Business Is a Spiritual Game with Meny Hoffman

In This Episode

• • [04:20] – Meny Hoffman recounts a personal story about the isolation CEOs often face and highlights the value of building a strong support network.
    
  • [07:24] – Meny outlines strategies to enhance communication and company culture for both remote and in-person teams, emphasizing regular huddles and proactive dialogue.
  • [14:05] – Meny details the collaborative process of creating and refining core values, involving input from both the leadership and the broader team.
  • [17:33] – Meny presents his framework for a balanced life, which centers on four pillars: spiritual, financial, family, and health goals.

• [21:53] – Meny emphasizes the power of defining non-negotiables and ensuring business practices are congruent with personal principles.
• [29:04] – Meny illustrates how recognizing small victories can generate momentum and pave the way for greater accomplishments
• [39:10] – Meny unveils a personal development template he created and has shared widely to support growth and accountability.
• [46:39] – Meny motivates listeners to set intentional goals, pursue ongoing self-improvement, and honor their progress along the way.

Jump to Links and Resources

Manny, it’s so great to have you on the show. 

Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Yeah, so we know each other through the Joint Venture Mastermind (JVMM) of Gordon‘s mastermind, and I’ve been a guest on your podcast, so thank you for that opportunity.

It’s always good to be both the host and the guest at times. 

Yes, you know, I get kind of lazy sometimes and get on other people’s shows. Whole stretches of time will go by where I’m not even pitching to get on other shows, and it’ll just be me, hosting, hosting, hosting, hosting, doing easily 100 episodes with maybe only a handful of guesting. 

Yeah. So interestingly, saying that, because I made a goal for myself, I want to attend a certain amount of events in the next 12 months, where I’m attending the event backstage instead of being on stage, because at one point you get, you know, you attend events that you are speaking at. It’s a whole different ball game than being in the audience and listening to other speakers speak and just replenishing your knowledge. 

Yeah. So, what are some of your favorite events? 

My favorite event is not so much about the type of speakers. I try to vet events more about the type of people in the audience because as much as the speakers inspire you, it’s the conversations that happen, you know, during lunch break, during networking and so on. Some of it is the speakers, of course, and the concepts. But a lot of the speakers at events, you could find their content all over the place. It’s the atmosphere and the environment of people saying, You know what, I’m going away from my everyday routine just for the concept of learning, networking, finding new connections. And that’s very valuable.

Yeah, yeah. Genius Network, for me, is a second home. It’s an amazing group. Yes, Polish runs it, and I’ve been working there since 2018. It feels so welcoming, and I’ve gotten so much business from it. But it’s not for the business that I go. It’s for the camaraderie and the friendships, and it’s like a soul family.

Yeah, it’s great. Just yesterday, I met with the CEO of a fairly successful and growing company, and he was sharing all his struggles and everything else. And I said, “You know what the common denominator is? Everything you shared with me is that it’s very lonely to be the CEO of a company.” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “When you open your company, it’s very lonely because you’re a solo entrepreneur. And then the next round, when you find out it’s back to the loneliness, is when you start having a big team doing it, knocking out stuff for projects, and now you’re only working on the business. Everybody’s working in the business. It becomes lonely again. And when you surround yourself with great people. It just gives you the support you need as an entrepreneur.”

Yeah, and how long have you been an entrepreneur? 

25 years? Yeah, our company will be celebrating 25 years in a couple of months. 

That’s a good run so far. 

Yeah, again, good, bad, and ugly, like every entrepreneur in every business, but the goal is to be more up than down. 

Yeah. Do you have a large team? 

Conversations between sessions often inspire more than the speakers themselves.

Yes, we had about 30 people in the PTex Group until COVID. We had everybody in the office in one centralized location. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, people have moved away to different locations. So we have the bulk of the team is still in our corporate headquarters in Brooklyn. We now have an office in New Jersey, and we also have freelancers working for us, part-time or full-time, from all over the place.

Yes, I’ve been fully remote since I sold my previous company in 2010, and I’m never going back. I just don’t have the desire for cubicles and a corner office and all that sort of thing.

However, this is a conversation I have had many times with business owners. And you see this in the news with large corporations bringing back people fully remote. There are companies that are built remotely from the ground up, which means they are established initially online. They were built that way. I think when you build from the ground up, and you create, what are the mechanisms we’ll do for communication properly, to have proper communication? What is the mechanism for creating a company culture that differs from a company built over 20 years, which is now all of a sudden operating remotely? I think that’s the difference of opinions you hear outside there like people saying, you know, remote doesn’t work. 

Now, in our company, I’ve realized another thing: if you look back, we’re obviously branding a marketing agency, and our inventory consists of great designers. They’re able to produce great work, which they do. Still, we’ve seen in the past that we were able to hire a junior designer with a desire to be a senior very soon. Because they were surrounded by other people in the same environment, the same office, they were able to reach a senior level relatively quickly. In contrast, with remote employees, this has shifted. It’s taking way too long for someone to pick up. That’s to go from junior to senior, just because they don’t have the mentorship as much as if you were in the same office.

