A Roadmap To Your Best Year Ever with Michael Hyatt

Author of New York Times bestseller, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. Founder of Platform University and Best Year Ever – Michael Hyatt

An episode loaded with no-fluff and put-this-into-play-today strategies that a multimillion dollar internet icon and creator of “The Best Year Ever” uses in his life daily. Specific strategies to go from where you are now to where you want to be by the end of 2015.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt
• Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life Of Your Dreams by Jeff Walker
• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You (10th Anniversary Edition) by John C. Maxwell
• The Millionaire Messenger: Make a Difference and a Fortune Sharing Your Advice by Brendon Burchard
• The Chalene Show
• Cliff J. Ravenscraft Podcast
• The Smart Passive Income Podcast

Use this affiliate link to get a special price for Michael’s goal setting course, 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever!

http://bestyearever.me/jaime/secrets

Check out MichaelHyatt.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I am so thankful to have Michael Hyatt back on the show again. He runs MichaelHyatt.com, he's a bestselling author of a book called "Platform", he runs Platform University and he also has a really awesome course that he just came out with last year, all about the Best Year Ever and how you can set goals that will make it utterly amazing for you. I am so excited to have him on the show. Thanks so much for coming on, Michael.

Michael: Thanks, Jaime. It's so great to see you again.

Jaime: Again! We were just talking a second ago and you said you tripled the number of opt-ins that you wanted to get yesterday - because this just launched and I know we're going to launch this a week after so it will be a week or so old by the time people hear this - but I want to ask you about that. How did you get so many opt-ins in the first day?

Michael: This is three times as many opt-ins as we've ever gotten before and I think it was the result of a couple of things. One is that we've gotten better at product launches so this is now about our sixth one. The first one was a total disaster.

Jaime: Really?

Michael: You know, just the usual tech stuff - broken links and copy that didn't work like we had hoped. But we've fine-tuned it, I've got a great team of people and we're all constantly learning from each other and learning from the best people in the business, so we've just incrementally changed it over time, getting a little bit better at it each time. but this time I think the secret sauce was that we involved our affiliates at the very beginning, so it's not just us promoting but it's all of these other people, our partners, who are also promoting, so they're bringing a lot of people to it who don't know me, but they know them.

Jaime: At the very beginning, so they're going "Hey, there's a really cool video, you should check it out," and the affiliate link is through the whole thing so it doesn't matter when they join?

Michael: That's exactly right, and they're going to get the benefit of it all the way through. To be honest, I think that videos are more compelling so we're doing a Jeff Walker-style three video launch, a sideway sales letter he calls it, where we try to deliver -\ I say we, I mean me - I try t deliver valuable content to people about goal setting and really talk about what's getting in the way of them achieving what matters most to them and how they can be one of those people that really consistently gets what they want out of life. That content is all free so people opt-in to get that free content and then of course we give them the option to buy the course.

Jaime: And of course it's super compelling right now because everyone is thinking about 2015 and going "Shoot, this didn't happen like I wanted it to this year, let's see what we can do next year." I want to know, looking back, you weren't in this product space at all, you were in the publishing space, which is a very different beast, I know, so when you started moving into this how did you start learning and how did you get to where you are now? I know it's been a process but give me an idea of how you did that.

Michael: I kind of stumbled my way to success, in a way. I was definitely a blogger so I was operating in the space of information and content but the huge mistake that I made at the beginning was that I was giving it away for free so I conditioned my audience over time, over about an eight year period, to think that everything from Michael Hyatt is free, that he provides a lot of value and a lot of content but he doesn't charge for it. Obviously that's not a sustainable business model. It's great for building trust, it's great for building a relationship, and all of that is the foundation for sales, but you've got to go to the next level. So when I left my corporate job and decided to step out into this full time I tested the waters a little bit but then I got a little bit more earnest about selling products. I had a moment where I said to myself "Do I really believe that these products are worth what I'm asking for them? Are they going to create the transformation?" because people don't really buy products, they buy what they think is going to be a transformation. So it was just getting bold about that and asking people. There were a few people on the fringes that said "Oh my God, you've committed the ultimate sacrilege - you've asked for the order, you're trying to sell something." Meanwhile, those people are happy to collect their pay check for selling their time or their products or whatever. So I was just kind of jumping in the deep end and I've really tried to learn from everybody that I can, I've devoured all of the courses that I can and just tried to study. To me, once you get clear on what you want, the fastest way to get there is to take advantage of the resources that are available, you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Jaime: What are some of those resources and things that have happened and really catapulted the business in the past few years?

