Secrets of Successful Time Management with Kevin Kruse

NY Times bestselling author, Forbes columnist, entrepreneur and keynote speaker on Wholehearted Leadership for Employee Engagement- Kevin Kruse

What is the “Power Of 1440” and why all successful millionaires swear by it. The surprising part your “energy” plays in a successful time-management strategy and the E3C formula for ultimate productivity. The 15 secrets successful people know about time management.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

15timesecrets.com

Check out KevinKruse.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Jaime:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire.  I'm Jaime Tardy, and today on the show, we have Kevin Kruse.  He's an Inc.  500 serial entrepreneur.  I can't even list all of the companies that he has started with annual revenues of $12 million, and he sold it in five years.  It's insane.  Plus, he has a book all about productivity, which I'm in and you have to go get.  Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Kevin.

Kevin:	Hey, Jaime, thanks for having me.

Jaime:	Okay.  First, how do you even start as many companies as you've started because everybody wants to be a "serial entrepreneur," right? Do you think they should start one and then make a huge success out of that, or did you dabble at the beginning?

Kevin:	Definitely one at a time, and I crashed and burned on several of my first companies.  I started out right out of the gates, right out of college, doing my first business.  It failed, the next one failed, the one after that did okay.

	I think that entrepreneurs, by our nature, we're always chasing the next shiny object, we have a million new ideas, so it's actually a danger to chase too many things at one time.

I think stay focused and stay on that path until you've hit the success that you wanna hit, or you decide, "Okay, I've just discovered another way not to make a million dollars.  Let me try something else," so I think one thing at a time is good advice.

Jaime:	Okay, and I agree with that 1000 percent, but if you fail twice out of the gate, sometimes you'll be like - how did you keep going after that and not just go get a "real," job.

Kevin:	I've had short-term real jobs in between those, but -

Jaime:	Oh, no.

Kevin:	Yeah, I mean, there's no shame in - in fact, looking back, every time I've started a company, I did it while I had a day job of some sort.  I was never one to just, except for right out of college, that was a different kinda thing, different kinda stupidity, but I think it's a great way to do it.

	I mean, in this day and age, it's never been easier to be successful as an entrepreneur.  We have access to knowledge, to talent, to technology, everything's cheaper, so there's no reason why you can't start that side project, that weekend business, and grow into it, and quit your day job when you've already earned up what you're making on that day job.

	I've always started the next business after kind of recovering or landing in a corporate job and then jumping out, and I think that's a good time to pay off the credit card debt and to lick your emotional wounds.

	Just because you fail once doesn't mean that you are a failure.  I mean, venture capitalists are the smartest people on the planet, and they only get one or two out of ten right, so it just takes time to get smarter, and a little bit of luck helps, and to keep at it.

Jaime:	I so appreciate you saying that because a lot of people that are in it and not doing well right now, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I have to go back and get a corporate job," and that's the ultimate failure for people, right? "Oh, now I'm screwed forever.  I'm never going to be able to be an entrepreneur," and that's not true, but that's how some people feel.

	The fact that you've went back to corporate - when you were in that, "Oh, shoot, I have to go back to corporate," was it always a, "I'm gonna start this next thing," so you were always waiting for the next thing?"

Kevin:	Yes, exactly.  I didn't always know what the next thing was going to be, but I knew there would be a next thing.  Look, for people who are the corporate warriors, the corporate athletes, they might wanna put 60 hours a week into their day job, which becomes a night and weekend job because they're trying to climb that ladder, right? They're trying to get to the corner office or become a vice president or whatever it is.

	I think when you have that entrepreneurial mindset and you take the corporate job, you're still gonna work hard, you still are gonna excel.  Look, if you're an entrepreneur going into corporate, you're gonna be a rock star, the way you think, the way you communicate, your energy.  You're gonna win it in 40 hours or 45 hours a week anyway just from that entrepreneurial background and discipline.

	That doesn't mean you need to put another 20 hours in to climb the corporate ladder, you put the next ten, 20, 30 hours in to your side project until you're ready to grow it to the next level.

Jaime:	I love that.  Okay, good.  I just feel like everybody needs to hear that that has a day job right now, or that is not doing well in their not-day job and they're like, "Shoot, I have to go back to that shitty?" That doesn't mean that you are worthless or anything like that, that just means that you just need to find that next thing.  When did it really hit for you? When was your first success, and what made it so successful?

Kevin:	Yeah, I think some of the big factors - when I started the very first business, I thought - it was 1989, 1990, I know I'm dating myself, I heard, I think, you were 7 years old in 1989 or something like that.