What are some best practices for a remote team and an in-person team that would help you truly elevate your communication, culture, and internal brand?

The first thing is that the word I’m going to use is being intentional, which means that you have a culture. Sometimes, you would ask a company, ‘What is the company culture?’ And it says we don’t have a particular culture. It states that every company has a culture, which means that even if a default is also a culture, something has developed as a distinct company culture.

Surround yourself with great people because they give you the support every entrepreneur needs.

Now, if you are a forward-thinking CEO and you understand the value of culture. We could talk about it soon; you need to be proactive and intentional about a goal where you want to be, what type of culture you want to build and work towards it, even if you’re a startup or even if you’re an existing company, that at one point you feel this is an important next step for your company. So, you need to be intentional. 

Now, if you have a remote-first company, the intention needs to be followed with action more than if it’s in a personal office. So, let’s say everybody’s remote. “Okay, we’re going to have, once a week, a huddle, and this is going to be the structure of the huddle. These are the things we’re going to be discussing to bring everybody into sync with what’s happening in the company,”  you could have a way of if you’re a company that’s hiring fast. All of a sudden, this person doesn’t know that we hired three people this week because they’re not in the office or everybody’s remote. What is the mechanism, the intentionality of introducing one person to the other or letting everybody know about what’s happening? 

So, you could be proactive about it, but I would say that most companies fail because they get busy with everyday tasks, and that’s always the last thing on their list. My advice would be to find someone in your company who will actually take this as their mission. They’ll spend some, we say, they’ll burn calories every week, figuring out, what else could we do? What’s coming up? What else could we do? A holiday is coming up? Well, we just had this big win. We need to update everyone about it, and so on. We’re not working in Ptex. 

A lot of the work we do externally in branding and marketing is not only for external companies. You know, we do external branding and marketing. A lot of the work we do is internal branding and marketing for their employees, a project that we have, so we have now a client that has grown to 600 employees, between five and 600 employees, four different warehouses, four different locations, and they said they came to us with a challenge that the corporate one of the locations is the flagship location where the offices, corporate offices all around it, there are other remote offices. They are starting to have hundreds of employees in these locations, and they notice a difference in culture, which they want to unify across the board. 

So we’ve developed with them. We really extracted the core values of the company and everything else. Now, we’re just launching that program. It’s a four-month program that will be implemented across all facilities, and we’ve selected one person from each facility. It’s going to be the culture ambassador to help us get it out there and also report back if it’s making a difference.

Appoint someone to own the culture and watch them burn calories every week, finding what else can be done.

So, you need to be intentional. The CEO had to be intentional about wanting to spend money on it, to see this as a priority, and then spend the money for it, and then ultimately making sure that it’s getting executed so it’s not happening. By doing nothing, you must be proactive about these types of conversations and then follow through with the action.

Yeah, I love what you said about burning calories because it reminds me of a fun little stat: your brain is 2% of your body weight, and it burns 25% of your calories. Yeah, that’s a good statistic. Yeah. Where did you come up with this idea of a culture ambassador? I

I learn a lot. I love to learn. And people ask me, What’s the benefit of having my podcast, the Let’s Talk Business podcast, which you were? I guess the main benefit for me is that I learn first. I get to learn from these people, and when I ask questions, I genuinely want to learn.

In the earlier years when I started my company, it wasn’t always this way. From the get-go, I knew that I wanted to build a company. I don’t want to be the solo entrepreneur who designs stuff. I started designing because I had a passion for the field. I had a passion for understanding the impact of design on a company and seeing it thrive through the materials we created. 

So, very soon, I saw that I didn’t want to stay a graphic designer myself. I want to build a team around it and eventually add other services to the mix so we can help other companies grow today. Ptex group helps driven brands create their next. Every driven brand has its next stage in the company. It could be internal marketing, transitioning to external marketing, expanding to a new location, or introducing a new brand – whatever it may be. So, we’re there to support them. 

So, from the get-go, I knew that, yes, we need to have talented individuals. Yes, we need to have people who are committed to supporting our clients. But I knew from the outset that every person is built differently, and I knew we needed to have those core values, which would be the common denominator among all of us. Everybody brings something different to the table from a skill set perspective in terms of how we do things and the mindset we have when working together. This needs to be a filter for when they hire, and ultimately, something that we hold each other accountable for.

And I often say that I teach this through programs I create about core values, and sometimes I go through our core values, and people say, ‘This is brilliant.’ I like it. Could I use it all for my company? And then say you could use them, but it’s not something just to put on your website. It’s something that you can hold your people accountable. 

