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Your Second Act isn't just about starting over; it's about starting smarter. You’ve left the safety of a structured career to follow your passion, and while the opportunity is exciting, the uncertainty is real. You have the vision and the drive, but without a roadmap, that leap of faith can quickly feel like a freefall.
Welcome to Second Act Business Owner, the podcast dedicated to ensuring your new venture lands on solid ground.
Hosted by Lee Gray—an award-winning ActionCOACH, certified executive trainer, and serial entrepreneur—this show is for the courageous professionals who are trading corporate stability for entrepreneurial freedom. Lee understands that being an expert in your field doesn’t automatically make you an expert in running a business.
Each week, we strip away the fluff to provide the real-world MBA training you need to turn chaos into clarity. From navigating the emotional rollercoaster of ownership to mastering the mechanics of profit, Lee brings the structure and strategy required to build a legacy.
Hit follow and let’s get to work.
Ep18
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[00:00:00]
Lee Gray: Hello, hello. Episode 18. Episode 18. I'm so, so glad you're here. You know what? , You should pat yourself on the back for being here and learning and listening, because there are a lot of people who are spending their time in their car doing something they shouldn't be doing instead of listening and learning, and I don't know where you are listening, but I'm glad you're here.
Really glad you're here. Welcome to the Second Act Business Owner Podcast, and I wanna ask you a question.
Law of Entropy Explained
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Lee Gray: I wanna start [00:01:00] this today with, if you do nothing, things get worse. If you do nothing, things get worse. This is the law of entropy. I'm gonna be sharing some stories about entropy today and how if you understand this law, it's a law of nature, which means it's a law of everything.
It's a law of business, a law of relationships, a law of everything. If you understand it, then you can leverage it and make changes to your business, to your second act, to your life that you want so that things can be better for you, and that's what we're all here about. We're all here to make our second act, to be the best second actor we can be.
And basically, the law says that nothing naturally improves on its own. So a garden grows weeds, a house gets dusty, cars wear out, a relationship drifts apart, a business slowly dis- declines. A second act dissolves if no [00:02:00] action is taken. I'm really excited about sharing this information on the law of entropy, entropy with you today, because no matter where you are in your business, no matter where you are in your second act, if you're starting out, , even if you've been in your second act for a while, this law is gonna be beneficial to you because of how much it does influence us in our lives and our business.
And of course, like anything else, becoming aware of something is the first step, and by sharing how entropy impacts your business and life, you are going to have some more information in your arsenal for your second act success, which I absolutely love.
Why Businesses Drift
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Lee Gray: So why businesses don't stay the same. It's the law of entropy.
Have you ever looked in a business and thought, or even looked at your own business and thought, "How did we get here?" Maybe sales are down, marketing's down, people aren't engaged, customers have stopped referring, the office is cluttered and messy. And you know, you didn't wake up one morning [00:03:00] and, and all that happened.
You didn't wake up and decide, "Oh, I'm gonna create a bunch of employee problems and customer problems and retention problems and renewal problems." They happen because of entropy. When nothing happens, things get worse. So entropy is a simple... It's simply the natural tendency for everything to move from order to disorder unless energy is applied.
Businesses are no different. Relationships are no different. Second acts are no different. They don't naturally improve, they naturally drift. They don't improve, they naturally drift. If you're not intentionally improving your business, entropy is quietly changing it for you.
Culture Needs Maintenance
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Lee Gray: Give you an example of the growing team. You hire great people, you have a great hiring strategy, everyone communicates, you're having team meetings, you're doing your lion meeting every week that you should be doing, the culture is strong. Oh, but then you get [00:04:00] busy and you stop having one-to-one meetings.
Then you quit recognizing the good work of your people, and communication becomes inconsistent because you've told them enough. Why do you need to tell them again? Then people begin making assumptions in your business. Nothing dramatic happens. You simply stop putting energy into the culture. Then one day you wake up and you have an unhealthy business, an unhealthy culture.
No one knows what's going on because communication has ceased to exist and people are making up their own ideas about what it is we're doing in this business. Culture doesn't stay healthy. It has to be maintained.
Businesses, relationships, second acts don't fail overnight. They drift. And don't forget that. It's really important. Drifting out to sea, you know how that's a really good analogy. If you're not pedaling, paddling somewhere, you're going to drift anywhere, and that's what [00:05:00] the law of entropy is all about.
Marketing and Pipeline Drift
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Lee Gray: So another example is, let's talk about the sales pipeline in your business, or if you've got a business with 25 salespeople, it's the same thing. You have plenty of customers, everyone's busy, and then, oh, gosh, we, we can stop marketing. We can finally stop marketing.
Six months later, sales slow down. Now everyone's panicking. "We're panicking, there are no sales." Marketing isn't something you do when you're slow. Marketing is something you continue to do to avoid entropy in your business.
Systems Need Upkeep
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Lee Gray: It's something you do so you never become slow A company, and a company that creates great procedures, great systems, and follows them, and follows them, and over time gets lazy.
You know, people start taking shortcuts or, uh, no one'll notice if I miss- if I do this one step or if I don't follow up with this one customer. But then quality starts to drop, and [00:06:00] you're not as busy, and customers start to notice. Systems, even in the business, don't stay excellent by themselves. Without continuous improvement on your systems, entropy takes over, and pretty soon you're drifting away and things get undone that need to be done as part of a system.
