Megan Keithan's journey, detailed in a recent interview, is a remarkable story of resilience and leadership. She faced a life-altering shock when she discovered her husband was a felon, leading to social ostracization and personal turmoil. Adopting a strategy of confronting one fear daily, Megan transitioned from despair to empowerment, eventually leaving her corporate job to venture into entrepreneurship. This included starting a photography business and moving into operations consulting.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Megan's business approach evolved, culminating in the foundation of Busy Cure, which focuses on improving operational efficiency to balance work and life. Her leadership philosophy centers on self-responsibility, learning from failures, and leading with honesty and vulnerability. Megan's experience underscores the importance of adaptability and self-growth in leadership, showing how challenges can be transformed into opportunities for development and success.

To learn more about Megan's work, check out their website at https://thebusycure.com/.

Connect with Megan on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/busy-cure/.

Key Points

Transcript

All right. Today I want to welcome Megan Keithan. She is the co founder and principal strategist at Busy Cure, an operations consultancy devoted to teaching businesses how to have full time impact with part time hours. With more than 2000 hires in her to her name, she is best known for being a team expert, helping founders become great leaders and businesses develop strong and healthy culture. In her free time, Megan reads over a hundred books a year. Oh, my goodness. A hundred travels to the world and bakes delicious sweets for her loved ones. Megan lives in Nashville where she's an active member in the entrepreneurial community and in her church. Megan, welcome.

Speaker 2          00:55

Thank you so much, Craig. It is wonderful to be here.

Speaker 1          00:58

Oh, I've been looking forward to it. Megan, I've had such a delightful time in the green room talking to you and I just want to give the audience something. Buckle up. This is going to be an interesting ride. This is an episode that you're going to want to hear an amazing story. Megan's going to bring an amazing story and some powerful leadership lessons. And so I guess megan, let's start. Was it eleven years ago? You were a happy newlywed?

Speaker 2          01:40

I sure was.

Speaker 1          01:41

And then a surprised newlywed.

Speaker 2          01:45

Yes, I was. Woke up on a Saturday, normal Saturday morning, had no idea that it was going to be anything different than every other Saturday morning before it. It was January in 2012 and that was the day that I found out that my then husband, my new husband, was a felon. And not just any kind of felon, but a pedophile and child molester.

Speaker 1          02:20

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 2          02:24

Very much a surprise, as you can imagine.

Speaker 1          02:30

Yeah.

Speaker 1          02:33

The emotions going through my head, the shock, betrayal, embarrassment.

Speaker 2          02:41

Yeah, I think I was shell shocked initially. I also was sort of invited to leave my church at the time and pretty much lost all of my friends as word kind of spread around. I obviously was not talking a lot about it, but found that people knew anyway. And I went very quickly from an amazing social life filled with a lot of people I thought I loved and I thought who had loved me, to pretty much everyone who had been at my wedding, no longer answering texts or phone calls from me. And not only that, but I had some

Speaker 2          03:34

very mean messages, we'll just put it mildly, from people who had been my closest friends. I was completely abandoned by pretty much everybody except for my family and a couple of close friends. And it was not what I anticipated for that season of my life, that's for sure.

Speaker 1          03:59

Wow. I am so incredibly sorry. There was one thing. You said you were asked to leave the church. That shocks me. That seems like the precise time the church should be giving you a hug.

Speaker 2          04:15

It does. And especially as someone who had grown up in church and heard that church was supposed to be there for you. And of course, knowing that Jesus loved people through their hard situations, it was shocking to me. In retrospect. 2023, Megan can say I have so much grace and compassion for where they were. I was human. I was so mad. I was so hurt at the time. And today I can look back and say, they were human, they were hurt. They were shell shocked. It was a very tight knit church, a small church, and so I can't imagine what it would have been like to have a child and wonder about what might have happened if I were in their shoes. So I do have just a lot of compassion. It wasn't the response that Jesus would have had, but I don't think my response was either.