So let’s say one of our core values is we’re partners and service providers. Okay, it comes up almost every single day. We just have a big puzzle for a client, and we’re adding this, this deliverable, that deliverable, and so on. I’ll use this in a conversation. I’ll ask my business development guy, “If you’re a partner in this company, would you suggest they have to spend this much? Or there are other ways of achieving the success the same success.” So, which means is, it’s not just a core value. It’s something that has to trigger down to a conversation.

One of our core values is true courage. And I can have people hold me accountable, even if I’m the CEO of the company. For instance, in light of true courage, you weren’t at the kickoff of the meeting, nor were you involved in all the conversations. Let us handle it, you know I mean, and I encourage it. I like it because it means I don’t have to worry that people are afraid to speak up and that something is bothering them; they’re not speaking up. These core values were built for a reason, and they should be things that you measure success by and hold people accountable for.

Did you have a workshop to come up with these core values? Did you involve the entire company and your internal team? Or did you ask great questions like, how did that work?

Great question. So, we had every company, I believe, a successful one that has been around for a while. So, the question is always, is this the first time you’re doing it, or is there a version that we need to upgrade? 

True courage as a core value means people are not afraid to speak up.

The first time you do it, you definitely want to involve, at a minimum, your leadership team. Now sometimes you want to involve everybody in the company. So, the first time we did it, we actually had an exercise where we involved everybody on the team, not just to pick the core values. Rather, to do an exercise where, if somebody will ask you to describe our culture, what sets us apart. So, it was more for information gathering. Why? Because we didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feeling or their core value weren’t chosen and stuff like that. But at one point, you can’t put everything. You can’t create so many core values. 

My gut feeling is always telling me that if there are more than six or seven at most, it’s not possible to manage. It loses the value of knowing this is who we are because it becomes a whole jargon, a whole list in an email, and so on on a website. So we do that now. We also did this throughout the years. At one point, we wanted to enhance our core values. We said we had to get rid of three of them, and maybe others are more important at this time and stage of the company, so we’ve gone through another version where we’ve people actually pick and choose and vote on which ones we should keep. Which one should go? It’s still an important trade, but it’s not something that we could say. This is the common denominator we have to abide by as a whole. 

Yeah, which three did you get rid of? 

I don’t remember at the time because it had been a while since we last updated our core values. I think the last time we updated was, for sure, six or seven years ago. But it was more about it’s an important thing, but it’s not something like if we have to get rid of, I remember which one took that spot that I remember, and it was a team of individuals. Our team felt that because we always emphasize teamwork and collaboration, it’s so important, and you see it in many companies; that’s a recurring theme. Our team felt that we needed to incorporate our core values into the team. While we work as a team on a big picture, everybody still needs to understand their responsibility so they know how they impact the project. So that’s more of accountability. 

Another way of saying that we need to have accountability is that it’s very easy to get lost and make mistakes. Okay, no, no, we are together. We’re successful. If there’s a mess up, where did it break down? And it has to be turning to, and that’s something that we teach in our onboarding process. And we could go into how we teach about core values. 

Embed core values in the team, yet ensure everyone owns their roles.

The example we use is that at any given time, you should know whether you’re the directly responsible individual for this task or if it’s a collaborative effort where we’re brainstorming together. Ultimately, who is responsible for coming up with an idea for a client by the end of the day? So, in a meeting, we could call a brainstorming session; there will be one person who knows I’m the directly responsible individual there. I’m a team of individuals, but they are also my colleagues. They’re supporting me in the process because I just need the collective effort to come up with ideas. 

So, how much overlap do you have between your company’s core values and overall Jewish values?

There are two instances where it comes into play. So first of all, if you allow me to do this, because I think it’s important for business owners and people listening to this in general, and this is something that I find such an important topic to discuss, especially when you’re speaking to business people. 

Most of the time, when you find the business owners, any owner, a leader, successful, nonsuccessful, or anything in between, you’ll have a conversation, or I’ll have a conversation. I’ll ask them, “Do you have goals?” And right away, their business goals will come in front of him and say, “Of course, we want to double our sales this year.” And I said, “No, no, no, I’m asking about your personal goals.” And they’ll ask me,  “Oh, I thought we were having a business conversation.”  And then, we enter the conversation, understanding, especially as a leader, that you are not your business. Your business is not you. The business is sometimes an extension of your values or what you want to do and how you want to do things. However, businesses can sometimes shut down your values. And Don’t let who you are as an individual be compromised. 

You could have income from multiple businesses. Do you know how many entrepreneurs have multiple streams of revenue from different businesses? So, if you only have business goals, where’s your personal goal setting? And the way I explain how to have personal goals is it’s life is like a car. A car has four tires. Life has four pillars: spiritual, financial, family, and health goals. Those are the makeup of a healthy individual on a personal level. 

