sweat Equity Payday and a New Jersey-based M&A advisor and business broker who helps business owners sell their companies smart—maximizing value while protecting the terms that matter most.

A founder who built and sold his own eight-figure company and a three-time Inc. 5000 CEO Honoree, Mark brings firsthand insight into what buyers pay for and why. In Sweat Equity Payday, he distills the exit into three practical truths: prepare early to keep leverage, build value by reducing risk (especially owner dependency), and focus on the deal you actually get—price and terms—from LOI to close.

Click here to learn more about Mark’s business!

Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn!

Want more business building advice? Check out “How to Successfully Build and Scale Your Service Business with Rick Elmore“