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Today I’m sharing something I’ve never talked about publicly. It’s a story I almost waited to tell, because honestly, we’re still in the middle of it. But I’ve come to believe that sometimes the most valuable lessons aren’t the ones you share from the other side of the mountain. They’re the ones you share from the climb. So settle in, because this one is personal, it’s honest, it’s raw, and if you’ve ever built something you’re proud of and watched it take a hit you didn’t see coming, I think it’s going to hit close to home.
Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday, this is episode 702, “System Failure.” I’m Darrell Darnell, the nighttime lighting at Disneyland during Halloween is one of my very favorite things, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I love Disneyland. And for years, I watched one of my good friends talk about wanting to go. This dream he’d carried around but never been able to act on because the money just wasn’t there. So somewhere along the way, I made it a personal goal to take him. Not just invite him. Take him.
In the summer of 2024, I started making plans. And I went all in.
I knew he worked a job that didn’t offer paid vacation, so I made sure the trip didn’t cost him a penny. I covered every expense: flights, hotel, park tickets, meals, lost wages, all of it. I even gave him spending money for souvenirs because I wanted him to be able to grab whatever caught his eye without doing the math in his head. We timed the whole thing around Halloween because that’s his favorite holiday, and Disneyland during Halloween season is something else entirely.
And the trip delivered. Every bit of it.
I remember standing in the middle of that park watching my friend experience something he’d dreamed about for years, and thinking, I get to do this. I’m in a position to do this. It was one of the best trips I’d ever taken to Disneyland, and I’ve taken a lot of them. We came home the first week of November 2024, and I was riding high.
I had no idea what was coming.
My business had been on a run. Not a modest, steady run. I’m talking real growth. Over the years we’d seen growth numbers like 48%, 67%, even 100% in a single year. Our lean years still looked like 14%, 19%, 24% growth. For eight straight years, the business had done nothing but move forward. I had systems, I had clients, I had referrals flowing in. Life was good.
What I didn’t have was a reliable set of eyes on what was actually happening in real time.
A typo I’d made in my tracking system had been quietly hiding the truth from me. September was down 7%. October was down 9%. I missed both of them completely. By November, we were down 23%. December dropped another 21%. I only caught it when we sat down to run the year-end numbers and discovered that, for the first time in the history of my business, we’d finished the year in the red. Down just over 2% for the year.
I found it alarming, but I told myself it was a blip. A rough patch. We’d bounce back.
We didn’t bounce back.
January came in down 25%. Then February hit and we were down 38%. By this point I am significantly rattled. I brought it to my mastermind group and sat down with my wife, and we started trying to figure out what in the world was happening.
I reached out to clients who had gone quiet. Several of them responded and their answers told a clear story.
They’d moved to AI for their podcast production.
Almost all of them used some version of the same phrase: It’s not as good as what you do, but it’s good enough and it’s cheaper.
Good enough and cheaper. That was the competition I hadn’t seen coming.
That was about eighteen months ago. And we’re still in it.
The business has mostly stabilized, but it’s now less than half of what it was at its peak. The savings account I’d spent years building, the one I’d been so proud of, the one that let me fly a friend to Disneyland and cover everything without a second thought, that account is empty. Things have been so challenging that a few months back, someone from our church quietly gave us a financial gift, anonymously, because they knew we were struggling.
A year ago, when I first started thinking about sharing this story, I told myself I’d wait. Wait until we’d turned the corner. Wait until I could package it up with a clean resolution and a confident “here’s how it all worked out.” But eighteen months in, we’re still in the middle of it. I finally decided that waiting for the other side wasn’t the right move.
There’s something worth saying from inside the storm. So here we are.
Let me take you back to 2017 for a second.
I was sitting in the courtyard of a community outreach center in Guatemala, talking to a guy named John. At the time, John and I were more acquaintances than friends. Today he’s one of my closest friends and has been in my mastermind group since 2018. We had a conversation during that Guatemala trip that I forgot about almost immediately after it ended. John never forgot it.
He’s brought it up a few times over the years, and every time he does, he shakes his head the same way. He told me he walked away from that conversation in disbelief. Because during that conversation, he asked me what I did to market my business. And I told him I wasn’t really a marketing guy.
I explained that I’d built the whole thing on referrals from clients and colleagues, and a booth at a podcast conference once or twice a year. And given the growth I was seeing, that felt like a completely reasonable answer to me. The numbers backed me up. Why fix what isn’t broken?