Now, when you say that, or when you think that way, you know the following: nobody will have a car to say, I couldn’t care less about my tires. The only tire they care about is my right front tire, even if you’re going to continue to blow air as much as and clean it and wax it, whatever you want to do for that tire, if you don’t care about the rest of the tires, at one point, you’ll have a flat tire, and you won’t be able to drive. It could take you a while. At one point, you’ll arrive at that destination. 

Core values were built for a reason. They should be things that you measure success by and hold people accountable for. Share on X

Life is the same way if you ignore some of those pillars of life and only focus on one versus the other; at one point, you’re going to find you’re going to have a lot of regret in your life or have lost so much value at the time of my life. I didn’t focus on my family, nor did I focus on spiritual goals. I didn’t focus on financial goals, whatever they may be. So it could be where you are in your life. You have to take care of one more than the others, but you can’t lose sight of all four of them. 

So, to directly answer your question, I, as an individual, have my own belief system. I have my non-negotiables, as I call it, my values. Those are non-negotiable things, and regardless of which business I will have, what type of business I’m going to be in today, tomorrow, 10 years from now, or 50 years from now, those personal values don’t change, and that’s always a check mark. As you start a new business, you want to know, will this align with my values? I don’t want to be associated with something that’s not aligning with my Jewish values and everything else that I’ve built as my non-negotiables. 

The beauty of that is you bring in a bunch of people in your company. Now, if the company works for you, then there’s still ethics. You can’t dictate everything about me, as a person and individual, and my values to every person working here, but how they pertain to the work we do, you can. So, the type of work we do: let’s say we get a client who does something shady, and they say, “I need a marketing project.” We don’t want to be associated with such a project. And suppose we don’t believe in that. In that case, we’re not going to take this as a client or mislead people with a false narrative, or whatever it is that will be something that will be right back to my core values, to say, “I have a non-negotiable that this is a value that we don’t cross regardless you as an individual employee, believe it or not, that’s across the company. ” 

That’s my company. It’s my image. It’s something that connects to me. We need to do that in every individual, regardless of affiliation. If you’re religious, nonreligious, whatever it is, every person should have non-negotiables because you need to build up who you are as a person; what are your personal preferences? What is your belief system? What are your desires as you develop in your own life, and whatever that is, you can say today, Yes, and tomorrow not; it’s something that has to be there and has to be there always.

It is easy to get lost and make mistakes, so trace back and ask where it broke down.

Yep, absolutely. So, what would be some of your non-negotiables?

So non-negotiables are a bunch, you know, a bunch of them to mention, but some of them are some of the type of clients we take or not take, which were related to our business. Non-negotiable might be some of the types of people we take with whom we want to associate ourselves, not only as clients but even as team members. They could be the most brilliant people, but if they infuse a certain culture with something that will not match up to our belief system, and we’re talking about a belief system that we’re talking about a non-negotiable belief system, then that might have an issue with that.

So would you take on, as an example, a client who’s an outward atheist.

Therefore, the client’s belief system may not align with their work if they develop a project that aims to market their belief system. Okay, then, yes, we won’t be. First of all, they shouldn’t come to us, because if we don’t believe in what they do, it’s very hard to be the marketing agency for that. So that’s just the general like, sometimes we don’t believe somebody comes with a startup idea, and we don’t believe there’s a need for it. We don’t believe there is a market for this. Why do you care? Just market it. I said you don’t want to hire us for that because we don’t believe in the outcome that you’re expecting. It’s very hard to be the best at it. 

However, if you have a personal preference or belief system that doesn’t interfere with the work you want to do, such as marketing your car wash or creating a brand on Amazon, it doesn’t interfere with the work we do. We don’t mix it into your personal life. It’s not a place where we could have an input and then get it okay. But if it’s like sports betting or payday loans, or sometimes if it’s going to be, let’s say, against Jewish law, sometimes it’s a place where we will have to ask a rabbi like from a Jewish perspective, is this forbidden, or is this allowed? We have had some of those scenarios in the past.

And you’ve turned down those.

Yep. Again. Doesn’t happen that often. It’s not that the bulk of our business consists of straightforward branding projects for everyday household items, healthcare providers, or numerous real estate projects we undertake; most of them don’t come to light. But in 25 years of being a business, we’ve had a couple of those.

And how did the spiritual goals of you personally show up as business goals and your agency?

One of the options is that we could have different employees with varying levels of affiliation, and there should be something for everybody to be welcome. Everybody should feel they can continue their level of affiliation and, therefore, live within their religious belief system, without one influencing the other in either direction, neither up nor down. That’s something that we have made as a spiritual goal. But most of the spiritual goals end up happening. These are things that I, as an individual, want to work on myself to prioritize things in my life. Yeah, so you could chase money all day long, or you could say, these are the hours I work; these are the hours I pray.