Jaime:	[Inaudible] [00:11:03] was, yes.

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	I've heard it on one of your other shows.

Jaime:	I'm surprised you remembered, good job.

Kevin:	When you were 7 years old, I had the dream to be the next Bill Gates, and I saw him up close at a conference in Vegas.  Tech was hot, like it still is now.  The problem was I didn't have any money, though, Jaime, so I couldn't afford both an apartment and an office, so I did the logical thing and I got an office.  It was a one-room windowless little office.  I was subleasing it from an accounting firm, and so I would sleep under my desk.

I would work from 6:00 in the morning to midnight, take the pillow out of my file cabinet because I had no clients, I had no files, and I would sleep.  Then, I would get up at 5:00 in the morning before anyone came in and realized I'm living in their office, and I'd go shower a the YMCA, come back in like an early riser, "Hey everybody, I'm just starting the day."

I had swallowed that myth of entrepreneurs starting in their garage, and it's about hustle, and I thought I was the smartest guy in the room, I didn't need any help, and I did that for a year.  I worked like that without taking a single day off, worked my birthday, worked Christmas, worked every Saturday and Sunday, and finally, looking in that YMCA mirror, there was no Bill Gates looking back.
I'm further and further into debt and no closer to figuring it out.  That was the first time I said, "Okay, shut it down, get a day job, pay off some debt, and figure it out."

The second time I jumped out I did better, but I had a partner, and I didn't know how to thrive in a partnership.  Again, young and dumb, couldn't communicate right, so we chose to go our own ways after about a year.

It was the third time, though, the third business, that finally it was okay.  After five years, though, it took five years, I broke that million dollar mark and then sold my business for just about 1.75, and yet it killed me.

I mean, that's where I fell in love with this idea of tide in productivity because I was working over 100 hours a week.  Nothing had changed from those times that I was living in the office.  I wasn't living in the office, but I mean, it was just seven days a week, long days, literally pulling, sometimes, all-nighters without sleep, and there was a smarter way to do that.

How creative can you be when you're working that many hours? How strategic can you be? How good of a leader can you be? After selling that business and really blowing up a lot of relationships and doing a lot of damage, I got some mentors who explained that it's not all about more things on the to-do list so you sleep less, more things on the to-do list, so you skip your meals.  It's not about that.

We talked a little bit in the preshow, it took me a couple more businesses, but over the next decade, I learned to completely flip how I worked and how I focused so that the final business, instead of working 100 hours a week and doing $1 million a year, I was doing $12 million a year, less than 40 hours a week.

12 times the outcome with one third the effort.  It's a 30X productivity gain, same industry, same me, a lot of the same employees, a lot of the same stuff going on, just completely different.

Jaime:	See, I love that.  One of the reasons why I started eventual millionaire was because I have two kids, right, and so I didn't want to work constantly, but the myth, or whatever it is, was that, "If you're an entrepreneur, you have to work every single hour." In my corporate job, I worked - we would brag about how long, "I went 32 hours straight," right, and that's not good.  You shouldn't be bragging about how long you're working.

	When I interviewed all these millionaires for my book, I asked them how many - at the very beginning, how many hours they worked.  There was no multiple choice, people just wrote all of them.  Most of the people wrote all of them, and I'm like, "Oh man, I guess we [inaudible] [00:15:13] do that, right?" That's the thing.

	Give me your advice, and I wanna dive into productivity tactics because you have the book that we'll talk about in just a second, but give me what really shifted for you in that.  Do you think we can do it in less hours?

Kevin:	I know you can do it in less hours.  Jaime, you said something so important.  You talked about how we would brag about pulling an all-nighter, we'd brag, "Oh, I haven't had a vacation in five years."

	Today, when you ask people, average people, "Hey, how you doing," what do they say? "Crazy busy," right? Everybody's crazy busy.  It's to the point now where we almost feel guilty, like, "Geeze, I got nothing going on this afternoon.  Something must be wrong." Someone asked me, "If I don't say I'm crazy busy, it's like I'm a slacker."

	Well, the sign of success, the sign of true wealth, is discretionary time, of not being crazy.  We've gotten it flipped around.  When you talk to ultra-productive people in any field, and I'm talking top 1 percent, top 2 percent, they don't answer, "Crazy busy," they're like, "It's going great.  I'm killing it," and they all swap stories about, "Oh yeah, I took a month off and went to Bora Bora in the last month."

	They're all swapping all these leisure stories.  They're talking about how amazing their books are doing, their businesses are doing, their whatever is doing, and yet they're not saying they're crazy busy, so there is a way to kinda have your cake and eat it, too.