Something doesn't get handled right with a customer, a product doesn't go out on time, or it goes out with an error, costing you a lot of money. Systems require constant attention, and every healthy business is under, uh, like a construction constraint. I, I like to think about it this way. When you think about your business...
When you're thinking about your business and thinking about systems, sometimes you have to, you have to follow 'em, right? And then sometimes you have to regroup and have a look at them because a product's changed, a service has changed or something. So it's like we're under construction. It's no different than you drive to work and [00:07:00] there are the dreaded orange cones.
We get frustrated about those orange cones on the road, don't we? But if we, on our way to work, never had any construction because nothing was being done, only entropy was taking place and things were getting worse and worse and worse and worse on that roadway, and we were crossing a bridge, eventually the bridge would crumble and, and lives would be lost.
Construction and orange cones are no different than business. Without stopping and making repairs and making improvements, it'll just fade, drift away until it really disappears.
Dreams Need Action
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Lee Gray: People often talk about their dreams sort of in the same way, too. It's like, you know, someday Someday turns into next year, and then next year turns into five years, and the thing about your second act is confidence doesn't start on its own.
It, it... You have to be intentional about it. [00:08:00] Without intentionality, that confidence and our desire to become a second act shrinks, and then the longer we delay, the harder it is to feel that way, the further away we get from our dream. Even our dreams entropy if we don't act on them. That's, that's really something to listen to.
Even our dreams suffer from entropy if we don't act on them. So if you have a dream, take action, take a step. Otherwise, it's drifting out to sea. .
Writing a Book Momentum
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Lee Gray: An example of me. So, you know, I'm writing my book, and one thing I have learned, look, books don't write themselves. Did you know that?
Oh, no, no. And the further you get away from writing your book, Coach Lee, the further away the momentum gets. Like, "Oh, another day, another day of not writing a book." The more action I take to writing the book, the more I want to take action, and entropy is [00:09:00] the s- works the same way in that the further apart I get from getting off the couch and watching TV to going into the office or going to the coffee shop to spend time writing that book, it's either take action and move ahead, or it's not and move further apart.
There's no way it comes together. You're either moving away or you're coming closer Every day momentum grows. . Motion creates momentum while waiting creates decline. That's what happens in the process of writing a book. You're either taking motion and creating momentum, or you're creating decline by waiting. There's no, no in between
So we often think business is gonna be fine, everything'll stay the same. But businesses that have stayed the same for any amount of time, they're not in business anymore. And I, I think actually, if nothing changes, everything just slowly declines. Great- if [00:10:00] great businesses are intentional, great marriages are intentional, great health is intentional, great second acts are intentional, then we can avoid inter- entropy.
Success isn't maintained by accident.
Neighborhood Entropy Story
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Lee Gray: I wanna give you an example. When we, when I was a child, we grew up, of course, in a neighborhood like everyone, I guess, most people, where I live, and everyone had a nice yard, and most people kept their yard grass pretty normally cut, short cut, edged nice, bushes trimmed, and plants , you know, maintained.
And then there was this one house that always was like a week late mowing, and then they never edged, and they didn't trim their shrubs. And you would drive by our neighborhood, and all the houses were pretty well-maintained because you could see they were constantly taking action. But there's this one household suffering from entropy, and it just looked shaggy.
Shaggy, shaggy, shaggy. One house would get a new, , fresh coat of paint. That [00:11:00] house didn't. Another - , house would take some, , initiative to add new shrubs, update their driveway in some way. That house didn't. 10 years goes by, and that whole block looks bad because this one house, with all of the entropy that's taking over, just looks like it doesn't even belong in the neighborhood.
That cost that person who lived there when they decided to sell it a lot of money. The house literally was not worth as much as it would've been had it, they just fought entropy and taken constant actions. I sometimes drive by that neighborhood now, and I think about there are other houses suffering from entropy in that neighborhood now.
But we've all seen it, haven't we? You drive through a neighborhood, and you see other people. You see some homes that look beautiful. They're taking constant action, and then there's the one that's overcome by entropy.
Spot Entropy in Your Life
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Lee Gray: So where is entropy showing up in your life? Is it in your health? Is it in [00:12:00] your yard?
Is it your finances, your leadership? Is it in your relationships? Is it in your marketing? Is entropy impacting your dream? Is impacting... Is entropy impacting and affecting your second act? What's one thing you could do this week to apply some of the things we've talked about, some focused energy on what you can do to take action to avoid the drift of entropy?
Leadership Over Entropy
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Lee Gray: The opposite of entropy is leadership. Your second act isn't waiting for the perfect time. It's waiting for your decision. Entropy says, "Wait another year." Leadership says, "Start today."
What I feel like expressing today about entropy is I'm glad we had this podcast together, because knowing and doing is the only way to get better, and I feel like knowing and [00:13:00] doing, knowing and understanding so that we can do around entropy, is going to help all of us in our second act, and that's what I feel like expressing.
Wrap Up and Share
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Lee Gray: If you found today's podcast helpful, help us help other people in their second act learn more, know more. Tell them about the podcast. We're on all of the channels where you listen to podcasts, and we're also on YouTube, where if you leave us a review and a like and follow us, we would very much appreciate it.
The more people who like us and follow us, the more people will be exposed to the information that we cover here on the Second Act podcast