These are the hours I learn. These are the hours I spend with my family. These are the things that I do with my family. This is what work-life balance looks like. Because we understand that from a Jewish perspective, from a spiritual perspective, we know that our job is to put in the effort, the input, and the outcome; we believe in God that He has a plan for us, which means we’ll do whatever it takes within the framework we have in order to put in the necessary input. But then, all of a sudden, God has His plans for how he gets success to you. Sometimes, it’s directly connected to the effort. Sometimes, it’s totally not,

And it must evolve over time, your goals and your understanding of the framework, the boundaries, and how the universe works. For example, I recently learned that there is no blessing in the work done during the intermediate days of Qul Hamad, and therefore, why work during any of those days? So, I take the entire week of Passover off. I don’t come in for those intermediate days where I could work because I don’t need to, and why would I do work that doesn’t come with a blessing?

Your business is not you. The business is sometimes an extension of your values, but don’t let who you are be compromised by it. Share on X

Exactly? And again, these are things that sometimes you learn the hard way. Sometimes you get involved personally to feel, you know what? I live a higher meaning. I live by a higher calling, especially in light of what’s happening in the economy. I could share with you that over the last 20 years, I’ve seen many industries rise and fall, with people achieving great success. And, you know, look at what’s happening in the Amazon space. 

Five years ago, everyone was opening an Amazon account and selling on the platform. In the last two years, everything turned upside down on that platform. So we know that we put in the effort, and we have to put in the effort. That’s what God wants from us. We should put in the effort, but we have to believe that we can see success from our effort, or it may not be connected to the effort at all and ultimately lead to success. 

But God still wants us to put in the effort. That’s a higher calling and higher way of living, that you don’t control the outcome. And we see it. If you’re in business long enough, you could see it. I attended a trade show and spoke with 150 people. None of them want to do business with me, and all of a sudden, five minutes later, somebody calls me out of nowhere and says, “I want to place an order.” It’s not entirely connected, but sometimes, this is what’s in front of you. So that’s what you did, and now, all of a sudden, the blessing is coming from somewhere else. 

Yes, it’s amazing how everything works. I also want to distinguish for our listeners how different it is to say ‘put in the effort,’ which is important so you don’t get the unintended consequences of getting something for free. That’s the bread of shame in Kabbalistic terminology. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum, somebody full of ego saying it was by the power of my right hand, essentially, whether, like that, I got this new client or that I got this, I don’t know, whatever the win was. 

Your business is not you, so do not compromise who you are as an individual.

No, you got it by the grace of God, and therefore, your effort made it so that God decided to reward you with that bread of shame. But if you think it’s you doing the work, then you’re about to get handed a big lesson. So that’s a really important distinction, and a lot of people, me included, have learned that the hard way, through being an ego and getting handed my hat, but also and times thinking that I could just kind of skate through things and not put in the effort and still get the rewards.

Nice. It’s important. And the way of looking at it is that I believe every single person, regardless of their religious affiliation, should have personal goals every single month. They should know that if I ask them to wake up in the middle of the night, what are the things you’re working on improving? Everybody has a place to improve on all fronts in life. We spoke about the four pillars of life; everybody could use improvement because it’s also a common thing from our sages, where it’s either you go up, or you go down. There’s no such thing as standing in one place because things are involving around you. 

So, if you’re not proactively working to improve, you’re automatically falling back. I believe that every person should have, at any given time, a clear understanding of what they are working to become better at. And actually, I like to say that when you have something that’s working, and you’re making even small improvements to it, that momentum is fire. I saw even a small improvement in that momentum. People think in order to celebrate a win, you have to be at the finish line. I have to make the marathon to the finish line. If not, I’m a loser. 

No, in life, there’s no losers. You improved. You’re a win. It’s a win. You have to celebrate that because if you celebrate small wins, that gives you the momentum to say, “Okay, next year, next month, we’ll do even more, even more,” and all of a sudden, you find yourself 235, years later, a totally different person. And I think that’s a mistake that we don’t see enough in a society where success means the company became a $300 million company; success means that “oh, we went public, or Facebook meta bought us out.” Yes, if you have small wins, they call for celebration. 

I always encourage the entrepreneurs I work with to celebrate small wins, even with their spouses, kids, and even for themselves. Sometimes, I even suggest putting a picture of a watch or something you’ve achieved. This is what I’m going to buy from you if I achieve that goal. To celebrate the win, we have a template for personal development; again, nothing related to PTex, but simply because I’m passionate about this topic, and people can download that framework. It’s a simple framework. It’s a Word document. 

The last thing is, how are you going to celebrate because it’s part of the plan? It should be part of the plan. Because if you don’t, you eat yourself up. Only if you’re because I did not achieve everything I wanted. You never achieve everything because that means you’re thinking too small. 

So, what are some ways that you celebrate your wins? 