Jaime:	Okay, so now everyone's like, "Please tell us [inaudible] how, please," because that's the thing, right? It's elusive, right? I know it does take being decisive with your time and all that fun stuff, but I want three of the best - well, show everybody the book first of all because I'm in it, and it's the best book ever, so everybody [inaudible] [00:17:05].

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	You are in it.  It's the best book ever because you are in it, that's right.

Jaime:	It's called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management.  Really good friends are in it too, and some utterly amazing people are in it.  Give me the top three.  I know there's 15.  Give me the top three that everybody can start using now.

Kevin:	Yeah, this was a fun one.  I mean, as I mentioned, time sort of was a passion project for me.  I didn't wanna just write what I thought people should be doing, so I went out, I interviewed over 200 billionaires, millionaires, successful entrepreneurs, straight-A athletes, I'm sorry, straight-A students and Olympic athletes, so it isn't even all just the business people.

	Just like the question you had asked, it was open-ended.  Give me your one secret to time management and extreme productivity.  How do you get it all done without feeling overworked and overwhelmed? How do you get high productivity and reduce stress?

	It got almost 300 answers, coded them all up, and 15 Secrets is the things that I captured the most.  Not everybody's doing all 15 quite the same way.

	The first big ah-ha, it is a mindset shift.  I know everyone wants to know, "What do I do," and we'll do some of that, but the one common theme among these ultra-productive people is they truly felt in their bones that time is our most valuable asset.

	I talk about the power of 1440.  There's only 1440 minutes in a day.  I am gonna pull this sticker off my monitor.  I literally keep a 1440 reminder in front of me, on my monitor.  Back when I had a fast-growing company, I would put it on the outside of my door to help prevent those, "Got a minute," knocks on the door.

	People say, "Yeah, yeah, time's our most valuable asset," and yet if you truly felt that way, you wouldn't so freely give it away, taking all those knocks on the door, all those random people that wanna have a cup of coffee or a phone call to see if there's a partnership, all these kinds of things.  You wouldn't just leave your money lying out in a pile for anybody to come grab it, and yet we just give away our time too freely.

	I mean, the first common thing is to truly understand 1440 minutes in a day.  Ultra-productive people are thinking about minutes, not days or hours.  I was doing another interview, and the host said, "Come on, Kevin, we all have the same 168 hours every week." Right there is a difference.  Average people think about hours, ultra-productive people are thinking about minutes.  I mean, that's how prized it is.

	The other thing that jumped out at me, Jaime, was, and I get a lot of hate male for this one, to-do lists don't work.  Ultra-productive people, they don't use to-do lists.

	Everyone's like, "Oh, so you're saying I'm a loser because I use a  to-do list? I love my to-do list." We've been lied to.  Time management systems, and I know you had a great conversation with Rory Vaden, who covers a lot of the same ground, to-do lists are this 100-year-old idea, and it worked back when the world moved more slowly, and we had less to do, and we didn't have all the technology.

	Ultra-productive people, they're not working from their to-do lists, they're working from their calendar.  Everything that you wanna get done is a scheduled time slot.  One of the guys who just said it with such force was Chris Ducker, who's running a million different things.  Chris says, "I simply put everything on my schedule.  That is it.  30 minutes of social media time on  the calendar.  45 minutes to check the email on the calendar.  Quiet time to think, to be creative, productive, to recover, on the calendar."

	Most people, Chris and all these people I'm talking to, they change the default setting in Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, into 15-minute time chunks.  We just -

Jaime:	You can do that? Wait, [inaudible] [00:21:15].

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	I know, isn't that great? By default it's 30 minutes or 60 minutes, so everyone's like, "Oh, let's have a meeting," and everybody just, "Sure."
Jaime:	Yeah, every time, it sucks, okay.

Kevin:	Exactly.  You can change that default.  Marissa Mary, five-minute meetings, ten-minute meetings.  People think of minutes rather than hours.  This sounds like a simple thing, the to-do list to the calendar, but there was a study last year that showed 41 % of items that are on to-do lists are never done, never done at all.

	It's the important but non-urgent things, they go to a to-do list to die, to just never get done.  If you wanna get it done, whether that's that doctor appointment you should have made a year ago that you've been putting off because it's so embarrassing, or that hard conversation with a direct report, or just creating our strategic plan for 2016, now's the time, put it on your calendar.

	The extreme performers, they're not checking email all day, they're not responding to every Facebook ding, you're shutting off all your notifications and scheduling time to process emails, scheduling time to process social media.