Michael: Without question, Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula was a game changer for us.

Jaime: Really?

Michael: It's almost sort of like "Before Jeff" and "After Jeff" - we were growing before Jeff - for each of the last three years we've doubled the size of the business, this year it's a multimillion dollar business and I can lay most of that at the feet of Jeff Walker because what I learned from him about how to market - and I've been a professional marketer my whole career - but what I learned from him about how to market using content was huge. Brendon Burchard was another one - his book, "The Millionaire Messenger", was one of the first things that was a big paradigm shift for me, just the thought that a product can live in so many different formats and you can add value in so many different ways.

Jaime: Tell me more about Jeff Walker and what really impacted you. I'm in a mastermind group of ten women and someone posted the other day saying "Do you actually get this?" I know the sideway sales letter, we listen to him on podcasts and he talks about it a lot and he gives a lot of free content away and there is the new book that goes through it, and she was like "Is it worth getting it?" It seems like it was transformational for you that I want to ask you that question and I'll have her watch this!

Michael: If you buy Jeff's book, which is very good - I reviewed it on my website and pushed it when it launched it - that's like buying the college textbook, but taking the course is like actually signing up for the course where you have assignments and you have due dates and you're going to be graded. The course is $2,000 so it's pretty expensive and I think that actually works in your favor as a student because, when you're really vested in something like that, you pay attention. I've bought courses, you've probably bought courses, where they just sit on our hard drive because we're not that invested in it. The thing about Jeff's was that it was so expensive and I had heard so many good reports about it that it was worth every penny. I literally recouped the investment within the first five minutes of my first launch and that was crazy - a lot of things didn't work but it was still enough to recoup that investment quickly.

Jaime: Really? That's awesome. So going through what you've learned now from different launches, what do you think those critical factors have been? The first launch was "Meh", the second launch was better and you've tweaked as you go.

Michael: I think one of the critical things - and I talk about this in my book, "Platform" - is that you've got to have a "wow" product. No amount of marketing savvy or technological wizardry will overcome a bad product concept. So you've got to have something that people really want that they find compelling and it's got to be a compelling offer, so we start with that. For example, in the Best Year Ever course, even though we shot it a year and a half ago, after we finished the launch last year I wanted to retool it and completely reshoot it, so we did everything as if we had never done it before - we were informed by the past but we weren't constrained by the past. I totally envision doing it again this year, so just continually trying to outdo yourself on quality is one of the keys to create "wow" in the hearts and the mind of your customers, and that's as simple as exceeding your expectations. What do people expect? Literally write that down and then say "How can we delight them by exceeding their expectation and giving them more of what they didn't expect?" That's really the game plan on how we do this. Then it's a million little things too. I'll tell you one simple one - we used to say, when we promoted a webinar, "What you'll learn?" and then we would itemize what they would learn. Then I heard somebody, it might have been Ray Edwards, it might have been somebody else, talking about copywriting and saying "Actually, people don't like to learn. That sounds like a lot of work," so we straight up tested it and we found that "discover", as in "What you will discover?", gets a much better response than "learn", or "What I'm hoping to reveal in this webinar," versus -What I'm going to teach you," so just the subtlety of the words and that's the kind of thing that we're polishing and I've got a really good team of copywriters that pay attention to that stuff.

Jaime: One word makes conversions better, but if you're new to this you don't have to be worrying about this.

Michael: No.

Jaime: That's later down the road, which makes a big difference. That testing piece comes up over and over again - I just did a few interviews and it seems like a running theme lately, where we're tweaking and testing and trying again and getting feedback. What systems do you use for that? Because it can get really confusing dealing with conversions and all of that stuff. I know you have a team that does this so what do you actually use?