Interesting question. I think I have to celebrate more, but there are there’s a couple of things that I do. One way to celebrate is to bring my family into my wins, which sometimes goes against my nature. Personally, let’s say to celebrate the small win with your kids. Why do they have to know what’s going on? I would like to know more about this win, both spiritually and financially, or whatever it may be. I appreciate the cheering of my kids for something I’ve been able to achieve. I got to be a client, just as I had a certain vision of sharing it with my kids, not because I need the validation, but because I feel it brings us closer as a family. That’s a big win for me, and that’s a way of celebrating. 

I’m not the type of person who buys myself a gift or something, as I mentioned before, but I will if it’s related to health; for example, I lost 10 pounds. Well, I’m going out to dinner at this major restaurant with my spouse, my wife, yeah, so, which means those are the small wins that we’re going to celebrate. But again, everybody knows what triggers them, what we’ll call a way of celebrating for them. But these are all ideas that you would enjoy saying, so I’m looking forward to it. 

This is important because you have to recognize that you have to spot it for it to be a win, that you actually celebrate; if you take it for granted and you completely miss it, then you, I think, are being disrespectful to your Creator. 

100% I’ll tell you even more. I deal a lot with people leaders, and sometimes, we get into the messy part of life, which is the personal development side. And sometimes I’ll have a meeting, and the person is just in a bad mood, and they’ll go on a rant about everything that’s not working. I said, “Do you want to play up how our conversation was exactly one year ago, where you were as an individual, where you were with your marriage, where you were with your kids, where you were with the spirituality, everything else, you know, how much progress we made. So now you’re eating yourself up. It’s okay because you want to demand more from you, but you can’t forget where you’re coming from, how much you’ve achieved.”

Bringing family into wins, big or small, deepens our connection.

Yeah, it’s really important. A way to celebrate, acknowledge, and show appreciation to the Creator is through journaling. And that’s one of my celebration techniques. I’m journaling every day about all the wonderful blessings, miracles, synchronicities, and messages that are coming into my life so that I can both acknowledge and appreciate them and also document them. So, if I ever want to, let’s say, put it into a blog post, a memoir, or a documentary movie about my life, or whatever, I can do that because I’ve captured it. 

On that note, I have established in my family that every Friday night at our Shabbat table, we go around, starting with me, my wife, and then every single kid will share something. I want to thank Hashem, thank a God that happened to me this week, and we don’t ask. Why did he choose this? Why do you choose whatever comes out of these kids’ mouths? It could be my teacher who chose me to do this, and I want to win the raffle. I want this or whatever it is, whatever comes. What it teaches kids from a young age is, first of all, that they can sometimes see what is important to their father, what is important to their mother, what the priorities are in their life, and what they are thankful for. Plus, it teaches them gratitude. 

Gratitude is such an important point because gratitude, obviously, to the Creator and to God, has a totally different meaning. But even somebody that’s not affiliated, just show gratitude to the people around you. Because if you’re a believer and you believe in God, that’s the essence of why you exist. But even if you’re a non-believer, it just puts your whole life in a different perspective: you’re not just waking up, and you’re not just getting food on the table; you’re not just there, but you have gratitude for everything you do. It puts you in a higher spiritual perspective on everything in life. 

Yeah.

So it’s very important. In Judaism, there is a prayer that is recited upon waking, thanking the Creator for bringing us back and not abandoning us. And going into that, if you look at the words, the last word is Amena Sacha fellow, which means you believed in us. And one of the sages is asking, like, we’re thanking God, like, What the It’s just a change. Everything I’m saying, I Ali means me, so I thank, and I think, and salah, which means God is, look, we’re saying something related to God, not to us.

And he said a beautiful thing, that since I heard it, it’s just a different way how I say it every single morning, which is, you had a choice not to give back my soul, and you believed in me, that regardless of how I used my yesterday’s days, you still gave it back to me. So now I have work to do today. I thank the Creator for giving me back my soul today, so I have another chance to do good for the universe, for the people around me, and ultimately, to be good for myself and my own soul because that’s why I’m in this world.

Journaling blessings, miracles, and synchronicities is a form of celebration.

Yeah, it’s a powerful way to be and to operate. So if you are in that higher vibration, higher level consciousness, you also probably find that more synchronicities, more miracles, more revealed blessings, show up in your life and in your business, right?

100% if you want to believe, if you’re a business owner, you see it every single day, the miracles that happen, you have to cover the bank. All of a sudden, this deposit came in unexpectedly. You had to deliver something to a client, but you were stuck, unsure of what to do. Then, all of a sudden, a creative idea came to mind. Oh, we have a plan of action. There’s so much that goes on, so much that goes on on a daily basis and

Suppose you document it by appreciating it in a journal entry in a gratitude journal. What you’re doing now is stacking the deck with all these wonderful open miracles that you can refer back to and get into a real state of appreciation and high vibration. And you’ll find things that when you really look at it’s like, what are the odds of this happening? Probably one in a trillion sort of thing, like a past prospect from maybe 5 or 10 years ago pops into your mind first thing in the morning as you’re waking up before you even get out of bed, and then at the end of the day, they contact you out of the blue.