	I mean, that was a big one.  I mean, get it off the to-do list, put it on the calendar, and down to the 15-minute chunk.  That alone, people who have started to adopt that, I'm getting emails like, "Whoa, game changer," so that was a real easy one.

Jaime:	That's awesome.  That's exactly what I found, too, especially with the millionaires.  I implement what I call a master schedule of - you don't have to write your teeny little task, but you create the box for those teeny little tasks so you can knock them all out within 15, 20 minutes, and then you don't have to worry about it later.

You should look at my calendar, it's back to back for absolutely everything, but it's like, "Morning routine," and then I do this, and then I do this, and it's great.

Kevin:	I mean, time blocking is great.  I mean, that's another thing that a lot of people are talking about.  Dan Ariely is a behavioral psychologist, and he says, "We are usually mentally our strongest in the morning, about an hour after we get out of bed, and it lasts for about two to three hours.  In the afternoon, glucose is coming out of our brain, we're tired.  Willpower, creativity, it all goes downhill."

	He says, "How many people are not thoughtful about their mornings? The best thing you can do is time block your most important activity." I do the same thing.  I don't necessarily rethink every chunk, but I've got a block every morning that says, "Most important task, MIT." That's my MIT time.  It's in the morning before the fires start up, before my brain gets tired, before I want a nap.

	Each morning, I then think, "All right, how am I gonna win the day? How am I gonna win the day before lunch?" Today, it happens to be doing a killer interview with you, which meant some prep time and making sure the setup was working, all that kinda stuff.  Tomorrow, it might be working on my next book, but every morning, I know how am I gonna win the day, and I've already got a time block for it before noon.

Jaime:	Thanks so much for fitting me in on the smart time, I really appreciate it.  I was telling you when we got on the line, I was like, "This is perfect because you're my second interview of the day.  I'm all warmed up, I'm still feeling really great.  We're gonna rock this." I think that's awesome.  Okay, give us one more tactic tip thing.

Kevin:	Yeah.  This is another one that - it'll get some groans, but it was the big ah-ha from over 200 interviews.  I'm asking people, "Give me your best time management advice," just kinda like you're asking me.  They could give me anything.

	What I didn't expect was how many people said, "The secret is energy." It's about drinking tons of water.  There, cheers.  I call it half-you hydration.

Jaime:	I was gonna say this is kinda sad because I have [inaudible] [00:25:24].

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Oh my gosh, [inaudible].  This is great, I got a bottled one, too.  The simple thing you can do for that is you take your bodyweight in pounds, divide it by two, that's how many ounces of water you need to be drinking.

	If I'm 180 pounds, divide it in two, that's 90 ounces.  That's three of these a day.  I'll do two of these, and then two protein shakes or green smoothies.  Water has a huge impact, our hydration levels, on our focus, our willpower, and all the rest.

	Nobody wants to hear it, but it's sleep.  Busy people aren't gonna sleep more hours.  The trick is to get deeper sleep, so create that sleep sanctuary in your bedroom, keep it dark, keep it quiet use the earplugs and the mask if you need to, and get a solid five or six of deep sleep if you can't sleep any longer than that.

	Food, everybody's got their favorite, paleo, vegan, whatever.  If you're optimizing for brainpower, you want a steady stream of glucose, blood sugar, going into your brain, not carbs, that's the spikes.  You want low carb or slow carb throughout the day, so three reasonable meals and two snacks, that type of thing.

	I was looking for time management hacks.  A lot of people are saying, "Listen, if you're hungover or have the flu, you're not productive.  If you're energized, and up, and bringing it every day, you're gonna read faster, write faster, communicate better, be more creative, it all starts with that energy.

	It goes back to those basics of - I kinda boil down the formula, I say E3C.  E is energy, do what you can to be physically energetic.  The three Cs are capture, capture everything in a notebook, calendar, transfer those to-dos into your calendar, and the third C is concentrate.  Shut down those distractions, all those notifications.  

Most ultra-productive people are using work sprints, jam sessions, whether it's a Pomodoro, which is 25 minutes, I like to work, usually, in 50 minutes.  Get yourself a nice, big, fat clock.  I call it the Google timer because Google uses it.  It's actually a teacher's aid, it's called the Time Timer, that teachers use, and it comes in different sizes.

A Google engineer discovered and brought them back, and now Google will set this in their work sessions or in their meetings because it's a visual reminder of like, "How much time do we have left?"

[Crosstalk]

Jaime:	[Inaudible] [00:28:08] phone where you aren't really paying much attention to it.

