Hugh Culver – Antarctica Tourism and Millionaire Speaker

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Antarctica Tourism and Millionaire Speaker Hugh Culver

Hugh is amazing. He tells his story of creating a large tourism company in Canada and how he ended up bringing people to Antarctica for $35,000 a person.

Hugh has a great story of marathons, white water rafting, as well as creating the only tourism company in the world that traveled to Antarctica. Learn why saying “You might die doing this” is a good marketing tactic, and why charging way more is easy.

Plus learn some great advice from Hugh’s $25,000 keynotes, and tips and advice for your speaking career (and mine, I get to ask him a lot of questions about what I should be doing as a speaker!)

Check out HughCulver.com.

Thanks so much for listening! If you like these interviews subscribe via iTunes.

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Hugh Culver on the show. Hugh is a speaker and trainer. He also has completed the Iron Man four times. He has also had a past company that was one of the world's only tourism companies to go to Antarctica, which is awesome. I'm really excited to have him on the show today and really dig deep into what he knows and find out more. So thanks so much for coming on today, Hugh.

HUGH CULVER: My pleasure! Thanks, Jaime.

JAIME TARDY: Great! So why don't we get started because I love the idea of your first company. So can you tell me a little bit about how you became a business owner?

HUGH CULVER: Sure. Well the Antarctica company wasn't actually my first company. I actually started when I was 15 and I live in British Columbia, in western Canada, and my oldest brother was a real pioneer in white water rafting and so this is in the early '70s and so at the age of 15 I was a white water rafting guide and then I started to train other guides and then started to do programs in the Yukon and northwest territories and we sold that company in '85. That was a real lesson for me because we'd actually grown to be quite a big company with about 30 staff.

JAIME TARDY: Wait, I need to stop you. How old were you when you sold the company?

HUGH CULVER: We sold it in '84 so I was like 26.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, sorry, keep going. I just have to say that.

HUGH CULVER: Then I joined three partners and we started a company that flew people to the South Pole and so I went from, the way I describe it is I went from selling $55 one day rafting trips to $35,000 expeditions where that's the cost for one person to stand at the pole for four hours. In our first year, we sold out, which was 42 tickets. So we were now dealing in millions of dollars and we were buying airplanes. I had an ex military general of the Pinochet regime as my partner as one sort of liaison in Chile. It was amazing.

So I was flying around the world. I was signing deals that were well into the million dollar range and within three years, we generated over I think $12 million in revenues and we were doing, it still is the only company in the world that does this and we purchased a couple of airplanes and we had 35 staff.

JAIME TARDY: Let's go back a little; that's huge number one and you're like in your late 20s when you're doing this, right?

HUGH CULVER: That's right.

JAIME TARDY: So first, what really gave you the mindset? When you're 15 I guess you're just sort of doing white water rafting I'm assuming? I went white water rafting for the first time last year and it's crazy. I thank goodness for guides that know what they're doing because it's kind of crazy. So how did you actually go from there, because you were a partner with your brother, right?

HUGH CULVER: Right.

JAIME TARDY: How did you go to build that to be 30 employees?

HUGH CULVER: See I've always had a real interest in business. I really enjoyed looking at how businesses run. I later on did get a masters degree in business so I've always enjoyed trying to figure out businesses and so the Antarctic program kind of fell into my lap because I knew certain people and they were already doing mountain climbing down there and I just saw it as a bigger game. So it was a bigger game that I could get into. So whereas we were dealing in hundreds of thousands of dollars with our rafting company, it was really fun to now deal in millions of dollars.

What I learned was it really wasn't that different. I mean we were dealing with celebrities, of course, and we were dealing with very wealthy people. Some of our customers spent over a quarter of a million dollars for this but it really wasn't that different. We still had to deliver good customer service. We still had to create plans and goals. We still had to hire people. We still had to buy equipment. But instead of buying life jackets, we were buying airplanes.

It was just interesting for me to go into a whole different scope and it kind of made me realize that it's really not that much harder to make millions of dollars than it is to make 50 grand. It really isn't. You just have to actually see it as just a factor of multipliers, that's all it is.

JAIME TARDY: I love that. So nothing really changed in your mindset? You were just selling something just like you were selling something before?

HUGH CULVER: Like every once in awhile I could remember having this thought like oh my goodness. Like wholly smokes, I just wrote a check for $700,000 or oh my goodness I just bought an airplane and I haven't even seen it.

JAIME TARDY: And you haven't even seen it? Geez!