Exactly. Yeah, so this is something that you just live with, the higher calling in mind. Ultimately, it shapes who you are as an individual, the type of family you want to be part of, and the type of surroundings you want to be around. And ultimately, you look at business on a different level. You look at your relationships on a different level. You know that regardless of whether you’re dealing with the outside world or anybody in the world, there’s a higher standard that you want to hold yourself for, not the person holding you for. You need to hold yourself to a higher standard for who you are as an individual. 

Now, you mentioned you have a personal development template. I’d love to share that and get people to download that and utilize it. 

I threw it up on our website, Ptexgroup.com/goals

Okay, that’s very simple.

Gratitude shifts perspective, transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary.

It’s not like our core business is branding and marketing, and this is what we do the whole show. Let’s talk business. The podcast that I host is one that I feel is aligned with my personal mission in life: to give every person the opportunity to succeed. Sometimes, a person feels stuck. I’m unsure about the next steps in my personal life, business, and other areas of my life. So we figured, let’s go out there with content. Let’s do some of that information. 

This is just a template that I once developed for myself. I used it for a couple of years, and then I started sharing the idea with others, and people were just and now, you know, I could say proudly that 1000s of people have downloaded it, so it’s just a free template, and people could do it and use it on their own. It just gives you a framework to if I want to start working on my personal development, where do I start?  How do I do it?

Yeah, that’s awesome. Now, one thing I want to circle back on that we were talking about a little bit ago that I think is so critically important, and maybe this is so important for us, that we maybe make this the last big topic for this conversation, for this episode, and that is momentum.

Now, a concept I learned from one of my Kabbalah teachers. A few years ago, he referred to it as the spiritual flywheel. I’m not sure if he coined that term or if he got it from somewhere else, but that’s how he described it. If you are building something, creating whatever, maybe you’re building a bridge, right? So, 90% of the bridge is built. Everything just seems to go swimmingly, really effortlessly. Things are falling into place. Well, that’s great, but that last 10%, everything just kind of falls apart, or everything becomes really difficult, or you lose steam, or you lose interest, or whatever. Why is that happening? 

From a spiritual standpoint, it’s because this is where the opponent, right, the evil inclination, is really active and interested in thwarting you. This is where all the juice is, in other words, so it’s not like, let’s say, you finish a project, and you feel a sense of energy and gratitude and success and whatever that’s real energy that you can then re-utilize for other projects. Thus, the flywheel, the momentum. 

Well, if you’re getting 90 units of energy from completing 90% of that bridge, or that project, that app, or whatever you’re building, you don’t get 10 more units by completing it. The first 90% gets you 90 units. What’s the last 10%? What do you think actually closes out the whole 100? Well, he said it’s 10,000 units of energy. Oh, wow. It’s so vastly significant and superior in the output and the unlocking of the energy, right? 

People think you have to be at the finish line to celebrate a win. No—if you improved, it’s a win. Celebrate that. Momentum is fire. Share on X

So, it turns potential energy into kinetic energy, essentially, to finish this project, whatever it is. And if you get thwarted, or you get distracted, or you lose interest, and you don’t actually finish it, all of that potential energy is stuck, and none of it gets released. So you got very little, almost nothing, out of it. That 90 units of energy are nothing in comparison to the 10,000 units; if you just finish the thing, even if it’s not the most important project to you anymore, either kill it off completely and permanently or finish it because otherwise it’s actually costing you energy and it’s tying up your energy. 

And I just thought that was a really powerful concept. And if you apply this not just to business, and this guy’s very successful in business, a really impressive company that his wife runs and owns and 10s of millions of customers, right? So it’s a big deal that spiritual flywheel is one of their secrets to success, a really, really critical linchpin.

Yeah, it’s a very important point that you’re making. And this is true again, from a spiritual perspective, when you speak about the opponent because a person tests their ability based on what they were able to accomplish. So, a lot of people start things; they start businesses. People start going on a diet. People started anything. I’m starting to run because I want to run a marathon, okay? And ultimately, only a small percentage finish. And once you were able to say, I have this idea, I started it, I finished it. Now, I’m unstoppable, regardless of whether it’s spiritual or a business venture. 

So, the hardest you have to push is when you’re at 90% or less, regardless. If you still can’t close it out and say, “I finished it,” you have not proven yourself that I could finish something. But as soon as you are able to say, “I was able to build this house, I finished it. Now I could go build a bigger house.” As a contractor, Let’s say I was able to do a small project. I finished this basement from start to finish. Now, I could build a whole house from start to finish. If you do that now, I could build a six-family house from start to finish. And then goes on and on and on. Obviously, from a spiritual perspective and for what you mentioned before, that’s why the opponent will try to put as much effort as possible that you shouldn’t get to that where I finished it. 

