Episode 13

Taking Big Risks in Life and Business with Siobhan Colleen

"You don't rise to the occasion, you fall back to the level of your training."

What do cave diving, show rigging, and business ownership have in common? Risk, risk management, conditioning, and training. Entrepreneurs live on the precipice of ruin and successful leaps of faith; how do we navigate those critical junctions in our livelihoods? Kathleen and Jinx sit down with Siobhan Gee to discuss the mental situation room, decision-making strategies, and tools for mitigating risk.

In this episode: Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins, Kathleen Seide, Siobhan Colleen

More about Siobhan:

Siobhan Colleen is a certified rigger by trade for the entertainment industry. Since 2014, she's rigged for concerts, musicals, TV shows, tour rehearsals, and more in the Orange and LA counties of SoCal. Most notably, Siobhan worked with Technical Services at the Disneyland Resort, installed Criss Angel's Mindfreak at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas, and supervised stage builds and safety for Volcano Live! with Nik Wallenda.


Siobhan became GWO and rope access certified during the pandemic to pivot her expertise toward fall protection and confined space rescue instruction for wind turbine technicians. Most recently, Siobhan became a Rigging Commando for Area Four Industries for whom she creates educational rigging videos. In her free time, Siobhan hosts Industry Explorers live streams to show students career paths and opportunities. She also enjoys fitness so much that she became a NASM certified personal trainer and is currently developing programs for tradespeople.


Connect with Siobhan:

Link Tree: https://youcanfollow.me/industryexplorers

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siobhancolleen/


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Season Two of Unfuck My Business is sponsored by Seide Realty. Visit them at whystpete.com and let them unfuck your real estate experience.

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Below is a rough transcript for your convenience. It’s not perfect because we want to spend our time unfucking your business, not unfucking this transcript.



This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

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Transcript

000000 Kathleen Seide

Hey, this is Kathleen. And when I'm not unfucking businesses here on the podcast, I'm unfucking real estate over at WhyStPete.com. My company is Seide Realty and we are excited to sponsor this episode.

000013 Intro

Well, hello there unfuckers. This is Angel from CuriousIdealist.com and you're listening to unfuck my business. No bullshit advice for business owners who want to be resilient as fuck. Now go put the kids to bed, grab a drink, and get curious unfuckers.

000034 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

And welcome back to another episode of unfuck my business.

And I'm actually really excited about this one, today.Because we get to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart. As an entrepreneur, or one of the most fundamental things that we do is risk assessment. We look at landscapes which have opportunity, but opportunity also comes with risk. We decide how much risk, how much opportunity. And if those two things are in conjunction in the right formula, we'll take a leap off the cliff and assume we've got good enough wing building skills to not hit the bottom hard. But my guest today is Siobhan Colleen. I'll let her introduce herself in a second, but is one of two people that I always think of when I think of holy shit, I can't believe they do that cause it's fucking terrifying. The other one is my co interviewer today. Kathleen Seide who's cave. Diving is like a thing of nightmares for me. I can't even imagine doing that shit. Say hello, Kathleen. Hello, everybody. And Siobhan, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background doing shit that scares the fuck out of me.

000132 Siobhan Colleen

Hey everybody. Thank you for having me. I come from the entertainment industry and I am a rigger by trade, which means I'm responsible for everything that's above the audience and above the performers. So we hang thousands and thousands of pounds of equipment on building structures. Sometimes I'm on the ground doing work.

Sometimes it's pre-production stuff, which is all about CAD drawings. And sometimes I'm actually in a harness and climbing around on steel anywhere from oh, 30 up to a hundred feet in the air. So it's a pretty laborous job. And there's a lot of risk involved. Clearly when you're walking on two inch beams, 60 feet above the ground.

Safety is always on the forefront of my brain when it comes to that type of work. So now that I'm pivoting into the tech world as a non-tech person, there's a whole other slew of risks that I need to keep in mind as I go on this new adventure. So that's me in a nutshell.