HUGH CULVER: Or I just hired a pilot in Alaska by phone. I haven't even met this guy. But the only thing that really holds us back is this belief that we can't do it and so one day I'm selling stuff that's 50 bucks, 75 bucks, 100 bucks, a big program was $1,000. The next day I am selling things that are in the $100,000/$200,000 and really as long as I don't hold myself back, there's really no reason why I can't do it. So it has been an amazing ride for me because it really takes away my fear of asking customers for $100,000 or $50,000 for a training program.

Because I just think what's the big deal? So it also helps me to be a good negotiator because I don't think it's that big of deal because I've already done it.

JAIME TARDY: So was the sales process any different from $55 to $100,000 or $35,000, was the sales process different or was the sales process pretty much the same?

HUGH CULVER: The sales process takes longer but it was pretty much the same. Everybody wants to know what are they going to get from it and they don't really care how they get it. So for example, people never really cared how we got them to the South Pole. They really didn't care. We did. It was really important that the tents were insulated or that we had a cook and a doctor, but they really didn't care.

JAIME TARDY: Really, okay?

HUGH CULVER: We could talk for hours about safety and logistics and fuel capacities and flight ranges but they don't care. Like one of the best things we ever did was we started calling them expeditions. That was probably what they wanted to hear more than the fact that we remove all of our garbage from Antarctica. What they wanted to know was what do I get from it? Well you see bragging rights is bigger of they were on an expedition than if you're on a trip. So we started calling it an expedition. We had people sign forms that said you may die on this expedition.

JAIME TARDY: Cool and people are like yes!

HUGH CULVER: That adds a lot of value.

JAIME TARDY: That adds a lot of value.

HUGH CULVER: So it works.

JAIME TARDY: I need one of those. I need to put that on my waiver, right? You should put it in your speaking waiver. This might be so good you might die.

HUGH CULVER: When I got into speaking it was a very interesting transition for me. I was just thinking about this the other day because I've now been a professional speaker for 18 years and when I first got into the speaking business, I thought that what I should do is tell everybody all about my story because I knew it so well and people loved to hear about the South Pole. I mean they love to hear about the crazy things that happened where we just barely escaped major disaster.

But then I came to realize was it doesn't really serve people because no one is going to go out and recreate that kind of a company and whereas it can be seen as a metaphor for business success, to me, I think that's just too great a leap for a lot of people to do. So right now I work with people who are speakers and seminar leaders and coaches and authors and I can talk about Antarctica in a metaphorical sense and say this is what I overcame and now you can too, but what I've come to learn is that what people need is they need also practical tips. They need practical advice.

For a lot of people, it's too big a stretch to go back to their little spare bedroom or small office and to think okay now Antarctica, make me a sale. I don't get it. So what I've done in the last well quite a few years now is to come up with simple ways that people can help themselves and one of the main ways that I help people is I help them to get unbusy. What I discovered was there was this pattern and it didn't matter if I was running my construction company, which I did while I was going to university, or I was taking people white water rafting or I was running my consulting company, which I did after I got my MBA, I ended up getting busy.

I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, we see busy as this bizarre form of success where people ask us how is it going and we reply busy. We get a charge, right, like look at me; like pat on my back I'm so busy. It took me a long time to realize how ineffective being busy is. Some of my best ideas, some of my greatest, most successful strategies, certainly the best conversations I've had with clients, have come when I have been not busy. So it's counterintuitive but I think for entrepreneurs, they need to find ways to get less busy and then to use the new time that they've found more wisely.

So right now, I call it the age of distraction. If you're in business for yourself it is crazy how you can be distracted. The worst thing to do is to look at your email in the morning. As soon as you look at your email, what you're looking at is you're looking at everyone else's agenda and you're going to be automatically distracted because if you care about growing your business you're going to start thinking well maybe I should or maybe I should look at that or I should go and check on that new service or yes I should sign up for that webinar or yes I should sign up for the teleseminar and there is nothing wrong with that except that what it is doing is that it's putting your agenda on the backseat.

So what I've come to learn is that we are always going to be distracted. The only different between someone who is really successful and someone who is unsuccessful is that they put their agenda first. The successful people put their agenda first which may mean that people have to wait a little bit to get a response on an email. It may mean you don't get on to everything that's available and it may mean that you're not sitting up at 10:00 at night watching a rerun of a webinar because what you did was you said well actually what's important for me is to read every night to recharge myself in a more fulfilling way than to be on someone else's agenda.