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Exactly.  It's quiet until it goes off, but you could just set this up, and it's a good reminder, "Oh yeah, I'm focused on my work sprint.  I'm focused on my work sprint." It starts with energy, Jaime, but then capture it, calendar it, and concentrate, work in a work sprint.  That's how I boil it all down.

Jaime:	So many questions.  Okay, so did you find out because this is the thing too, I asked millionaires about what their diets were because I was like, "Oh, are we - " because I wanted to find out that same thing.  Does that really matter?

	It was about 50-50.  50 percent of the people really paid attention, 50 percent of the people called it the entrepreneurs? diet, you eat whatever you can eat, and it's not always good.

	Those are the people working 100 hours a week.  We wanna talk about people who are not working 100 hours a week.  No, I don't know if there was any correlation, I did not ask, but were there anything specific on wake up times, or routines, or when they eat, or anything like that? Because I do the same thing.  I do a shake in the morning, a shake for lunch, there's one already prepped in the fridge, so as soon as this interview's done, I have another interview, -

Kevin:	Meal prep.  Meal prep is key.  Good job on meal prep, yeah.

Jaime:	- and I gotta go get one.  [Inaudible] [00:29:18] everything's all set.  I'm always looking to tweak and get better, and I use nootropics and all this.  Apparently I have ADD.  I found out yesterday that I have ADD, which is lovely.  I mean, I kind of already knew.

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Well, entrepreneurs, I mean again, I think there's high correlation between that, yeah.

Jaime:	I agree.  Almost all the millionaires - not almost all of them, but many of the millionaires I've interviewed say that they think they have ADD or they do have ADD, and so trying to manage time has been such a thing for me and focus because, of course, time doesn't matter if you can't focus in it.  What sort of morning routines or something like that that you have for people? Then, I have a follow up question on that, too.

Kevin:	Well, yeah.  I did some follow ups.  It wasn't a question I asked everybody, but you're right.  I mean, another one of those ah-has for me was how many people, when I said, "Give me your time management advice," they would say, "It's my morning routine, it's my morning ritual."

I'm like, "That's not what I asked about," and they would say, "Listen, how your first 30 minutes, hour goes, goes the rest of your day." Of course, Hal Elrod's very well known for his miracle morning routine, which is great, he's in the book.
Jaime:	He's in the book' He's challenged me, so I'm day 24 of the 30-day challenge right now, just so everybody knows.

Kevin:	Yeah, no, it's a good challenge.  I'm looking at other notes.  A lot of the Olympians, Olympic athletes, talk about - the thing that Olympic athletes talk about more about than anything else is rest.  They're sleeping all the time, but they're getting up early, and they've got very specific routines.

	I mean, unless you're doing Hal's specific program, people do it in different ways.  Some people are doing it for 30 minutes, others, I like to call it my sacred 60.  You go down the list, I mean, of Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, John Lee Dumas, your friend, they're all talking about their morning routines as being so key.

	Most of the time, they're doing something physical, it doesn't have to be a vigorous workout, but a walk to get the blood flowing, the oxygen flowing, or a seven-minute workout.  They're doing stretching, I like to do my yoga stretches.  They're doing some kind of quick physical thing.

They're hydrating, drinking water or water in a shake.  They're not skipping meals, so they're doing a green smoothie.  I like protein as well, so I try to do 30 and 30, 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, but I make sure there's plenty of spinach and blueberries and stuff in there.

Then, they're almost all doing some kind of mental or even spiritual thing.  Some people are meditating, others are praying.  I had lunch last week in San Diego with Ken Blanchard, who's this very well-known leadership guy.

Jaime:	I love Ken Blanchard.
Kevin:	Yeah, the one-minute manager and all this stuff.  It was great.  Three-hour lunch with Ken, first time I had a chance to meet him, and I picked his brain.  I had a notebook out taking this down.

	I asked him his morning routine, like, "Hey, do you have a morning routine?" He does.  He reads his personal mission statement every morning, he reads devotional, he's a very religious man, and so he reads devotionals, he gets on his exercise machine, he's lost 30 pounds in the last few years.

	Out of the blue, Ken Blanchard is doing it, and it's something spiritual, mental, something physical, and they're not skipping breakfast, they're also eating.

	That is another common thing.  I was later to the gam on this because I think the other half of the entrepreneurs who are saying, "It's the entrepreneurial diet, it's caffeine, it's Red Bulls," I used to be addicted to Red Bulls.  I write in my book that those Red Bull cans, they would call to me the way rum and cokes call to an alcoholic.  I just look at it and I'd just be like, "I can't wait until I can get another one of those."