Michael: We use Infusionsoft for everything. We'll split test stuff; we'll divide the list and split test it. Recently we had a pretty interesting test - when I write my blog post and it goes out, you've subscribed to my list, I've got 150,000 subscribers and if you're on my list you're going to get my blog post as I post and it comes in a nicely formatted, graphically attractive, congruent with my design kind of thing. But then I'm seeing all of these info marketers who not only send plain text e-mails but argue that they're more effective because they look like they're from a friend and people have less sales resistance to them. I thought that might be right so I said -This is what we're going to do? but my web developer said "We should test that." So we tested everything - we did a split test and we didn't take any of the existing customers, we only did it to new subscribers who didn't have an existing experience, and so we divided them randomly using an algorithm that he developed, so you would get on one list or the other and one list got the plain text version and the other list got the beautifully designed version that we had been using. What we discovered was that the designed version, on my list with my people, outperformed the plain text one.

Jaime: Really?

Michael: Yes, it outperformed it on open rate and click throughs, which are the two things that are the most important to us.

Jaime: I love hearing that, because my copywriter also told me to take off the images that I was doing and I was like "Oh, okay," but I didn't test it.

Michael: I think the theory is that people are smarter than we think.

Jaime: Thankfully!

Michael: When that plain text thing shows up and it's marketing, they know it's marketing! Why not just be honest about it? People will get different results based on who their audience is and what their voice is and all of that but, for me, I tested it and it made a difference.

Jaime: Maybe our audiences are just super smart. That must be what it is! That's awesome. I use InfusionSoft too and I think there's a lot that I don't know about it, about conversion rates and all of that stuff. Did you hire a consultant or have someone come in and teach you a bunch of InfusionSoft stuff?

Michael: I know nothing about InfusionSoft. My team figured all of that out and I've got one girl, we're actually about to divide her job, but she's my main copywriter and she also does InfusionSoft and she's brilliant at it, but now the business is at the point where I just want to hire one person to do all of the campaign setup and let her stay focused on copy. Both are important but they're really two different skillsets.

Jaime: Definitely. I want to ask about you building your team in just a second but before I get into that, it seems as though this launch had a lot to do with affiliates - can you talk about that? I've never done affiliates before on anything and people are like "You're dumb!" and I'm like "I just haven't yet!" and that's what next year is really about for me. I have tons of friends but I've never asked them for anything so give me the lowdown on how you did that and the best way to ask, especially as I don't like being weird around friends - "Promote my stuff!"

Michael: I know, it's a little awkward for some of us to get over. It really comes down to whether you really believe in the product and whether it will really be transformational in peoples? lives. It turns out that there are a lot of people online who are looking for opportunities and want to promote to their tribe quality content that they know they will benefit from. I look for that sort of stuff all the time for my own tribe. I feel that my primary job, as somebody who is a tribal leader of this audience that I've been given is to resource them with stuff that I know works, stuff that I use myself, and those are my criteria - I'm not going to recommend anything that I don't use and can't stand behind. With that in mind, what we did with the affiliates, is I personally wrote to all the major ones, we had A level and B level, so the A level ones I wrote to personally, I described the product, I invited them to sample it and then I invited them to be an affiliate. We really went all out - I have a little bit of a secret weapon because Stu McLaren is my business partner and Stu was an affiliate manager for years.

Jaime: Was he really?

Michael: Yeah.

Jaime: Stu's a friend of mine and I didn't even know that. That's horrible of me!

Michael: For example, he sketched out an affiliate center that is second to none, I mean it's unbelievable. Then my ace programming web developer, Andrew Buckman, who's brilliant, programmed anything. So now, when you go into the affiliate center, there's all the swipe copy, there's your states, there's all the video and the other digital assets that you might need, there's ads, there's everything that you could possibly want there. We wanted ti make it really turnkey but we wanted the affiliates to have the experience that we were really taking care of them and giving them what they need. We dedicated one person, Susy, on my team to affiliate management, so she's handling the logistical part of it. Stu is still involved at a strategic level but for us it wasn't just opening it up and saying "Hey, if you want to sell this?" like a blog post or something, and then you get all of these people who don't really have an audience. We targeted specific people, so in the Best Year Ever product launch we had 157 affiliates.

Jaime: Really? Wow.

Michael: And so we're just constantly giving them information like today, which is the first day after the day of the launch, we sent out a JV letter with a leaderboard that showed who was in first place with the opt-ins and second place and all of that, which I have found to be highly motivational when I'm on the other end of that and just some tips for them - we're really committed to making them successful.