And when you’re talking about certain types of projects, there is zero value from a physical standpoint until you finish it. For example, in the case of a bridge, you can consider the total amount of zero traffic on a bridge to be 99.95% complete.

Exactly, exactly. But it goes back to that you have to know where it’s applicable because sometimes when you want to have these small wins, small wins, small wins, small obviously, in a bridge, you could have small wins. You could celebrate the wins, but you’re not done. You celebrate, look, we’re halfway, 50% of the bridge done, but it’s not. If you don’t complete it, all the effort will eventually be wasted. 

Yeah. There is a concept of celebrating too early or prematurely, and a great example of that is illustrated in the storytelling of Jocko Willink‘s book. It’s a children’s book, and I’ve been reading it to my son, who’s five, and I just love it. It’s called the Way of the Warrior Kid. It’s teaching these incredible values about discipline being equal to freedom and how doing one thing leads to doing everything, and all this is really powerful stuff that many of us adults don’t even grasp. Here, little kids are learning it, and it’s so cool. 

And this is one of those concepts that I just think is so important. You don’t celebrate prematurely before you’ve actually accomplished the thing that you were really after. Beautiful, yeah, beautiful, yeah, I know where we gotta wrap. So, if you wanted to share one last little nugget that we haven’t already covered, maybe related to this topic of momentum and achieving scale and getting the wins that really matter, what would it be?

Sure, every person has times in their life or business where they want to achieve momentum, or they’ve started to achieve it, then they hit a roadblock, and all of a sudden, they quit. Know this: not every stumbling block has a reason to quit. It’s a way. It’s another pitfall in your process. It’s a way. It’s in it’s something, find a detour, and you’re going to be even prouder of yourself that you were able to find that detour and cross out that that’s dumb and block too many people give up way too early. And all of us are equipped with way more energy than we think we have if the mindset is there. 

So, make sure to pair your mindset with the energy, and don’t let any negative beliefs take over. Instead, push to the fullest. Achieve some small wins, and that will eventually lead to bigger wins.

Good stuff, all right, many thanks. Again. Your website is Ptexgroup.com, and your podcast is.

Let’s Talk Business. You can find it on our website where you can search all episodes, or you can find it on any other platform that you listen to. It’s a weekly show featuring great guests, such as yourself and many others, on a regular basis. 

Awesome. Thank you many, and thank you, listener.

My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. 

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Appoint a dedicated culture champion in my organization. Assign someone whose specific mission is to “burn calories every week,” finding ways to strengthen company culture, especially in remote environments.

Create core values that trigger daily conversations, not wall decorations. Use these values to hold team members (and myself) accountable in everyday decisions.

Implement the four-pillar personal goal framework alongside business objectives. Set monthly goals in the areas of spirituality, finances, family, and health.

Establish non-negotiables that align my business with my values. Define clear boundaries about the types of clients, projects, and team members I’ll work with, ensuring my business decisions never compromise my core belief system, regardless of financial incentives.

Practice the 90% completion rule to unlock exponential energy. Recognize that finishing the last 10% of any project releases 10,000 units of energy compared to just 90 units from the first 90%, so either complete projects fully or eliminate them to avoid energy drain.

Institute weekly gratitude sharing in my family or team. Start each Friday (or team meeting) by having everyone share something we’re thankful for from the week, which teaches gratitude and reveals what’s truly important to each person.

Celebrate small wins as part of my success strategy. Plan specific ways to celebrate incremental progress. This gives me the momentum to say, “Next month I’ll do even more,” rather than waiting until I reach the finish line.

Involve my leadership team in core values creation through information gathering. Conduct exercises where I ask everyone to describe their culture and what sets them apart, then distill these insights into manageable core values (a maximum of 6-7) that can be realistically implemented and remembered.

Maintain a separate identity from my business to keep my perspective clear. Remember, “I am not my business, my business is not me,” and maintain personal goals that are independent of business objectives to avoid compromising my values and growth.

Connect with Meny Hoffman to access free personal development resources and discuss intentional culture building. Download Meny’s personal development template at ptexgroup.com/goals, and listen to actionable business strategies on his weekly Let’s Talk Business Podcast available on all platforms. For branding and marketing support, visit ptexgroup.com to learn how they help driven brands create their next stage of growth.

About Meny Hoffman

Meny Hoffman is the CEO of Ptex Group, an award-winning branding and marketing agency headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. A lifelong entrepreneur passionate about creating winning strategies that help growing businesses flourish, Meny has been successfully helping brands grow and thrive since 2001. He is the founder of the Let’s Talk Business (LTB) platform, a movement that provides entrepreneurs with the powerful tools needed to learn, grow, and lead. Meny is a popular speaker who shares his strategies at regional corporations and conferences.