But John is an expert marketer. He saw opportunity everywhere I was choosing not to look. And what I didn’t realize in that courtyard, what I wouldn’t realize for years, was that my relationship with marketing wasn’t just passive. It was actively shrinking.
See, one of those trade shows I’d been doing stopped giving me the return I needed. So I pulled the booth. I started going as a speaker instead of a vendor. But I stopped investing in it as a marketing channel. Then the second one went the same way. After a few years of taking a loss, I walked away from that one too.
And those marketing dollars I’d been spending? I didn’t reinvest them somewhere smarter. I just stopped spending them altogether. Referrals were still coming in. Google was still sending people to my website. I didn’t run any paid ads. I didn’t pursue anything new.
I closed the door on marketing and told myself the referrals would always come.
There’s a word for that. It’s called complacency. And I was living in it.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
I want to be honest that some of these lessons are still fresh. Some of them still hurt when I turn them over in my head. Some of them I’m still actively learning.
The first thing I learned is that success can be its own kind of blind spot. For eight years, I had systems that worked, clients that stayed, and numbers that grew. And that track record quietly convinced me that I’d figured it out. I stopped asking whether what was working yesterday would still work tomorrow. I stopped leaning forward. I got comfortable, and comfort, especially in business, has a way of setting you up for a fall you never see coming.
The second thing I learned is that I’d built my business on a foundation that sounded solid but had a crack running right through it. For years, industry publications had listed us as a top choice for “budget-conscious podcasters.” I hated that label. I felt like we were better than that, more capable, more sophisticated. So we raised our prices.
But here’s the problem: we raised our prices without changing who we were marketing to. We were still talking to the same people, positioning ourselves to the same audience, communicating the same message on our website, and assuming our quality would do the convincing and our higher prices would bring a more sophisticated client.
So when AI came along and gave those budget-conscious clients something “good enough” at a lower price point? They left. Of course they left. We’d never given them a reason to stay that went deeper than convenience.
That brings me to the third thing. Relationships. Real ones. I had clients I genuinely liked, people I’d worked with for years, and I let those relationships stay surface level. I wasn’t asking what they needed. I wasn’t staying close enough to know when their situation was changing. I wasn’t doing the work to make myself irreplaceable. And so when the market shifted, I didn’t have the kind of relational equity that makes someone pause before they cancel. I found out what was happening through farewell emails.
The hard truth is that by the time I understood what was going on, I was already behind it. I wasn’t anticipating anything. I was reacting to what had already been set in motion. And like a basketball player who loses track of his man and turns around to watch him catch a wide-open alley-oop, I was getting dunked on. All I could do was watch it happen and figure out what to do next.
So what do you do when you’re in that spot?
You get honest. You stop defending the decisions that got you there and you start asking better questions. You find people who will tell you the truth, which is why a mastermind is worth its weight in gold, and you listen to them, even when what they’re saying is uncomfortable. You rebuild. Not from scratch necessarily, but from the foundation up, checking every plank to see what’s still solid and what needs to go.
Over the last eighteen months I’ve reworked how we do business. We’ve changed how we market, how we talk about what we offer, and how we stay connected to the people we serve. We’ve been having conversations we probably should have been having for years. And honestly? I think we’re starting to see some positive signs. But I’m not going to oversell it. It’s too early to know for sure, and I’ve learned my lesson about assuming things are fine.
What I can tell you, the thing I want to leave you with, is this: I’m not sharing this story looking for sympathy. I’m sharing it because I think the lessons inside it are worth something, whether you’re running a business or raising a family or just trying to figure out why something that used to work has stopped working.
Don’t wait for the decline to get your attention before you ask the hard questions. Tend to your relationships like they matter, because they do. And don’t let a season of success convince you that you’ve already figured out tomorrow.
God has been faithful through this. Not in a tidy, everything-worked-out-perfectly kind of way, but faithful in the way that actually counts. Present in the hard moments, providing through unexpected people, keeping our family steady when my own confidence wasn’t. That anonymous gift from someone in our church still amazes me. That’s the kind of faithfulness you can’t manufacture or plan for. You just receive it with a grateful heart and keep trusting God, and keep moving forward.
Which is what we’re doing.
I’ll have more to share when the full picture comes into view. But for now, this is where we are, in the middle of it, still learning, still fighting, and still believing it’s going to be okay. Learning lessons on the hardest of days in the middle of the most challenging storm of my life, and getting stronger day by day.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag coming up in two weeks on June 29th! The submission deadline is the end of day on Wednesday June 24th. Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.