What's important for me is to feel like the first 90 minutes of my day were successful, not being run around by someone else's agenda. What's important for me is to cross things off my list, not to try to entertain someone else's list. So that's one of the, I guess one of the real themes to my work now and that's why I wrote my book last year called Give Me A Break. It's because it's what I kept saying to myself. I kept saying give me a break.

JAIME TARDY: Give me a break, come on!

HUGH CULVER: Like why am I so busy? So that's what I do now.

JAIME TARDY: That's awesome. It's funny because I say the same thing. It's like as if we don't choose our own priorities, they just sort of happen and that's not good. So how do you get people to actually implement that because it's really easy to say and very hard to actually do?

HUGH CULVER: Sure. I have two things that people need to focus on. Well really I guess there's really three. The first one is the obvious one which is you have got to have your goals. People need to have goals and I would suggest that most entrepreneurs have pretty bad goals. It's not that the goals are bad but the goals are not recorded in a way that really serves them. For example, if you're earning $60,000 a year and you write down I want to earn a quarter of a million dollars, well that's fantastic and that's great. You know, to increase your income by four times, that's great or you want to go from a quarter of a million to a million dollars, that's great.

But if you don't have a good way of recording that goal, all that's going to happen is it is going to be out there in the distance. So the first thing that people need to learn is how to break down those goals into realistic bites. So that's the first thing is goals. The second thing is systems and the third thing is habits. So in my book, I describe five simple systems that people need to get a handle on and so each one of those five systems helps them to be organized and the good thing about systems is you don't have to think about them.

See most entrepreneurs that I work with are really sloppy around systems and it's almost like they think that it allows them to be more creative. The fact that I go with my inspiration or somebody phones me and has a great idea and I run after it that that makes me successful. Actually it doesn't, it makes you really unsuccessful because what you're doing is you're allowing everybody else to push you around. So systems are really important. Then the last one is your habits.

Most entrepreneurs need to develop real strength in their habits and you know what I find actually quite amusing I guess amusing for lack of a better word is that a lot of people that give advise really need to take their own advice.

JAIME TARDY: Do you take your own advice? I should ask, right?

HUGH CULVER: You know, like I was saying to an audience last week, I said it would be pretty incongruent if I was to be onstage talking about fitness if I was out of shape. It would be pretty strange if I was talking about financial success and I wasn't financially successful and pretty weird if I was talking about having great conversations with your wife or your husband or your kids if I had a dysfunctional family.

JAIME TARDY: I don't want to listen to someone that just tells me and doesn't actually do it, definitely.

HUGH CULVER: So I like of entrepreneurs they've got to start with this. They got to start with okay it's 2012, what do I want to create? One of the great exercises that I get entrepreneurs to do is to just simply take the calendar and get realistic. How many days do I actually have to create income? Once I take away weekends and statutory holidays and time for myself and time for my family and time for that great conference I'm going to go to, which are all great things, how many days do I have to actually create income? It's pretty shocking.

Then to start looking at that as a precious resource that you're willing to trade money for because most speakers, for example, most keynote speakers work 100 days or less and if they're really good, they work a lot less. What they need to start thinking about is those are precious commodities that I will trade dollars for, which is why they need to have some price integrity. They need to not be discounting as much. They need also to probably increase their prices. One of the best things we did with our tourism company was to charge a lot of money because people then saw a lot of value.

JAIME TARDY: Well exactly. Tell me about the mindset because I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and they're like well I don't like to ask for a lot of money or it scares me that it's not worth it and there's all these things jumbling in their head. So what's your why? Why should we do this?

HUGH CULVER: I'll tell you a story first of all. When I got into the "speaking business" I was working for $200 or $300 a day as a trainer and there's a big distinction there. A trainer is not a speaker. So a seminar leader and trainer, that's one skill set and it really has a certain price point maximum. A keynote speaker has a whole different price point maximum because the market will pay more. So for me to take a leap from being a seminar leader trainer to being a main stage platform speaker, was a big leap not only in mindset but also in dollars because it doesn't make any sense for someone to hire me and fly me across the country if all I charge is two or three times what a seminar leader would charge.

So what I came to understand was it's part of my positioning. It's part of my package. So just like wearing a great suit, getting my hair done, just like all the customer service that we provide before, during and after, it's really important that I have the price that suggests creditability and value. So it's no different than charging a lot of money for people to ski across Antarctica or fly in and climb Vinson Massif. We have to charge a lot of money otherwise they'll wonder is this any good?