Jaime: I love that. One of my friends is a JV manager and we've never really chatted about it but I was talking to him last night because I'm researching this exact topic right now. I told him I'm doing a launch of Millionaire Hustlers in January and he said "How many affiliates do you want?" and I was like "I don't know, three maybe?" Because it's a live coaching program so there's a cap of how many people I can allow in so I probably only need three, maybe five, and he's like "That's not a launch. I wouldn't call that a launch." I was like "Oh, really?" He said "You could do that tomorrow." Then he showed me his list, because he has some really high level people, you would know their names, and I was like "Okay!" and you have 157. So I'm just small scale. But again, before you did affiliates, you probably didn't know what you were doing, how to set it all up in InfusionSoft and that stuff. I do have some team members but they don't know how to do it either so we're trying to figure it out on our own. Do you have any advice for us?

Michael: I think admitting that you don't know what you're doing is a great place to start.

Jaime: Especially live to my entire audience. That's good, right?

Michael: I have a friend, Andy Andrews, who's a New York Times bestselling author, who says you're always most confused right up until you're not and I think that's exactly right, so I just get comfortable with my confusion. Then you can start to learn - you can say "Okay, how do I resource this" Maybe I'll send some people out to Sixth Division, which is an Infusionsoft consulting company.

Jaime: I've interviewed Brad, yes.

Michael: I haven't used him yet but I will this next year; I've got some friends who have gone through it. It's just a simple matter of giving the team the training that they need and, I think, starting slow and realizing it's okay to make mistakes. I find that, if you've got an online presence like you do and you've built a rapport with the audience, people are incredibly forgiving. I've sent out a promotion blog post for a big launch before, not this one, and I had dead links in it - links that didn't work - and I had to send an "Oops!" e-mail, egg on my face, and people were like "It's so good to know that you're human. That's just made you even more credible with me." So everything can work to your advantage. This is an original with me but I try to operate from the premise that the entire universe is conspiring in my favor.

Jaime: I love that. I still want to talk about teams, I'm not going to forget about that but going through and hearing what you say, I have a couple of questions about going through your routines, because I know you have daily routines and habits and that sort of thing too, and feeling good, like you said, just that one little quote will change your state for the entire day, so how much do you pay attention to that stuff?

Michael: Oh, huge. I have a very defined morning ritual and here's how I look at it - if you look at golfers, and this is where I first started seeing golf professionals, they have a ritual that they go through just to approach the tee box before they drive. It's very defined, it's very conscious and they've worked it out with their coach. If you look at NFL players on game day, there's an entire ritual that begins the night before and gets them to a peak state where they've got the energy, the awareness, the brain power, the focus to really succeed at what they do. So I take every day like that. There are days where I blow it off or I'm off my game but it really begins very deliberately for me. I'm trying to exercise my spiritual life, my mental life, my emotional life and, maybe most importantly, I do all of that first but then I get into the gym and I work out - so I'm doing that six days a week. When I do that consistently, that's when I'm most likely to be successful during the day time because I've got the energy I need to be as productive as I want to be.

Jaime: What are the actual things that you're doing in the morning? I just interviewed Hal Elrod, do you know him? The Miracle Morning? He has this whole book about morning routine and ritual and what it actually does. He wakes up at four in the morning or something. I don't do that, but what time do you normally wake up?

Michael: I wake up at 5am. The first thing I do is I go into my den and I sit in stillness for 15 minutes. So I'm not thinking, I'm not planning, I'm not doing anything, I'm not even praying, I'm just trying to be quiet. If I pay attention to anything, it's my breathing, I just want to get calm. It's the only island in the whole day where I'm going to have that moment of quiet, because everything is going to be chaotic later. Then I pray. I'm a person of faith so I pray for a few minutes and I try to read from the bible every day and then, from there, I hit the gym, and when I'm in the gym I'm listening to podcasts or audio books. The only time I don't do that is when I'm strength training, which I do three times a week, and I've got my trainer - he didn't like that, he wants me to talk to him. But when I'm actually on the machines or I'm out for a run, I'm listening to podcasts because this gives me a chance to nourish my mind so that I'm actually putting something in the well, because in the content business like you and I are in, where you're giving out constantly, if you're not deliberately ingesting new content, the well goes dry. So I try to do that intellectual exercise when I'm exercising. Then I come back home, get a shower, eat breakfast, and then I sit down and I go through my newsfeeds and I give myself the luxury of 30 minutes of this - I call it foraging for my tribe - where I'm reading articles, scanning all the headlines, and if I find something that I think would be of benefit and add value to the people that follow me then I will create a link for that. By this time it's about 9 o'clock in the morning and then I'm really focused on specific objectives - I'll have two or three work projects that I have to create for that day and I'll attack the most important ones first and just work through until I get them done.