Speaker 1          05:18

That's very humble now, as you've gone to different churches and they've found out about this, have they asked you to leave?

Speaker 2          05:28

No. I've had some really incredible, supportive churches along the path. I'm now in an absolutely incredible church. I don't even think I've had a chance to tell my story. So many other wild things have happened in my life since then that that's not the part of my story that most often comes up. But I've been warmly welcomed by every church that I've been in since.

Speaker 1          05:54

Well, that makes me happy, because I think that's precisely what Jesus modeled.

Speaker 2          06:02

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1          06:04

So my just that is a wake up call that I just can't even imagine I can't get my head into. That what that would feel like. What was your response?

Speaker 2          06:26

The first few days? Everything felt like a walking nightmare for a while. I had to move back in with my parents because my apartment was in both of our names, and so he retained a key and full access. I felt very unsafe, of course, at the time. And I remember moving back into my parents house and for the first three, four days, just not even being able to get out of bed and being so afraid of the judgment that would inevitably happen if I encountered anyone I knew. And eventually I got to a place where I thought, no one. I can't move forward in my life if I live like this. I can't live like this forever. And so I have to do something. And I started doing something called one Scary Thing, which is every day I'm going to do one scary thing. And so the first day, it was getting out of bed, and then the second day, it was emerging downstairs and eating a meal. And then the third day, it was going to the grocery store, where, very realistically, I might run into somebody who had heard, and I might have to answer questions that I didn't want to answer. And then eventually, I got beyond the fear of judgment, and one scary thing after another led me to completely changing my life. And what started out as, I think an attempt to completely sabotage my life really turned me into the person I am today. Changed me completely. And like I said, it's been a wild ride, but it's not one I regret at all.

Speaker 1          08:14

Well, something you said there about taking on one scary thing. I don't care where you are in life. I think if everybody adopted that policy today, I'm going to do one thing that scares me. Just imagine how much further along all of us would be, and you already are.

Speaker 2          08:36

And it's really easy. There comes a point where you've done so much scary stuff that you almost get comfortable in that place, and then you have to figure out a new way to push yourself. But yeah, one scary thing, which started with literally just getting out of bed, led me to leaving my corporate career, which then led me to actually having a go at running my own business, which led me to another business after that and another business after that. And, yeah, you just never know where one scary thing will lead you.

Speaker 1          09:15

What was the corporate career that you left?

Speaker 2          09:17

I was a recruiter for a boutique recruitment firm, and I loved what I did, but I didn't know if I cared about it anymore. The experience that I had completely shook me and made me question all the decisions that I'd made in my life and realize that I had had sort of this secret agenda and this hidden path. My dad actually owns a recruiting firm that he bought from my maternal grandfather. So everyone in my life did recruiting. And I thought, well, I will take over the family business, so I'm going to get really good at this. I'm going to become the best at this, and then I'll take over the family business. Obviously, then crisis strikes. I question everything I know, and now I'm wondering, am I in the right seat? Am I doing the right thing? Is there meaning for me in this? And is this my highest calling? Could I be doing something else? Should I be doing something else?

Speaker 1          10:21

So I heard a little bit of organizational health language in the right seat. Can you explain that for folks that may not know the lingo?

Speaker 2          10:30

Well, now I'm blank. Is it good to Jim? Jim Collins wrote a great book talking about this concept of the right person being in the right seat. And in my business, we talk about the right person in the right seat at the right time and on the right bus. Because sometimes someone can be in the right seat. They're doing the right job, the job that is most aligned with them, but they're doing it at the wrong organization, at an organization where it doesn't make sense for them or they're in the right organization, but they're just not in the right role. We encounter that a lot. And for me, I don't know if any of that was aligned at that time, but that was because everything got all shook up and I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't have an identity. I'd based my identity on so many things that were very worldly and could change in a moment and did change in a moment. And so there couldn't be a right seat or a right bus or a right time for me because I no longer knew who I was.