	I think when you're younger, when maybe you were 7 years old in 1989, it's a little easier to skip meals and to use chemicals to kinda boost you through the day.  I gotta tell you guys, that doesn't last forever, so get the good habits in early.

Even if you're younger and physically you don't think you're feeling the effects, when your brain, the prefrontal cortex, they say it's the CEO of our brains, when the glucose is drawing down, we don't realize it.  It's kinda like you had too many drinks, and you're trying to drive home, and it's like, "Give me that keys." Everybody sees you stumbling and you're slurring, but you don't see it yourself.

Well, at the end of the day, all of a sudden you've got that brain fog, and you're forgetting words, or, "Wait, oh, I just missed that phone call," or, "I'm running late." You don't really see it, but it's happening.  If you're a hardcore coder in Silicon Valley living on Red Bulls or whatever it is, hey, you are slower skipping meals and all that stuff.  You've got to do that steady state throughout the day.  You will perform better longer.  You won't burn out as much.

Jaime:	I have lots of questions on this one, too.  It's perfect because you led me right into what I was gonna ask you anyway.  I'm a batcher, so I do - today, I have seven millionaire interviews.  Now, this is the first time I have seven in one day.  Usually I do four, but I was like, "Let's try this." Four usually makes me braindead, so I'm going, "Today we gotta bring it."

	The thing is is that because I batch, I usually do seven coaching calls in a day, get them all sort of done so I have one day a week of coaching calls.  I stay  in the same brain space, I help people out, I walk around, but at the end of those days, I'm like - you can go like this, and I'm sort of like, "Huh? What? How?"

	Is there a better way? Because I have so much that I'm fitting in, and I wanna make sure that I'm fitting it into the best of my ability because what I did before is I used to have two coaching days, and they were half days.  It was easier, but it took up a whole other day, and then I didn't have the time to actually work as much as I wanted to, so we started batching as much as humanly possible.

	Most of the time, I get done at 3:30, so I can't really say, "Oh, I'm working until 7:00 at night." A lot of times, I have to go pick up my kids at 3:30, so it's not huge, but what advice do you have for me now that I'm batching longer and longer days, and I can't - I mean, I feel like it still works, and I still do a good job, and I drink my water, and I drink my shakes, but give me advice.

Do you have any other ideas for me, or so far you think this is working, or can I just eliminate the brain fog? I have [inaudible] [00:36:15] scheduled after this so that way I'll [inaudible].

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Okay, so first of all, batching is great.  That's one of the 15 secrets, it's one of the 15 secrets.  My last article on Forbes was, "How does Jack Dorsey run both Square and Twitter at the same time," and one of his secrets is batching.  Monday is internal meetings, Tuesday is marketing, Wednesday is product.

	Steve Jobs was famous, every Wednesday was marketing day, ad review day, every Tuesday was sort of product review day.  Batching is great, that's a great secret.

	Listen, we are inevitably - the only thing that recharges us fully is a good night's sleep, so it's inevitable to have a little bit of a decline throughout the day, even if you're pushing water, even if you're eating your snacks, etc.

The only other thing I would suggest, if you're not doing it already, is when that clock goes off, so it's the end of your first coaching call, the end of one of these sessions, the lure for me is, "Okay, I finished that task.  I'm gonna give myself a ten-minute break.  What do I do?" I check email, I might scan cnn.com, maybe look at Facebook, and I'm thinking I'm giving myself a break.

That is still burning glucose.  We literally burn, when we're at restful state, we burn about 11 calories of glucose an hour.  When we're reading, it's 45.  When we're interacting, it's like 90.  The only way you're gonna slow that down and recover, build up those stores, is you finish your coaching call, you finish an interview, you take the ten to 15 minutes off, and you don't do any of that work.

You get up, walk around, you do a tree pose, or a warrior too, you drink some more water, you play with the cat, whatever it is, but you're supposed to let your mind recover.  That's the only other thing that might help, but it's tough.  When we're ultra-productive, we are still draining throughout the day, but just hopefully at a slower pace.

Jaime:	Well, what I found - I have ten-minute guided meditations, and so I go lay on my bed, and so I can have my feet up and not worry about it.  That seems to work as best as it can be without necessarily having? and I don't that every single time, of course, but I try and take two of those breaks a day just so that on these crazy nutso days that sort of give my brain and body sort of a rest.

	That's been working pretty well.  I guess the thing is is that at the end of the day, don't plan anything, have a massage or glass of  wine and relax.

Kevin:	Yeah, but there's the thing.  That's goes back to, again, the high-value stuff you do earlier in the day, and then you try to do other things later in the day.