Jaime: I love how intentional you are - this is the routine. What are some of your favorite podcasts? If you listen to so many podcasts you probably know some good ones.

Michael: Well, in addition to yours.

Jaime: Thanks, that was smooth!

Michael: I cycle through them, like a lot of people do, I'm sure. I love Chalene Johnson's podcast - do you know hers?

Jaime: No, it sounds really familiar. What's the name of it?

Michael: It's called "The Chalene Show". She's probably best known as a fitness trainer but she's a phenomenal marketer. I heard her at Brendon Bruchard's event last year, amazing speaker, she's so motivational. She covers a lot of the same gourd that I cover - everything about leadership and life - it's just kind of seamless. I love Ray Edward's podcast. Ray's a good friend and I think he does a really, really nice job. I usually listen to Cliff Ravenscraft too.

Jaime: Really? Is it weird listening to your friend all the time?

Michael: No, I listened to it and I told him that I don't really need that much technical information on podcasting because I have a team that does it in the studio so I don't really do any of the technical stuff anymore but I just love listening to his philosophy on life and he's got such great positive energy. And, of course, Pat Flynn.

Jaime: Of course.

Michael: Everybody listens to Pat. I love Pat's podcast.

Jaime: He was saying how much of an amazing time he had at your conference, by the way.

Michael: He was?

Jaime: Yeah, and he said that I need to read "Essentialism" so I have that book right next to me.

Michael: That will rock your world.

Jaime: I'm on chapter one. He was like "Read the first chapter and you'll be hooked" and, oh my gosh, I am.

Michael: I made so many major decisions this last year based on that book and I just interviewed Greg McKeown for my podcast. He flew into Nashville and I interviewed him in person for Platform University and for my podcast. It hasn't been aired yet.

Jaime: As soon as Pat told me, I wanted the hardcover and of course I had to wait for that and I hate waiting so I downloaded all of the podcasts that I could find that he did with other people so I could listen to those and get some of his philosophies before I read the book. So thank you for that, through osmosis, through association with Pat, I appreciate you telling him all about that for sure. Now let's get onto teams. I have talked it up a little too much. First of all, how big is your team right now?

Michael: Fourteen people.

Jaime: That's insane! The last time I interviewed you it was a lot smaller than that and that was only a year ago.

Michael: We've added a lot of people. This is kind of the missing ingredient for most entrepreneurs. I came out of the corporate world where I ran a company that had 650 people, I had 12 direct reports and it was a big team. I had 70 vice presidents at that company. So when I transitioned into being an entrepreneur it was just me for a while and then I got an assistant. What I've seen so many entrepreneurs do is they've gotten their own part of it down, they've gotten very efficient, very effective, they really want to have the public influence part of leadership down but the missing link is team leadership - they think they've got to do it all themselves and a lot of people out there who are touting being an entrepreneur and the freedom they have are covered in work, they're working 90 hours a week because they don't have a team and they're trying to do it all themselves and that just doesn't scale. You can't build a big business or a successful business and you certainly can't build a life that doesn't blow up without a team.

Jaime: Having that support is huge.

Michael: It's huge.

Jaime: But it's also scary to people, making that commitment to someone, and even just figuring out employment tax structure is a pain to people, so give me a step-by-step rundown if you can - when should we hire the first one and how fast should we grow? Especially considering cash flow, because a lot of people will be like "I need money," so trying to hire someone and making that commitment is difficult.

Michael: That's a great question. Here's how I started - when I left the corporate world I didn't even know where the FedEx box was.

Jaime: You had someone to do that, come on!