So if people want to earn big dollars, what they've got to do is they've got to see themselves as being worth it. They've got to see themselves as being valuable and the best way to be valuable is to prove results. A lot of speakers talk about things they've never proven. They've never actually done it.

JAIME TARDY: So are they just saying stories or are they just saying research or what are they doing?

HUGH CULVER: So most speakers need to do a number of things if they're going to increase their value. In my humble opinion, the first thing they got to do is stop using other people's stuff.

JAIME TARDY: Okay.

HUGH CULVER: So they got to create their own stuff. So don't use other people's stories, don't use any stories unless they happen to you.

JAIME TARDY: I was going to say, you know, I interview millionaires so all I do is use other people's stories, oh no!

HUGH CULVER: But that's different because that's your job. You see, that's your job. That's your gift. But for me to go onstage and tell a story that I heard on a CD, well first of all, it would seem weird to me but secondly it's not congruent with having some valuable message to share. People can go and read that book or listen to that CD on their own. So the first thing is to have authentic original material. The second thing that they need to do is in some way, whether it's by survey or it's by working with people one at a time, or with their client groups, they have to prove that what they did works.

Nothing is more valuable than having an expert give an example of what works. People right away see credibility. They see expertise. They want to have what you're describing. Now it might be that you got it to work for yourself. That's pretty impressive. If you got up there and you lost 25 pounds and you tell us how you lost 25 pounds or you went from poverty to riches, whatever, that's great. That's credibility but to just get up there and talk about great ideas and not having done it or having helped your clients do it is no credible and it's not worth much money.

JAIME TARDY: So how do people know though? So if you were to hire a speaker and they say well I do this and this and this and I am absolutely wonderful, how does even the audience or the person who are buying that really know what they're getting?

HUGH CULVER: That's the thing. You can fool some people once in awhile, but you'll never grow your business.

JAIME TARDY: So what are some really good tips because I know there's a lot of people on here that are like marketing coaches, consultants and that sort of thing and want to branch off to speaking. So you're telling us to charge a lot of money, to really have original content which is good. What are some other things, especially for someone, I'm just starting my speaking career. You told me to double my rate when I talked to you before, which thank you. I really appreciate that. But what other ideas would you give to me or to other people who are really trying to get into speaking a lot more?

HUGH CULVER: Sure. It's really good to watch other speakers and to not watch them with a critical eye where you're convincing yourself that you're better than they are but to watch a successful speaker and ask yourself what are they doing at that moment that made them believable. Like what are they doing at that moment with their voice, with their movements, with their eye contact that makes them powerful? That makes them persuasive. So forget about whether or not you agree with their story, but look at their stage skills. There's a lot of value in stage skills.

The fact that they're able to tell that story without looking at notes. The fact that they're able to make a segue from topic to topic without making it look clumsy. The fact that they're not married to their Power Point slides and that they're able to actually go free flow. One of the best things that I have been doing the last few years is getting rid of my slides. I think the keynote last week had 12 slides. If you really have something of value to say, they don't need to see it in words every time as well as hear you. In fact, that can actually take them away from listening to you.

So that's the first thing is to look at really good speakers. The second thing is to find your authentic voice. I think that Tim Ferriss talks about this, the author of the Four Hour Work Week, of course, and he talks about this in regard to writing. It's a great message. He says, you know, for him, he had to find his authentic voice as a writer and I think we need to do that as a speaker as well. So what is our way of presenting? Once you watch enough people it's pretty easy to mimic them and that's not valuable. What people need is an authentic voice and it doesn't mean that you have to be slick. It doesn't mean you have to be eloquent.

Some of the most powerful speakers that I've heard recently, they aren't slick at all. But they pack a powerful message. They are fully present. They are authentic. When they speak, you believe that they know precisely what they are talking about. So that would be the second thing would be to find your own voice, like your own way. Frankly, I think there's nothing better, whether you're a speaker, seminar leader, of course as an author, but maybe also as a consultant, is to write. I believe people should be writing every day. They should be writing original content.

It's the only way I think to craft your original voice is to actually continually try to put on paper what you believe and then to start to notice if there's a voice starting to appear there in terms of the way that you structure your sentences, the way that you use phrases, you know, the way that you either use models all the time or you think big picture or the fact that you might use visuals and analogies or the fact that you speak in a very tangential tactical way. So you have to look for that is to look for that voice.

The third thing, of course, for any speaker is you got to get your legs. So you got to get out there and do it. The good news is that there are literally tens of thousands of not for profits in the world, just even in America, that would probably love to have you come and give a speech. Whereas you might be a member of Toastmasters or something like that, which is great, but you're going to probably get a more accurate feedback if you're in front of an audience. What I would always do is I would always charge something, even if it's only $100, always charge something because there's nothing like that client giving you a little bit of money to change the whole relationship.

