RYB 855: From SUCCESSFUL Business to Losing It ALL and Then Rebuilding with Jordan Harbinger

Rock Your Brand Podcast

Welcome! Today I have a special guest on the show, Jordan Harbinger. He’s got a fairly new and very popular podcast, and he’s getting over 6 million views a month! The first podcast he had with his old partners, he got kicked out and had to start over. He struggled for a little while with the whole thing, but he got back up and started his own podcast without having to compete with the old one. The big take away I want you to get while you listen is that no matter where you are in your journey, you will face something that will challenge you, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up. Let’s get right to it and learn a few valuable takeaways from Jordan.

Jordan’s Starting Over Story

I’ve been doing a podcast for a decade. I started a company in my twenties with some friends that did well. As we got older, I realized that I was doing all the work, and they weren’t doing as much. When you’re running a business, you’re married to your business partner. So whatever their problems are you have to deal with them because it becomes your problem too. I didn’t feel like I could start over because we had been together for so long and didn’t know what would happen if I left.

I ended up moving to a different city to get away from it all, but every day it was still so hard to deal with it all. I talked to my team and asked what they would do if I left, and many said they would come with me if I did. I tried to convenience my partner to split the company to we could end on good turns. We negotiated a split, but in the middle of it my partners decided they could do it all without me and drove me out of the company completely.

In the meantime, I had moved on to the Jordan Harbinger show. My partner didn’t want me to be successful after I left the company. He sued me, and I just drug them through the mud, and I cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars through the process. They ended up destroying their business in the process. I was so worried about starting over, but within eight months, we had built the show to the same size as the first show I had.

I’m happier than I’ve ever been, but its a shame watching something I built get ruined. Nobody wants to see something that they’ve worked so hard to get destroyed, so that was definitely a challenge to deal with.

How I Relied On My Network

I had to lean on my network to get through the hard times. Because I knew I couldn’t get through this on my own. You can’t really do anything by yourself. Luckily many of the fans from the old show came over to my new show. Luckily I grew up with good saving habits and was able to keep going while we started over and pay my team during the process.

In the first month, I made over 100 calls to ask for favors and use my network to keep things going. I also had to work with advertisers that had been on my old podcast for free for a while. It was all about damage control and using the relationships that I had built to ask for help and keep moving forward even when things were tough.

That’s the thing about digging the well before you get thirsty. Many people say, “hey, that’s a good idea,” but don’t think they’re ever going to be thirsty or that anything bad could happen to them, so they don’t end up doing it. I was so glad that I practiced what I preached.

In my mind, I thought that my business partners would never be able to get by without me. I did most of the lead generation and marketing. So, I felt like I was relativity safe, but on