Michael: I had someone to do that - "Overnight this to so-and-so." So now I have to figure out where the FedEx box is, I have to book my own travel, I'm pulling my hair out, spending all of my time doing this administrative stuff when I need to be generating revenue. This is not the highest and best use of me. I'm a little hung up on two things - I'm not going to borrow money and I'm not going to take investment capital. I want it to be self-funded out of cash flow, just me. I've worked in about every kind of financial structure there is, including running a publicly held company, having debt on the company, all of that - I hate that, because when other people have money in your company they have a say in your company and I'm just in a place where I like to be independent and free, so I didn't want my investment to get ahead of my ability to pay for it and the return on investment so I said "Okay, I'm going to hire an assistant for five hours a week," and who knew that there's an entire industry of virtual assistant companies that are geared specifically for entrepreneurs who are at that level? That felt like a little bit of a commitment at the time but I thought I could handle five hours a week and because it's a virtual person - well, it's a real person but it's a virtual relationship - I thought if it doesn't work out, I could nix it, it's not a big deal. It's not like hiring a person who needs a job and you have to provide their livelihood full time. Within two weeks that went to 10 hours a week and then 15 and then 20 so, for me, every time I get to a place I ask myself "Is this the best use of me?" and if the answer is "No" it's "What is it that I don't love or that I'm not good at that I can offload?" Here's an example - when I started podcasting I went through Cliff's stuff and his whole thing is you do everything and so I said I would do one weekly podcast and I'm a slow learner so this would take a full day per week by the time I do the show prep, record it, edit it, post it and all of that stuff, a full day per week. After a while I said "I hate the production of this; I hate editing it. I'm too anal about it and it's just taking forever. I'm going to find a podcast producer." So I found a guy who was willing to do it for $125 an episode. I've since found out that other people do it for $50 but that's what I paid. And guess what? That gave me back almost half a day per week. I make more than $125 in half a day so if it frees me up to do other activities that pay me better than what it's costing me to pay somebody else to do it, that's just math. That's an easy investment.

Jaime: Logic!

Michael: So every time I've hired somebody - and I've done it incrementally, deliberately, a little bit at a time, I rarely bring somebody in full time - my income has gone up, and what's happened to me over the course of the last four years is that I've got increasing focused on the parts of the business where I add the most value and where I really love what I'm doing, so much so that in August I went away for a one month sabbatical to Europe with my wife.

Jaime: I saw that; that's insane.

Michael: And get this ' I came back to five e-mails. Well, I should say this - I got five e-mails while I was gone and I came back to zero emails because of the way it's set up and because of my team. The business didn't miss a beat, the income was actually an increase over the previous couple of months, so everything just went on.

Jaime: I adore hearing that. Can you give us the process? You said it was VA at first and then you started increasing how often you did it. What were the second, third and fourth, if you can go down the line? Because a lot of people are probably in similar situations, going "Okay, I hired an assistant. Now what?"

Michael: Again, going back to that idea of what you love and what you're good at and how can you focus on that. So obviously I'm not good at finding the FedEx box or booking my own travel so I got rid of that first. Then I said "Okay, do I really need to spend a couple of hours every day managing my e-mail inbox?" Because so much of the e-mail I get now, and it's probably true for you, is stuff that somebody else could handle, giving the same answers to the same questions, there are a finite number of questions that people ask, so then I brought in a second assistant whose only job was to do e-mail management. We've got a pretty interesting system of how we do that -- I have a public address and anything that goes into the public address gets processed by them and then I have a private address that my team and family has, and a few other outsiders, and it's really reduced my e-mail dramatically. Then I hired a web developer, it was a guy that had been working with me and so now he, over the course of the last four years, he's become full time. He's not an employee - I'm about to have to make that decision - but he's working at least 40 hours a week for me. Then copywriters - we have a lot of product and a lot of copy that has to be written. I don't think there's a job that I haven't done myself, it's just that there are other people that can do it better. But it helps me in knowing what I'm hiring for so I'm not bamboozled by somebody who can talk that language and knows what they're talking about and I don't. Bookkeeping was another thing that I brought in pretty early. I didn't want to be collecting from people and invoicing and all of that, so I was able to outsource that and that's still being outsourced to this day. That will probably change in the next year or two. Does that help?