000238 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Perfect. It's interesting that you mentioned, you know, safety being such a priority there because a lot of people don't really consider risk and safety to be sort of part and parcel of the same thing, but we know that they are right because good risk assessment is not just how risky is this environment. It's also, what are all the ways in which I can reduce the risk in this environment. Right. And trying to make an assessment. And usually in two different places, one during the planning stage where you've got some freedom and time to consider these things and hopefully reduce as much as possible. The instance of the second scenario, which is it's in the moment, this is an emergency. What do you do right now. And you've done actually some safety training and know a little bit about emergency management

000319 Siobhan Colleen

too. Yeah. Oh yeah. If you need to know how to get out of a 300 foot tall wind turbine on fire safely, I got, you know, exactly what you need to do for the better part of COVID. I was also a rescue instructor for wind turbine technicians.

A big part of safety, whether it's an entertainment, energy, construction, doesn't matter. A big part of it is your documentation. You have to think of it this way. If I don't write something down, then it's not policy. It's not procedure. And I could risk going to court. If something happens, if something bad happens and I go to court.

They're going to do an investigation and they're going to ask you for your documentation. So you better have that stuff, better be organized, better be detail oriented. If someone is taking a shortcut out on the field and again, something bad happens. Then if you do end up going to court, they're going to ask you, well, why?

Well, your document says that this is how you're supposed to do things. Why did they do this instead? And I think a lot of that also translates into the business world.

000422 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

I just think it's funny that it's five minutes into the podcast and you've already hit like one of the major points that I think is super, super important, right?

That planning stage documenting your processes, having an established plan. And then of course, making sure that that plan is clearly communicated to everybody in the team. That's, what's critical in those moments of crisis. Everybody having sort of the muscle memory of the business in the form of a book that I'm flipping to a cheat sheet on how to deal with this particular crisis right now, and hopefully a practiced enough response to that scenario that you don't even have to reference the book you are going to perform every one of those documented steps exactly has been trained.

000459 Siobhan Colleen

That was going to be, my next point is training is a big part of that because when you're training up to a certain level, when you are in those real life emergency situations, you're not going to rise to the occasion. You're going to fall to your level of training.

So when you are in that planning and preparation stage, You want to go above and beyond what you think you need to because when shit hits the fan, you're going to fall back to your level of preparation. I'm sure. Kathleen has plenty of examples of that when it comes to scuba diving and caving and all the other things that you do and, and probably in real estate too, I'd imagine.

000537 Kathleen Seide

Yeah, absolutely training for those emergencies is so, so important. And I think it's important to think about too, having minor emergencies along the way helps you prep for the big one. When you actually do need all this training to kick in. And so there can be ways that you build those minor trainings into your business so that people are constantly getting.

The practice and getting the muscle memory or, you know, whatever that is, whether it's the muscle memory, it could be physical. It could be a certain way of responding in an email or verbally on the spot with a customer, you know, whatever it is, but have those things that are so practiced that it's just becomes automatic. The mindset needs to be right. The phrasing needs to be right.

000620 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

There's a, uh, a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. I'm going to have to Google the author real quick, uh, because I don't remember all those offers all the time. It's Daniel Kahneman I believe, or Cayman something along that. But he really talks about the fact that we've got two different types of responsive thinking in our brain, right?

We've got Twitch response, which is, oh my God, this is happening right now. And then we've got measured. Long-term response. I'm sitting here with a nice beer and I'm thinking about my strategy over the next three to six months in the same way, we have quick risk and slow risk. And quick risk of course, is those moments where the wind turbines on fire and you have to immediately know how to safely get out of this situation.

A flow risk is like baking a cake, right? Because you don't know if it actually worked until the moment that it comes out. And by the time that you figure out things are going wrong, it's already way too late. Right. So when you were pivoting from a background in entertainment and rigging and some of this other safety stuff into technology in particular, that's moving from a fast risk situation to a slow risk situation.

Where you're having to put together strategies right now that you're betting on a three to six month to 12 month, you know, reaction or response to that particular, uh, strategy. How has that affected your thinking and how you assess it?

000737 Siobhan Colleen

The process that you've described in the rescue world, no matter what sector or industry you're in, that's just called risk mitigation.

We think about, can I eliminate this risk? If I can't eliminate it, what's the best engineered proposal. Like what's the best engineered solution. If I can't go with that, what's the next best thing, the next best thing, because I'm trying to bring my risk down incrementally to the best of my ability and the same could be said in business.

So one way to reduce your risk is by doing your research. For me being in the tech world. I'm not a tech person, I'm a trades person, but I'm not a technologist. So I've had to learn. It's like being in kindergarten and first grade all over again. I've had to learn new vocabulary words and just new jargon, because I want my product to achieve certain things, but I need to know how to talk to a team that's going to help me achieve those things.

Research, market research, researching the industry, and researching the teams that you're going to need to work with. What are their processes? What are their processes look like for me? What does it take to make a mobile app? What are the steps that need to happen? What other teams do I need? I need a graphic artist.

What is the lingo of a graphic artist that I need to learn? It's not as someone who is kind of leading this endeavor. It's not my responsibility to be an expert at every single thing. It's my job to be resourceful and motivational and inspirational, right? It's my job to be resourceful, to know where to do the research.

It's my job to be motivational and inspirational because I gotta motivate the teams around me and I have to boost morale. So those are just a few things that I can think of in this new world that help mitigate that risk.

000928 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

One of the things I think that makes it difficult in moments of crisis and in doing good, fast risk analysis and all the rest of that is physiological response.

Anytime that we are under intense stress, you get that big rush of, of rapid poles and shallow breathing. And, you know, the, the tendency to have the muscle freeze up, the adrenaline burst, you know, the fight or flight response, all these things are like taking you deeper and deeper into that sort of amygdala kind of thinking, right?

That, that way back of the brain primal caveman shit. Do you have any methods or, or rituals that you have when those physiological responses are coming on to be able to sort of center yourself and make sure that you are, you have the clarity of thinking required to navigate those complex situations?

001016 Siobhan Colleen

I think depending on what state I'm in. When it comes to a complex situation, I think of it as prevention is always better than reaction. So preventative measures that I could take, having a good nutrition throughout the day, getting enough sleep, practicing all of the, when we're, when, when you go back to previous UFMB episodes, and you guys are talking about mental health.

All those principles that we talk about are so important and it's so important to find what works for you personally, for me, the really big thing is nutrition. If I'm not eating enough or often enough, My brain is not going to function. Your brain needs glucose to function. So if you don't give your brain that food, your mental performance is going to diminish when it comes to like being in the shit in an actual emergency situation. I don't really know how to describe it, but it's a weird switch that I can do. I can. Become really stoic in the moment and not think about anything. And, and to give you example, I'll tell a funny story real quick. This is a gross story. So y'all have been warned, trigger, warning, trigger warning. It's gross.

So I clogged the toilet one day. And even though my shits are very massive and impressive, our pipes are also very old. So. After much hard work. I couldn't unclog the toilet and my boyfriend's like, you need to snake it. I'm like, that's disgusting. I am not doing it. Long story short, it would have cost $300 to pay someone to snake it.

So I, I, I, uh, I did it and it was disgusting. Now I'm also the same person who. 80 feet above a concrete floor on a foot wide beam. I can hear my partner, a couple of bays over and again, we're 80 feet up high we're rigging. And I hear him like doing the hurling sounds. I'm like, oh no, no, I am not hearing what I think I'm hearing. And I turn around and it happens. He vomits all over himself.

And in that moment, it's a switch that happens in me. I make it safe where I'm at and I climb my way over to where this person is at to put my first aid hat on. And I fall to my level of first aid training.

Hey, can you see, is it blurry? Is your vision darkening? How do you feel? Can you hear me? How many fingers am I holding up? What's going on? Let's get you off these beans. Let's get you somewhere safe.

Meanwhile, there's vomit all over the beams. I hate vomit. It's disgusting. I don't like bodily fluids. But in that moment, it's just what needs to get done. This person needs help. And my job is very clear in that moment. So that's me.

That's such a weird thing, right? Like in the comfort of my home at ground level, I don't want to do certain things. If I'm 80 feet in the air, Suddenly those things don't matter because the priorities are different. There are much higher needs that need to be addressed in that moment.

And it's just, I don't know how else to describe it. You know, I'm, I'm the, also the same person who has anxiety over spilt milk, but when it comes to canyoneering and repelling down a 200 foot canyon, I'm like, this is good. This is, this is relaxing.

001346 Kathleen Seide

I've been in several, oh shit scenarios in cave diving and around that. And like she said, there's a switch that happens where all of a sudden you're in the experience, you're very present. But I think the important thing to bring into this and important takeaway for anybody is that even in my situation, I'm sure in your situation, you have a moment to take a breath.

And taking that second, take a breath, get oriented, get a realistic assessment of what's actually going on rather than reacting to this knee jerk adrenaline rush that you've got is the best way to say safe and be able to help anybody that's around you. You need to just calm down, take a breath and then act.

And in those situations, people think there's not time. But there are almost always is time. And you know, they talk about this in a lot of different ways at different places. You slow down to speed up.

001447 Siobhan Colleen

Oh absolutely. When we're teaching rope access and rescue, we'll often say slow is smooth, smooth is fast, because when you're doing something really technical, it's easy to mess up.

If you're rushing and sometimes by doing a little mess up, it causes you to take that much extra time to do the correction and then continue on. So when you feel yourself rushing into a situation, It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how extreme or not extreme. It doesn't even matter if like your dog puked on the rug.

You need to take a moment to assess the scene, assess the situation before you take action.

001528 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

I don't know if anybody's watched the show on Netflix, Startups or Startup. They'd released like three seasons all at once. And I binged all three seasons and they left it on a, on a cliffhanger. That's like, God, I need three more seasons like right now what's what's wrong. But they actually show to great effect how your competitors and or predators use that against you in a business environment. Uh, the, the protagonist is he is dealing with a venture capital company who's coming in to fund the company, but they do the typical way. And my apologies, all you VC folks out there, but you know, it's true.

They come in and they go, Hey, we've got the great deal for you. Here's more money than you could possibly even need, but we're going to need some changes to the company. First of all, you got to fire the rest of your executive board. You're the only one that we want. Your attorney's no good. We prefer to work with our attorney.

That's the only thing we're going to do. And you have five minutes to decide on this. Yes or no. Or we go home and they have all the power in that scenario to absolutely force you into that position. But it very much is a moment where you have to stop, take a breath and slow down, even if it means the cost of the deal, because any deal that forces you into that level of risk is putting you into a dangerous position and it's probably going to have a bad outcome, which of course, in the show it does. And I've also seen that scenario play out in real life, multiple times. One of the companies that I advise a few years back, the CEO came to me and he is like, Hey, these guys said, they're willing to deal with us, but they want to use their own attorney.

They said we can't use our attorney because they don't like working with them. And I'm like, that's a giant ass red flag right there. You should always have your own legal representation. You know, they are increasing risk, but pressuring you to accept that extra risk along the way. And if you condition yourself and train yourself to stop and take that breath and think slowly for a moment about this focus on smooth rather than fast, right? You're going to have a better outcome. At the end of that.

I had my own switch to Zen moment, jumping out of an airplane where I have a terrible fear of Heights, which is why, you know, your business is just incomprehensible to me, but God damn it. I was going to go to site diving at least once only once, but I did it.

And, you know, everybody was expecting me to be panicked in that moment, but I absolutely went to that Zen place because I'm like, this is it. This is what's happening. And when we went out of the plane, I had about four seconds where my heart rate probably hit 180, you know, and, and when I was at, I was committed.

And so yes, you become present in that moment. So that degree, I think it takes a really extreme amount of immediate risk to kind of hit that space.

001804 Siobhan Colleen

Definitely. With that example that you were describing with the venture capitalists, trying to pressure you into a deal. And Kathleen had a perfect phrase for it.

Artificial urgency is what they're creating. If you have a mentor that you can rely on, who's going to help prep you for such situations and can describe these new scenarios that you're going to encounter. Let's think about mitigation techniques while we can brush up on our negotiation skills, we can practice doing mock interviews. We can brush up on the lingo. We can brush up on all kinds of different things. And you mentioned conditioned and training. Yes. You have to condition yourself to have that switch. You have to train yourself to take that moment where you pause.

That pause. It feels urgent. Everything around you is it feels like it's urgent. And you know, and even if someone is going into cardiac arrest, it's an urgent moment, but you still have to assess the world around you. You have to pause and think what's going on. Let me analyze it. What do I need to take care of? What's within my control. What's out of my control. Are there additional hazards that I need to consider?

And again, when I talk about these principles, it applies both for, you know, rescue technicians and for business owners, it's the same principles you can apply to both situations.

001932 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

In business negotiation, I call that the technique, which is that when somebody asks you a hard question that you need a moment to think about it, say, Hmm, audibly out loud, because it creates a verbal moment for you to have that space to breathe and think for a second.

Kathleen, you had a look. Did you have a thought there?

001948 Kathleen Seide

Oh, I have had a lot of thoughts. Yes,

001951 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

please. Let's hear them.

001952 Kathleen Seide

So I think what you just said, taking that moment to hmm is wonderful. I was just listening to a podcast the other day that was talking about that and how we actually create this time pressure internally that's much more extreme than anyone we're talking to. They will forgive us for long pauses. When we rush ourselves into answering a question. But in addition, you know, I'm thinking about the way that we approach risk management in cave diving and the way that we train our cave divers. Now we spent a lot of time there's this process of accident analysis.

So starting in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, people were developing this equipment. They were developing the systems. Nobody had ever done these things before, and there were a lot of fatalities. In scuba diving in general and in overhead and technical diving. And at some point people started going, Hmm, well, that's not good.

Maybe there's something that these things have in common. How can we look at it? And so they did this analysis. And, and they broke it down into a couple categories of things that are really likely to kill you are likely to be very dangerous. And they developed either training around that awareness around that ways to mitigate that either in gear or in training.

And I think that those principles can get applied to any business. If you step back from your business and you look at not just the ways that your business can die or be damaged, but how does that happen in your industry for other businesses? What has happened to those other businesses? So that you can then develop plans around that and reactions, processes, equipment, all those kinds of things so that when the shit does hit the fan and you're taking that breath, you actually have some tools in your toolbox to respond to it with.

002132 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

I think I, I joke a lot that the way that I became a business leader was that I fucked up in every way possible. So I could help other people recognize when they're about to fail. And I don't think that I'm the only you know, business advisor or business leader or whatever the fuck in this space, you know, are in any space who's had the same experience. There's something to be said about that three legged, one eyed, deaf dog named lucky. He's still there. Right. And that's the point you've gone through this shit, in advance and you recognize what it looks like, you know? And so for yourself, when you're doing your own risk assessment, the more times that you been in that scenario, the faster you recognize it, which, you know, often speed is, is life, right?

The faster you understand what's going on. The faster, you can effectively respond to it. But finding the OGs, the veterans, the retired folks who have like been doing this forever and they're like, oh shit, I've got some stories to tell you. And you know, that's a great resource for learning how to do some of your own shit.

And I've, you know, I've been blessed to have many of those over there. Risk advisors. I mean, that's, there that's a whole industry that happens by itself. Right. But I think, uh, we don't think about doing that enough in our own companies the same way that I recommend that every company, if you're planning on being more than, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year, cottage business have an advisory board, right.

Have some advisors, but you know, how do you find good risk advisors in your space? Kathleen? I know you've, you've had a few mentors over the years. Who've given you some insight. How did you develop those relationships?

002300 Kathleen Seide

Yeah, in real estate. It's interesting. I tend to go outside of my industry for business advice, and I like to, I like to learn about things, find out how to break them and apply them to something they're not supposed to be used in.

Uh, so that works really well for me to develop those mentorships. I like going to community groups, like professional organizations that are adjacent, but outside of my industry, making friendships there and learning yeah. Sort of their best practices and, and learning how to apply them or how to extend that into what I do.

And then I also, I'm lucky enough to have a business partner who is family. Who's been in the business 20 years longer than I have. So that was a built-in mentorship for me. That was really easy to slide into.

002342 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Gotta love those old dogs. Siobhan, you've had some folks over the years, who've contributed significant knowledge to you and your growth along the way.

And then you're also partnered up with someone who has an amount of business experience and can contribute some of that. Anything to add on how and where you help develop mentorship or advisory relationships.

002401 Siobhan Colleen

I think you can find it anywhere. And a really important thing to remember is that no one person can have all the answers. It's impossible. And if you find yourself only trusting one person's advice, you either want people to be preaching to the choir. And you're never going to hear any constructive feedback. Or you might be in a manipulative mentorship slash relationship, which has happened to me early in my rigging career.

But when I realized the situation and I got out of that situation, then I realized the importance of having multiple mentors. And then you can find mentorship anywhere and it doesn't have to be someone who's necessarily older than you. It doesn't have to be someone who has more experience than you in your subject.

Matter of expertise. I think what really matters is their unique perspective and their unique experiences. If you have someone who's doing the same task for 20 years, but you have someone else who has five years doing 10 unique tasks, I would rather go with that person who only has five years of quote unquote experience because of the diversity of that experience.

So that's an important thing to consider when you're looking for someone to have a mentorship relationship with like Kathleen finding online communities. That was a big thing during COVID because we couldn't, nobody could meet in person, but there's also nothing wrong with meeting someone online and go into weekly meetings.

Like the Unfuck My Business community meeting every Tuesday, hint, hint, see you all there. And I also really love LinkedIn. Thanks.

002548 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

We didn't pay her for that plug by the way. That actually perfectly segues into the last session here. I've actually written a white paper about letting your frontline organization help drive process improvement.

But peer information gathering, I think is super important. It was interesting to me that you sort of naturally put that all together in your head from a mentorship or advisory perspective, because normally there's an expectation of hierarchy there. I do kind of fundamentally consider those different things because we talked in the past about your quadrant of communication and how you communicate with each of those people. And as a quick recap, that is your mentors, advisors, your superiors people that you report to your peers and or teammates, and then your customers, right? Those are like all different quadrants of it, communication in your business, and you should be communicating with them differently.

There's information that should be divulged in each direction to sort of keep things appropriately segmented because sometimes information is power, but that being said, peer information gathering, I think is super, super important in any business. A lot of the ways in which I was able to make some progression of, you know, throughout my corporate career pretty quickly was I would develop contacts quickly across the organization, horizontally, not vertically.

It wasn't trying to find the managers, the boss connections or any of the rest of that. If I'm in support, I'm finding someone in customer service, I'm finding someone in billing. I'm finding someone in accounting. I'm finding someone in each of these other groups who knows what they're doing in their space.

And I'm using that to gather peer information about the total landscape and allows me to be more effective. And it sounds like you have deeply integrated that sort of a model into how you approach some of these things. Right.

002723 Siobhan Colleen

And the entertainment industry you kind of have to, because in our world, that would be the equivalent of like the rigors talking to the lighting department, talking to the video department, talking to it, or if you're ahead of any of those departments, then you're also talking with the artistic director or in some cases you might be talking to the actual client.

Which is, it can be intimidating if you've never for, for, for me that that was a Chris... Chris Angel. I remember whisper. Yeah. I just, I'll never forget it. We were looking at audience sight lines and I whispered something to my mentor slash supervisor. And Chris goes, oh, did you have something you wanted to tell me?

And I was like, oh, Yeah, I just, you know, you might want to consider how high we put this trust because it might affect the audience sight lines in the seats and he's like, oh, okay. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And I was like, oh my gosh, but you know what, in the moment you. You know, people are people, it doesn't matter what their status is. It doesn't matter. Everybody puts pants on one leg at a time. If they wear pants, I don't know

002837 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Tutus and ...for me for the record,

002839 Siobhan Colleen

but you know what I'm saying? Like you just got to see people as human beings and that's, that's really all it is. We all have our own problems, our own struggles. If you fan girl, fan girl, internally

002850 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

But in regards to the peer information gathering, I mean, the, the broader, the perspective that you had and you outlined it really well.

I mean, from the concept of a show, understanding all of the different parts of the show, and Hey, I did a little theater in high school, so I'm not completely uneducated on this topic, but you know, you have to understand all of the aspects of the show and especially on the technical side, all of the production stuff, the back end stuff.

If you're lighting, you need to understand what's happening in stagecraft. If your sound, you need to have a good understanding with the musical director of where it's going to peak and where it's going to back off, right. There has to be this sort of cross information gathering because in the production of that event, right, you have countless risk moments happening the entire time that all have to be navigated well.

And to circle that back to the beginning, you have to have had a good plan and plenty of practice rehearsal, right in advance to get through those things.

002938 Siobhan Colleen

I would like to also mention that. In this whole podcast episode, I feel like we're talking about risk management and risk mitigation in a very formal context, but whether it's risk mitigation, or if we're talking about peer review and getting peer feedback and even finding mentors that doesn't have to happen in very formal processes. We mentioned finding community groups online, reaching out to people on LinkedIn. I had a TicTok that went viral. People's comments on my TikTok were very enlightening. They were, they were showing me barriers that might target audience has that I never considered before. And it's just amazing the information you can gather in just a sentence with emoji.

You know what I mean? It's funny. Right. But you just got to think of it that way. The world is a wealth of knowledge. It doesn't have to be in a research paper. It doesn't have to be in a white paper. Sometimes it's in the comments section of a social media post. Sometimes your mentor isn't someone that you have to pay $300 an hour to get, well, let's face it. That's coaching, right? You don't have to be in that situation. Sometimes mentorship can look like texting someone real quick on Facebook messenger. Hey, this, I have this to consider and I'm not sure what the best solution is. I was thinking this, do you have anything better? Oh no. Yeah. Here you might want to also consider this, right.

And it's just a text or quick phone call, not everything in business has to be approached in a very formal way. At the end of the day, yeah, have your documentation to back up, whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. But as far as processes go, it doesn't have to be like so formalized. I just think that's an important point.

003131 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Absolutely. I mean, I would suggest that that network building is a fundamental part of your risk mitigation strategy because the greater your network, the greater, the ability that you have to call on an asset at any particular moment in the moment when you're in crisis and be able to get something out of that.

We are going to go into our lightning round. And this, my friend is when we ask you fast questions that you give us knee jerk instinct responses to don't put any thought into it. You're going to be in your crisis moment. So get into your Zen place, but we want your immediate reaction

Cocktail of choice?

003201 Siobhan Colleen

Mimosa.

003202 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

What's your go-to de-stress method.

003205 Siobhan Colleen

What's that? No, I'm just kidding. Go to de-stress method, taking a hit of my CBD pen.

003212 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Fantastic. Apple or PC?

003216 Siobhan Colleen

Either.

003216 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Okay. I'm good with that.

003218 Siobhan Colleen

I know I'm really not married to either.

003221 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Great answer. Peanut butter, smooth or crunchy?

003224 Siobhan Colleen

Crunchy.

003225 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Okay. What's your favorite insult?

003228 Siobhan Colleen

You cocksucker.

003230 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Okay. All right. Strong words from a strong person. Thank you very much for being here. Our show. We greatly appreciate that. And, and you, and, and many of the other folks, the unfuck, my business, you know, we mitigate risk and, and cross that line every single day with figuring out how to survive in tough times, shitty situations like a global pandemic for instance,

003251 Siobhan Colleen

or a literal shitty situation.

003253 Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

Yeah, exactly. We will make sure that all of a Siobhan's contact information is available in the show notes. You want to check out what she's doing and follow her on social media in all the places like apparently TikTok where she's popular.

So from all of us here at unfuck, my business to all of you out there see you next Tuesday.

003318 Outtro

What the fuck are you waiting for? Take what you learned in this episode and do something with it. You'll find all the links and resources we talked about in our show notes for this episode and go to UnfuckMyBusiness.com to subscribe to the show.

About the Podcast

Show artwork for Unf*ck My Business
Unf*ck My Business
No bullshit advice for business owners who want to be resilient AF.

About your hosts

Profile picture for Robyn Sayles

Robyn Sayles

HOST | SHOW RUNNER
Twitter + IG: @robynsayles
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Chris 'Jinx' Jenkins

HOST
Twitter: @immrdubious

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