JAIME TARDY: So do you tell them I'm new, I'm only charging $100 right now because, okay?

HUGH CULVER: No, that's not quite it. What I would say is, well I wouldn't actually say I was new.

JAIME TARDY: Well see that's the thing. I'm going I either charge or a lot or I am free. You know what I mean? There's sort of weird thing of charging only $100.

HUGH CULVER: What I would say is first of all you always start with your market fees, always. So if you're a $1,500 speaker or $2,500 speaker or in the higher range, you always start by saying, "Well first of all let me explain to you how my fees work." Then you explain your fees. Then of course the client goes gulp. Then you might say after a pause, it's always important to pause, the good news is that I am building my market awareness right now and so what I am doing is I am looking for select clients that I think would be a great audience for me where I could be willing to dramatically reduce my fees in return for feedback.

So what I would like in return for reducing my fees, is I would like a letter of recommendation, of course, you know, if you think that what I provided was valuable, I would like a letter of recommendation and I would like to either survey the audience or I would like to have a phone call with you afterwards to debrief it which is actually quite fun to do, but I would like some kind of feedback from it. If you want, you could even give a little simple three question survey to the audience and you could leave that on their desk and you could ask them for two closed ended question and one open ended question.

So the first two questions might be something like please rate on a scale of 1 to 5 the value of the information that the speaker shared. Then number two could be please rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how important this was to you in your life or your career? Then the open ended question could be: what is one thing that you learned today that you could use in your life or career?

JAIME TARDY: Which helps them too to really process what they have and take it away. That's awesome. I think that's a really good way of doing it too, to get feedback. That way you're actually doing it. I love Toastmasters but when you're really working on the same people, you know what I mean, it's totally different doing it to a real audience and being able to ask them questions. That's awesome. I wrote that down for next time. Beautiful.

I also loved what you said about writing because I know a lot of people that want to be speakers don't necessarily assume that they have to be writers but a lot of people I work with either have a blog or want to blog and it's amazing to be able to get your voice, even if you're not a great writer. I am not a great writer and I get people emailing me saying you're a wonderful writer and I'm going no I just sort of write what I think and that sort of is fine with me. But it's kind of amazing to get the feedback to see how other people actually hear you and it's a really, really cool thing.

HUGH CULVER: Very good. When you think about what does a keynote speaker do, just as an example of one career choice, but the keynote speaker is constantly telling stories. That's what they do. They are using segues, they're using models, but essentially they're stringing together a series of stories and messages and the better that we can get at creating an argument that links to a story, well the better we can be on stage. But where are we going to be able to practice? Well you can't get up on stage all the time and after awhile you're partner at home or your kids get tired practicing so it's better just to write.

Julie Cameron, the author of The Artist Way, she calls it your morning papers and she recommends 500 words every morning and what's interesting is she doesn't say write an article or even a blog. She says just write 50 words every morning. I find that it's just really fun to, I have a little discipline that I always use which is to write down the two or three things I have to do in the morning before 7:00 because I am always up at 5:00, so in those two hours and so one of them will be either a blog or an article or finishing a proposal, but it's always writing.

So I am never on my email until usually 9:00 in the morning. So I've had four hours of family time, exercise time, writing time before I actually look at my email. I'm very strict about that because, again email is someone else's agenda. What's important to me is that I have a successful day that starts first thing in the morning. So one of the things I am always doing is I am always writing in the morning.

Now if I have to write something really that I want to publish, it's not just thoughts, like it's an article or a blog or a report, then I will always draft the day before and that I find is a great way for me. My brain seems to be able to process it. I self critique myself and then when I sit down in the morning, in about 45 minutes to an hour, I can finish that whole process because I didn't have to start from scratch. I went through and I edited, changed and cleaned it up and then I am really happy with it. So that two-stage process really helps me a lot.

JAIME TARDY: I do the exact same thing. It's amazing starting with something when you're ready to go. It's really, really cool. Awesome. So tell me, you've got tons of information, first of all, in this interview, which I really appreciate, but also you have got a bunch of free seminars coming up, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

HUGH CULVER: Listen, I would recommend this and I know you are doing this as well, Jaime, but I would really recommend this to entrepreneurs is probably the best marketing that I have done in the last two years is to offer free content to clients. I mean it's a whole new way of advertising, exactly what you're doing, Jaime, is letting clients try you on. It used to be that everything was behind the velvet curtain, right? You would have your website and it would say here's why I am great and here's what I have and maybe even here is my prices but you can't have any of it until you pay me.

