Get Over It - Damon Gersh (Entrepreneur, leader, and CEO of Maxons Restorations Inc.)

Damon Gersh is a successful entrepreneur, a proven business leader, and CEO of Maxons Restorations Inc. but he doesn’t let that totally define him. In his Paper Napkin Wisdom, Damon advises us all to “Get a life”. As entrepreneurs, we often define ourselves by that title. When someone asks me what I do for a living, I often respond with “I am an entrepreneur.” Damon wants us to remember that we’re more than that. “Entrepreneurship is one of the things we choose to do in our lives, it’s not who we are necessarily,” he says. When we first start our businesses the business has to be our be all and end all but once that first stage is over and we’re established, those same habits that got us through to the million dollar mark are the same things that hold us back from growing the business further and having our own lives. Damon says that we have a responsibility to remember that doing and being everything, with all hands on deck, is a gate. You have to pass through it and start delegating, hiring good people, and developing strategies and processes if you want to succeed. The success Damon talks about isn’t just commercial; he’s talking about personal success too. He says he’s met a lot of successful entrepreneurs who don’t define themselves as successful because though they have material success, they have lost relationships with spouses, their children, and friends due to their inability to invest time outside of their businesses. That’s a place Damon doesn’t want to find himself in. To him, balance is the key. “You’re a human being with so many facets to you,” says Damon “Entrepreneurship might be a fundamental part of that but it’s not the end all be all,” Balance isn’t just something Damon preaches, he practices it himself. When his son was born he made the decision to start taking every other Friday off as a personal day to spend dedicated time with his family and with the birth of his daughter 2 years later, he committed to every Friday off. To entrepreneurial leaders who say they couldn’t do something like that because they’d feel guilty, Damon has some advice: “Feeling guilty? Get over it.” You put the work in to build your company, you own the company, and your staff is there to support you. If you’ve done the leg work and chosen the right people for the right seats, you aren’t needed every day of the week and by stepping back you actually empower the people you put into place to do the things that need to be done. If you empower your team on a weekly basis, you build a leadership muscle within them and then if an emergency should arise, your team will be stronger and more capable of handling it. As entrepreneurs, we often have a hard time taking the ‘hero’ hat off. We start our businesses with this Superhero mentality to get ourselves through that first hurdle. Once we get through the first threshold we can sometimes be reluctant to let go, especially when playing the hero worked in the first place, but Damon reminds us that when we let our businesses consume us, we cheat ourselves and our teams. As Damon talks about how he schedules his week between work and life, it’s clear that he’s found a balance that he finds rewarding and engaging. That’s a kind of success we should all be striving for. Listen to my conversation with Damon here: