177. To Shave or Not to Shave?

To shave or not to shave? That's the question.

I think it's safe to say that shaving halfway is probably not the best answer. It might get me some clicks on my social media, but it might not get me the results I'm looking for as far as closing that deal and getting people to sign on the dotted line. As entrepreneurs, we often wonder how well do I have to prepare? How good do I have to look? How sharp does my agame need to be?

Do I need to be shaved? Do I need to be fully beautified? Do I need to have my filters on? What does it need to look like? I'm a Gen Xer, so I grew up in a time when I applied for a job, we had to be shaven.

At least if you wanted some sort of white collar or professional job, that's just what had to be. And as I've gotten older, that's something that maybe it's baggage, maybe it's not. It's something I've taken with me and something that I use and continue to do as I give big presentations, as I have larger webinars, there's this sense that when you shave for somebody and you put your best foot forward that you are showing them the utmost respect. Or at least that's what we learned in our generation or the where I grew up in the United States that shaving was assigned to making sure that you are prepared as best as possible. Now, when you look at the math of shaving, it takes a lot of time for me to shave properly every day.

It takes me a good 15 to 20 minutes. I don't know, maybe I'm slow, maybe I never got good at it, but it's 20 minutes a day. And if you do the math on that, that's 100 minutes a week. And then if you did that for a year, if soul work 50 weeks, that would be 5000 minutes shaving, that's a lot of time. Or if you want to really simplify it, even if you spent twelve minutes a day, five days a week, that's an hour a week.

So that's 50 hours. That's over two days just shaving so that people can look at your face and say, oh, that's what his skin looks like. Now, depending on your situation, depending on who you're marketing to, you might decide to do that. I certainly make that decision at times based on who my demographic is, who I'm presenting to. So in my insurance agency coaching business, I'll more often wear a button down shirt.

That's more common in that industry. And yes, I will shave. I'll shave because I believe I'm risking money if I don't. I've often told my wife I shave for love and I shave for money. And as it turns out, she actually kind of likes it when I don't shave.

So I really pretty much shave for money. I really don't care if I shave, but I want to communicate respect to the people that I work with. And probably only a couple of my interviews have I not shaven. And then I started realizing that maybe this was my baggage. Maybe it was something that I was bringing on with me and was or wasn't perhaps costing me money.

So first thing I'm going to invite you to consider for the people you target, does it matter to them? So again, in my case with my insurance agency owners, they're used to seeing clean shaven people, and yet they're entrepreneurs, they're business owners, and there is a sort of cache or power that comes from saying, hey, you know what? I don't have to shark tank as somebody who does this three day weekend entrepreneur coaching. I know most of my entrepreneur coaching clients. Really, it's almost not even on their radar whether I shave or not.

Maybe it's because of their age, maybe it's because of how they view the world, but it really doesn't seem to matter to them. So I want to invite you to consider something. You've been listening to this video so far with me speaking, and I'm not clean shaven. Has it impacted your perception of me, your perception of my intelligence, your perception of the usefulness of the information I convey? I would ask you to share your feedback to that because I'm actually learning in this as we go.

But if you'd share that in the comments section below, that would be awesome. And now what I'm going to do so now that I'm shaving, do I sound more intelligent? Do you believe me more? If I were selling products that make your skin look younger? You might say that me being shaven makes my skin look younger and makes me look younger.

I could counter with the fact that I only shave about 15 to 20 times a year, which could be why at 50 years old, my skin doesn't look like people who've shaven for all those years. Also, there have been times when I've been told by people that I look too young to be able to sound wise in a specific field. I know certainly when I first started and I was in my mid twenty s and late 30s, people told me that having a little bit of a beard or something like that made me look wiser and like I knew more stuff. So overall, it's a personal decision as far as how it looks if you work behind the scenes and you don't need to meet with clients, but if you're meeting with clients, you might decide that there are certain days you do shave. What I do is I'll usually have my podcast interviews and some of the appointments where I know I'll need to shave on that same day so I can shave once a week and not have to shave the other day.

Part of it is because I don't want to wade my time doing something I don't need to do to make money or to make people around me happy. So I encourage you to consider in your schedule, how much time could you be saving by not shaving. You can also factor in the impact on the environment, if that's something that concerns you, and the impact on your budget if that concerns you as well. So of course, when you shave less, you spend less money on shaving supplies. And unless I'm mistaken, you do less damage to your skin.

It SaaS, softer and then also you simply spend less time of your life going like this. So I hope this serves you, I hope this helps you. This is unfortunately, I guess now that I'm thinking about it probably a somewhat male directed episode. So sorry about that for the ladies. I don't have the ladies perspective on that.

So whatever you can take from this, I hope it serves you. I'm sure there's parallels. I'm not even going to go there. I just remembered one downside of shaving. I just remembered, as my daughter reminds me, that when I shave, it sometimes shows off my multiple chins.

So maybe that's not what you're looking to do, depending on what you're trying to sell. But again, something you have to invest some time, maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not. I'll leave that for you to decide. I hope you, your loved ones and your business are going great. If there's anything I can do to help you, please let me know.

I do ask you, please share your feedback in the comments as far as what you think in general and then even specifically for me about shaving. Does it make me look smarter? Do you believe me more or less? Or does it not even matter? Curious to hear your feedback and as always, I look forward to helping you impact more people and making make more money in less time.

Do what you do best so you can better enjoy your family, your friends and your life. Thanks so much for listening. Bye.