Jaime:	Those poor millionaire [inaudible] [00:39:06] at the end of the day.  [Inaudible] tell them.  We won't tell them, it'll be fine.

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	That meditation, that's advanced ninja stuff.  I just got the Muse band so you could actually track your EEG, and I'm not as good a meditator as I thought.  I thought I was pretty Zen, and then I put the band on and it's like, "Tch, tch, tch," like, "Okay, I got some work to do, still."

Jaime:	That's awesome.  I totally need to get that, then, too.  What made you decide to get that? What was the premise for getting it because I want one, too.

Kevin:	As you can tell, I geek out on this stuff, and I'm always asking you and Ken, I'm always just wanting all the techniques.  I've been hearing more and more people talking about meditating with the Muse band and their experience.  I mean, it's part of my morning routine.

	When I'm at my best, and when I perform my best, it's because I'm doing a morning routine that's got a few minutes of meditation.  I always wondered, "How good am I, and how can I get better at it?" I'm still new to the band, but again, I've got a long way to go, so I'm glad I got it.

Jaime:	That's awesome.  Typical entrepreneur, though, "I wanna be the best at everything I do."

Kevin:	Right, never good enough.

Jaime:	I know, exactly.  There's always something to get better at.  Oh my gosh, I love this, and this is the thing.  I told you before, I was actually not gonna be talking about productivity as much, but we got so much into this

I'm gonna have to have you on the show again to talk about the $12 million company you built in five years because I don't think we have enough time to dive really deep into that.  I really, really want to because productivity is awesome, and your book is awesome, but you have so much knowledge that's not related to productivity.  I [inaudible] [00:40:45] build your companies, which I think is awesome.

We'll have to have you back on the show again to sort of talk about marketing tactics, and how [inaudible].  Can you just tell me about the types of companies that you've created so that people can sort of see - it's not Internet marketing ones, or it's not you're an author and that's it.  Tell me about the companies that you've started, even the ones that you failed, if you could just sort of go through the [inaudible] [00:41:06].

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Yeah, yeah.  I mean, they were all in a similar space of corporate education, and back in the late '80s, early '90s, a lot of that was creating training programs that were delivered in a classroom environment, or then it was really high-tech CD-ROMs, and then Internet-based training, eventually E-Learning.

	When I first started, this is one of the secrets, when I first started, and even when I had what some people would consider a successful business, a million dollars a year, I was offering custom corporate training programs to anybody.

	I was doing training programs for Coca-Cola, for Prudential Insurance, for Unisys Computers, I mean, banks.  The problem was separate industries all over the country.  I'm located outside of Philadelphia now, pharmaceutical industry, we're right in the middle of that corridor, and I had a handful of pharmaceutical clients.

	One of the ah-has was - I can remember it was a big grocery store chain.  They said, "We wanna do deli training," and it was sales skills for deli people.  If I order ham, I'm supposed to say, "Would you like some Swiss cheese," things like that.

	They said, "Hey, we love you, it's great.  Give us your references.  This is your project, we just need to check references." I give them three references, I lose the project.  Why did I lose the project? They said, "Well, you know what, there was another company that had done some deli training that we had seen and gave us recommendations and referrals from other people in our industry."

	What I found was, it's like, "You know what? All right, I'm going to just turn down, start turning down, all the work - stop selling the work outside of the pharmaceutical industry.  I'm just going to pick one industry and be like, "We do the best custom training in the pharmaceutical industry."

	As I narrowed that down, revenues went up.  Then I said, "We're gonna do the best E-Learning," so technology-delivered, "in the pharmaceutical industry." Narrowed it down, revenues went up.

	Then I said, "Okay, we seem to do a lot of cardiovascular training for heart drugs." I mean, we were also doing pain drugs, all kinds of drugs, but we're really good at cardiovascular, so I said, "You know what? We are the best cardiovascular training company on the planet." Narrowed the bullseye further, revenue went up.

	Then it got to the point where we went to AstraZenica, and then Pfizer, and it was true.  We said, "We've got more experience in cholesterol pills, cholesterol training, than anybody on the planet." Well, why wouldn't they wanna work? They don't wanna work with the No.  2 cholesterol training company.  The bullseye went that big, revenue went to the $12 million a year.

	Now, when people say that, it's like, "That's scary turning down all that stuff." The way we did it was we just were proactively selling and marketing to a smaller and smaller niche.

Believe me, while I'm telling everyone we're the No.  1 heart drug training company on the planet, when someone has a diabetes drug, saying, "Hey, we saw your stuff, heard you guys are great, this is a good project for you," we would still take that work, but proactively, we just kept that avatar, that niche, narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, narrowed down, and the revenues just took off.