Speaker 1          11:44

How did you find yourself?

Speaker 2          11:47

One painful, scary thing at a time. At the time I called it a photography business. I think that was very generous to myself to call it a business. I did collect money. I had been collecting money, but I was at best a freelancer doing gigs here and there on the weekends. And really I had this vision of this I kept having this dream where I was in my office chair, gripping the arms of my chair and there was a throne ahead of me. And I knew that that throne was mine to move into. But I was so scared to leave my office chair. It was safe, it was comfortable. My coworkers actually were among the people who did not judge me, who were very safe to be around at that time. And I kept having this dream and seeing this throne ahead of me knowing that I was called to something more and something greater but was terrified to leave. Eventually the dream went on long enough for me to look over my shoulder and see that there was someone without a chair who was waiting for me to vacate my chair, which as I looked at her, looked over my shoulder, looked at her, looked back at my chair, my chair became her throne. And I realized I am blocking someone else from being in their destiny and in their future. And the longer I sit here, I'm not only depriving myself, I'm depriving someone else. I stepped into that very scary unknown of trying to turn a freelance occasional gig thing into an actual business. I was terrible at it by the way, because I had always approached it as an artist. I didn't need to make money off of it. So I thought, great, now I get to be a full time photographer. And such a dream world. And it turns out I was not using any of my business acumen, any of the smarts that I had acquired through my career previously and almost killed my business. In fact, got so low that I had to go back to recruiting. Took a job for a year working for a multibillion dollar recruiting company. Actually started applying business principles to my own photography side hustle, we'll call it. A side hustle at that time. Built it up to become a business and then it was just one adventure after another from there.

Speaker 1          14:35

Well, that's encouraging. Now you said apparently there was a lot of businesses you started a lot of businesses, shut down a lot of businesses.

Speaker 2          14:44

I sure did. So the photography business was the first one. When I had absolutely no business starting a second business, I did start a second business. I found out that photographers were not very good at writing, and I had always thought that I was going to be a novelist at some point. I had been writing since I was basically in the womb crafting stories from childhood. And so I had a really strong command of the English language in a way that knew that where I knew how to move people with my words. And so I thought, AHA, I'm going to start a business writing website copy for photographers. And that took off really unexpectedly. I ended up kind of shifting into an agency model where I had other writers who worked with me and wrote blog posts for photographers, because I also learned to master SEO and then started training these other writers on SEO and had a lot of work coming in that way. That was fun. Again, I wasn't really good at business, but I was getting better at business. So, let's see, I started that I want to say end of 2013, maybe in 2018. I was totally disengaged from both of those things. They were both going really well, and I had really gotten good at business by that point. I learned to apply all of my lessons from my corporate life toward my business. I was reading business books. I had hired business coaches. I was in communities with other people who were doing business. Not only photographers, not only copywriters, but just business people in general. And I was bored. And so I started another business, coaching people. That was more of an accident. I come to the same coffee shop every day, and I sit there, and before I know it, I'm helping people solve their business problems and then somehow their life problems too. It was very unexpected. And towards the end of 2018, really decided to actually go all in on making that a business and seeing I gave myself a year to kind of turn my life around again. And I started coaching photographers. Really? I called it coaching. That was the word that was used for me. But it was consulting, teaching other photographers how to build a really profitable and successful business based on the model that I had used to grow my business from just me really barely making ends meet to bringing on multiple photographers and having something bigger than me.

Speaker 1          17:50

Wow. And then you had some other businesses around the time of COVID So those.

Speaker 2          17:58

Actually were my three businesses that I had when COVID hit. And I love to use COVID as the excuse. But realistically, at the very end of 2019, beginning of 2020, I got out of a serious relationship, got hit by a tornado, my dog died, lost a best friend. It was kind of like bam, bam, bam bam. All these things all at once. I was shell shocked. And then COVID happened and I thought, this is my golden ticket to starting over. All of these businesses are basically dead. I'm a photography company. We can't work in COVID times. I'm serving photographers with my other two companies. Perfect excuse to literally shut down everything that is not working for me and start over. And so I did. On June 3, 2020, I sold my first client into an operations consulting business. And little did I know that that too would be a roller coaster. But it was a fresh start and it was a very fun twist toward, I think, who I am naturally meant to be.