Jaime: It does, it totally helps, and I love the way you're saying it too. I just brought on a copywriter and everything that you just said is pretty much the exact way that I did it too, which is really cool, it's good to have validation and all of that stuff too. So how do work with your team? This is one of your things - leadership and how important it is - but it's a skillset that most people do not have unless they manage people. Do you have any tips or resources or books that people can read that would really help them?

Michael: If I had to recommend one book I would recommend john Maxwell's book, "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership". What John believes, and I believe and teach, is that self-leadership always proceeds team leadership. As a leader, you've got to take the initiative. You've got to model what you expect of others. You're going to create the culture; the culture of your company is going to filter from the top down. If the head of the fish stinks, the whole fish stinks, so if your attitude is rotten, if you're not positive, if you're not believing the best about people, if you're not practicing some of those basic attitudinal things, you'll find that you attract people who are like you are and so it's really, really important to lead yourself and to be the example to the team. So that's in everything - everything from keeping your word to being responsive to them to the way you treat people outside the business - all of that stuff creates the culture that will become your company. A lot of people aren't aware of the culture but the culture really does drive results. We've all been part of companies where the culture was terrible and the results usually weren't so good or they weren't sustainable for sure. The culture is what enables your company to last a long time and to really produce at a high level.

Jaime: When you're hiring someone, because I've gone through some hires and I've helped a lot of companies with this, if you hire someone and you're like "Yeah, they're pretty good. They're not A but they're a B," and then you start adding more people into that environment, what do you suggest? Because I've seen this happen I don't know how many times before - then they're like "I ended up with a bunch of people who are just okay and I don't know what to do at this point." Does that make sense?

Michael: Yeah, totally. One of the things I think you've got to be committed to do as a leader is you've got to hire for capacity, which means you've got to hire people that have more ability than they're going to be expressing in this first job ' so people that can grow with your company, because if your company is going and it's going to be in a different place five years from now than where it is right now, either you're going to replace all of these people five years from now or you're going to hire people who have the capacity to grow with you and become the people you're going to need in five years. For me, it begins with getting crystal clear on what I need as the employer. So to sustain a small company I discipline myself to do the job description of anybody I'm going  to hire and then I'll post on my blog and I'll go out to my tribe.

Jaime: How awesome is that?

Michael: Actually, what I'll do first is I'll go to my fellow team members, because A players attract A players, but back before I did that, before I had any players, I posted on my blog, and we still do ths, and then recruit from the tribe because those are people who understand my values, who get what I'm about. I'm not looking for fans but I'm looking for people who are committed to the same basic message, the same basic cause that I'm committed to. We don't fall in love with the first people we meet and me never at the first point of contact because I'm not that good at interviewing, like I spend all of my time talking about my company and why it's so great and why they should join it. A really good interviewer spends time asking questions and listening so I let somebody else on my team do that.

Jaime: That's awesome. You're like "That's not my skill, let someone else do that."

Michael: It's not my skill. I want somebody to screen through all of the people, like we hired a personal assistant for my wife about six months ago. We posted it out there on the web, we solicited people through Twitter and everything else and we had 34 applications and this person had to live in Nashville so we couldn't get anybody worldwide. Then my assistant went through, interviewed all the ones who, on paper, looked like they made sense, it was like 22 or something, and the interviewed via Skype - again, we're in the same town, but to make it easy they interviewed via Skype - about 8-9 candidates and then Gail, my wife, sat down and watched those interviews, which were recorded, and picked three of those people to meet with face to face. So the interview process sounds long, but to quote my friend Dave Ramsey - hire slow, fire fast.

Jaime: I love that, that's so awesome. So you found somebody that's really good for that personal assistant. I've been looking for a personal assistant just to help with the cleaning and the laundry - I have so much laundry, it's crazy with children, but I didn't even know what they did. I have someone on a trial right now, we'll see how well it goes, but she's cooked chicken and all of that fun stuff, but I also didn't know exactly how much to pay her. I've Google searched this stuff, I wanted to know how many hours you have that PA and how much you pay. I don't know if you're allowed to say that on my show but you know what I mean.