It's easier to break through and to be known, and your referrals count for more, when you've narrowed down your focus.  I mean, it sounds so simple, but that was one of the big keys over the years.

Jaime:	I think that's amazing and awesome, and you hear that so often, but I love being able to hear it in the timeline fashion because most people are like, "Well, you're supposed to pick that at the beginning," but you can actually narrow it down.  People have problems choosing, right?

Kevin:	Yes, yes.

Jaime:	Why pick pharmaceuticals over deli companies, you know what I mean? You could have gone a totally different route.

Kevin:	There's no one right answer, but you look for where you're strong anyway.  I thought about Coca-Cola.  I was getting on a plane to go down to Atlanta.  Others, I was going out to California.  Insurance companies were up in Boston.

We were already doing good work in pharmaceuticals, so we did have some experience, some referenceable clients, and geographically, it was in our backyard, and I just thought, "Hey, aging population, drugs, it's a healthy industry.  Let's do it."

It could have been anything.  I mean, I could have made a similar argument for banking; I'm not far from New York.  I'd say where's your passion lie, where's your experience lie.  Jaime, can I share a failure, a really quick one?
Jaime:	Yes, do it.

Kevin:	It just happened.  I'm launching the book, so 15 Secrets, blah, blah, blah, and I interviewed 239 entrepreneurs purposely thinking, "Okay, I don't just wanna make it a productivity book in general, I want to write the definitive time and productivity book for entrepreneurs."

	When I started doing some Facebook ads to help promote the book, they failed because I was targeting - I wasn't clear enough.  Entrepreneurs sounds real targeted, but as you know, there are solopreneurs, and the want-to-be entrepreneurs, and the sidepreneurs.  Then, there's business owners that are consultants, or accountants, or maybe lawyers that kinda work for themselves or in a small firm.

	Then, there's entrepreneurs that are running $100 million companies.  You can never niche down far enough, and I failed with that one outreach campaign, and I thought about it.  It's like, "You know what? I'm doing an ad for one type of entrepreneur dishing it up to the solopreneurs.  I completely messed that up."

	There's no one right answer, it's just choose that market you wanna own, choose that avatar as small as possible, and then own it.  Once you own it, then you can add another layer.  "Okay, we're the best at heart drugs and diabetes drugs." You can always start to build it up, but it's crucial when you're small or when you're just starting out to find that avatar, to find that ideal customer, I mean, so narrow that you're just gonna own that little space.

Jaime:	Yeah, and I love that.  It's really cool because especially if people are already in business or something like that, they can look at the clients they have and that they love working with and go like, "Oh - " I had a client.  She was like, "Oh, authors seem to come to me a lot," and it's like, "Do you like working with them?" She's like, "Yeah, I love it." I'm like, "Why would you just not only focus [inaudible] [00:47:40]?"

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Great question, do you like working with them, right because you don't want more of those clients that are a pain in the butt clients, right?

Jaime:	Yeah, exactly.  You're like, "Ideal, ideal." I know we have to start wrapping up.  I have to ask the last question, but again, like I said, we'll have you back on so that way we can get sorta the nitty-gritty because I wanna know about hiring and a whole bunch of other things.  Same last question, it's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Kevin:	I would say be crystal clear on your goal, specific, measurable, break it down into bite-size chunks, and then schedule it on your calendar.  Whatever that goal is, every day, or every weekend, or once a week, you decide, schedule that time on your calendar, and don't even think about it.  Just spend that time.  That will take you step-by-step, week-by-week, to that million-dollar goal.

Jaime:	Make the habit to making the things to get to the [inaudible].

[Crosstalk]

Kevin:	Making the habit.

Jaime:	Oh my gosh, okay.  I know this, and everybody needs to hear it again.  Thank you so much for coming on today.  Where can we find the book and  more about you and all that fun stuff online?

Kevin:	Yeah.  The book is everywhere.  If you wanna pay the $15.00 in shipping, you can get it on Amazon, or I'll send it to you for free if you cover shipping at 15timesecrets.com, that's 1-5-timesecrets.com

Jaime:	Awesome, make sure, everybody go check that out, go get the book, and then actually do something with it, all right?

Kevin:	Thanks, Jaime.

Jaime:	Thank you so much for coming on the show today, I really, really appreciate it, Kevin.

Kevin:	It's awesome.

[End of Audio]

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services

Tags: 15 Time Secrets, E3C Formula, Kevin Kruse, millionaire interview, Power Of 1440, productivity, Time Management, Time Management Strategy

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Millionaire Interviews, Productivity

---