Speaker 1          19:22

And is that Busy Cure or is that the business before Busy Cure?

Speaker 2          19:27

That's the business before busy cure.

Speaker 1          19:29

Okay, all right. We got another business to work in here. How did busy cure get started?

Speaker 2          19:36

So the long story short is that I built an incredible that business that I started in 2020 was called Queen of Ops. It started as an operations consultancy and it somehow transformed into a you're never going to believe this a recruiting firm. Oh my gosh. And I built that basically zero to a million dollars in the first twelve first eleven months. And then by month 15, 2 million. And then starting in month 16, made one bad decision after another. I was burned out. I had been working just insane hours. Not only was I working in my business, I was consulting for another business and really just running myself ragged, not resting, not taking care of myself. And it got so bad that in May we pretty much ran out of money and we're just living on whatever sales I could make week after week after week. It was literally have to make a sale this week to make payroll. And at the end of May, God Mercifully was like, shut that down. Get out of there. You need some time off. You need to recover. And so I shut the business down. It was the most painful thing I have ever been through. I had never had such a big team of people completely relying on me. This was not just with photographers. They had other photography gigs. They had their own businesses that they were doing on the side with writers. A lot of my writers were students or had full time jobs or whatever. This was a team of, at its height, 25 people fully depending on me to pay their salaries. And I went four weeks in a row without being able to pay their salaries. And then I was shutting it down and saying, not only do I owe you money, but I have no idea when I'm going to be able to repay it. I had no personal saving. I used up my personal savings to pay the bills for three months or so. And not only that, but I didn't have anything left in me to give to anyone. I spent my whole first week literally just I would wake up, work out, eat breakfast, walk the dog, come home, sleep, wake up, eat, walk the dog, come home, sleep. Eventually, I started just picking up operations, consulting jobs here and there, helping people avoid what I had set myself up for with Queen of Ops. And then I found an amazing business partner. Just one of those things wasn't looking for someone to go into business with. And we started Busy Cure, and we're very aligned on this idea that the world is very obsessed with working a lot in order to have this great impact. And we kind of thought, well, what if people didn't have to work so much? What if businesses could be so operationally strong that they didn't have to work 80 hours a week or 60 hours a week? Or maybe they don't even have to work 40 hours a week?

Speaker 1          23:07

Wow. And so that's the mission of Busy Care is to do. That

Speaker 1          23:18

just such an incredible journey that you've been on. If there was one leadership lesson that you wanted to leave the audience with, what would that be?

Speaker 2          23:34

I always start with leading myself first, so I cannot be a leader of anyone else if I am leading myself poorly. And that means taking responsibility for anything that I could have done to better a situation. I will never let someone go from my team if I'm responsible for any part of their failure, which is almost always, by the way. I will use examples from my life where I've messed up rather than pointing out where others have fallen short, because there is no end to the amount of times I have messed up. And unfortunately, I wish this was not true, but I will continue to fall short. And so I start by being really honest with myself, and I lead from a place of honesty, vulnerability, and just a willingness to be the stupidest person in the room, to be the one in the room who has made the most mistakes.

Speaker 1          24:44

Well, you have a wild ride to hear, and I think you have a lot of wisdom to share with people. I hope they will reach out to you. How do folks reach out to you?

Speaker 2          24:58

I can be found at megan@thebizycure.com. It's probably the best way.

Speaker 1          25:06

Well, excellent. Well, Megan, I do hope people reach out to you, because I love your mission of not having people work crazy hours. And if my wife hears this episode, she's probably going to be calling you. But, Megan, thank you for being on Leaders and Legacies.