Michael: In this case we wanted someone who could work 15 hours a week, doing the same basic stuff that you're talking about, everything from picking up the laundry - not housekeeping, we have someone else who does that - but picking up the laundry, doing the errands, going through the mail, responding on Gail's behalf, just lots of odds and ends, she does some errands for me too. We ended up paying $20 an hour - we probably could have got it done cheaper but that's what she asked for and we felt like she was worth it, she had great references - which, by the way, is another huge key. Don't skip checking references, it's so important because people leave a history and you can find out a lot by checking references. So that was it, it's been terrific.

Jaime: I love that. It's that same thing of you noticing stuff you don't want to do, or stuff your wife doesn't want to do - "Maybe we should hire someone."

Michael: It wasn't the highest and best use of Gail. There are so many things that she does well and wants to do well and I said to her when she was balking at $20 an hour - "Let me as you a question. If you don't like paying that much to somebody else, do you think your time is worth more than $20 an hour? Because you're essentially paying yourself $20 an hour to do this work."

Jaime: Ouch.

Michael: She said "No, I really think my time is worth more than that." I said "Okay, then pay the money and get on with your life."

Jaime: I love that; that is so awesome. Sometimes we don't, which is always the sting of not realizing how much you're actually getting back. I love that. We have to start wrapping up - I'm going to ask the same last question that I always ask, and it's always fun when I've got a guest that I've had on before because do you go with something completely different, do you even remember what you said last time? But what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million? And before you answer, I'll say go buy his goal setting course because I think that will definitely make a huge difference, but besides that, what do you think?

Michael: I think the most important thing anybody can do is get crystal clear on what they want out of life. Not what their parents want, not what their spouse wants, not what their employer wants, not what all the people around them want - what do they want? The goal setting course is a way to get clear on that but one of the best things you can do is just put on your calendar a time when you're going to sit down and answer that question and literally journal the things that come to mind. Whether it's that you want a better marriage, you want kids that you don't have ' unfortunately you can't give up the ones that you do have - a job or a business you want to start, but what would you do if there were no constraints? What do you really want? We've been given this one precious life, it's a gift, there are no do overs and if you don't get out of life what you want out of life it's because you haven't gotten clear on what you want. So I think that's where it starts. Forget about the resources - those will show up once you get clear. Don't let them inhibit you but get crystal clear on what you want.

Jaime: I love that. I don't think my life started to change until I started asking myself those questions but the hard thing is that I didn't know how to answer them. I had never asked myself those questions before - I would be like "What do I want? I don't know!" the more you ask and the more you pay attention to that the more it helps and you can actually have fun with it. It's amazing what can happen.

Michael: It is and I'm still asking myself that question now. It's a question that I repeatedly ask myself - what do I want? Because clarity proceeds acceleration. So a lot of the reasons our businesses aren't growing as fast as we'd like or that we don't have the relationship with our spouse that we want is because we've never been bold enough to articulate what it is that we want and then communicate it to the people that can help us get there. Once we do that, it becomes awesome.

Jaime: That's how you got that month sabbatical in August, I'm sure.

Michael: That's exactly right.

Jaime: Awesome. Well, where can we find out more about your course and of course you and how we can follow up with you later?

Michael: Two things - one is that you can find out more about the course at BestYearEver.me/Jaime - we've got some things for your audience - and you can find out more about me at MichaelHyatt.com, there are links to everything else that I do in the world.

Jaime: I highly recommend it. I went through the entire course last year and mapped all of my stuff out. You guys have amazingly designed, wonderful stuff that really helps pull out the clarity because, again, like I said, I had asked myself that question before but not in that format and I think when you have something that actually tells you what to do it's way easier to do. Just like when we were talking about Jeff Walker's stuff - tell me what to do and when I need to do it by and I'll actually do it. Who knew? So everybody make sure you check that out - we'll put links in the show notes so that everyone can click on that and check it out. I hope you have an amazing, awesome year and I hope I can hang out with you again at some point, Michael.

Michael: I would love that, Jaime. Thanks so much for having me on, it's always a delight to talk to you.

Jaime: Have a great day, take care.

Michael: Thank you, bye bye.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

 

Tags: best year ever, Business Growth, Business Scaling, business strategy, Focus, goal mapping, Goal Setting, Michael Hyatt, millionaire interview, productivity, Visioning

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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