Or we would mail out a brochure. Here's all the great stuff I have but you can't have any of it and if you look at realtors, a lot of these people spend a fortune on advertising who they are but they do very little to get you to test out their material. So what I did two years ago was start doing free webinars and then we started moving to teleseminars and so what I've created now is a series. They happen about every three weeks throughout the year and what I am focusing on is how to work smarter and live better.

So these are greats for entrepreneurs because in 45 minutes I will share specific techniques that I use or I've shared with my clients and I can prove the results where people have moved from being busy to being effective. The whole idea of work smarter, live better is to lead an effective business that makes you a lot of money where you can have a lot of fun and to lead an effective life where you can be incredibly healthy and do whatever you want. Effective is different than efficient. Efficient is like time management. Do stuff faster. Effective is doing the right stuff.

JAIME TARDY: Big difference, huge difference.

HUGH CULVER: So what I focus on is what do you do with this to do list that has a life of its own? What do you do with all these options in your life? What do you do with systems that don't serve you and how do you create systems that do serve you? So what I have found is that by using these really simple goal setting procedures, systems and habits, I am able to get a lot more done in a day in a week than I ever was before and I am really not working any harder. I'm just working a lot smarter. So that's what we'll be sharing and they're 45 minutes long and people can sign up for them by going to my website which is hughculver.com/offer.

JAIME TARDY: Nice. I'll definitely put a link too so that way anyone who is just on my site can just click over it and go to it too. That's awesome. So the last question that I always ask is what's one action that listeners can do this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

HUGH CULVER: This is really something to have some fun with. In every study that I have done with my clients, whether it's a live audience or surveys, I have been able to prove, with few exceptions, that everybody is a morning person. We are morning people.

JAIME TARDY: No way, really?

HUGH CULVER: We really are.

JAIME TARDY: You talk about 5:00 a.m. and I am going wow, 5:00 a.m. okay.

HUGH CULVER: Or get up at 6:00 or 7:00.

JAIME TARDY: I get up at 7:00 not too bad.

HUGH CULVER: In fact, we have these cycles of every 90 minutes throughout the day and so the first cycle starts as soon as you wake up. For every 90 minutes of the day you have this high and then you follow by a low. The things I would recommend to any entrepreneur, if you really want to become a millionaire, is you have to reexamine what you do with the first 90 minutes of your day. If you're the kind of person that works from home, then that would be the first 90 minutes in the morning.

For some of you, you need to get up earlier because what's happening is you're missing out on some of the best times of the day. So staying up late and watching Netflix or some DVD is probably not going to serve you as much as getting a little bit more sleep and getting up early in the morning and using that precious time. So the thing I would recommend is reexamine the first 90 minutes of your day. Now, if you make your income at the office, then I would absolutely recommend what you do for the first 90 minutes of the day in the office and so what you need to be looking at is how is it I can reduce the amount of interruptions and distractions?

How is it that I can get done what's on my agenda, the things that are important to me first? And how is it that I can create the highest level of achievement in those 90 minutes? Like what do I have to do, so I am thinking to myself "wow" like I got a big thing done - like I've got this big cross through the list of this blog posting, client proposal, reaching out to my network. draft email, draft teleseminar line; like what did I get done that I could never have gotten done any other time of the day? That's what I would recommend.

JAIME TARDY: That's huge. We procrastinate or we at least hesitate before we do those big things. Like the book Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. Like we hesitate because it seems so big or so hard so that's a great idea to definitely put it in the beginning. It's funny you say that because I started getting up earlier recently too and I want to, have you ever heard of an iPhone app called sleep cycle?

HUGH CULVER: No.

JAIME TARDY: You know why? It's actually supposed to wake you up during your lightest phase of sleep within like a half an hour increment. So it has actually been working great because usually my children wake me up early in the morning and I'm like so exhausted, but I think it's most of the time because I am waking up in deep sleep. But now my app has been waking me up which has been making a huge difference and now I am starting to become more of a morning person even though I like to say that I am a night person. So I think that's huge to say that people probably are morning people but don't want to admit it, i.e. me.

So tell me where we can find more information. I know we can get your offers there. Are you on Facebook or Twitter or are you online anywhere else that we should know about?

HUGH CULVER: Everywhere. They can go to Hugh Culver on Facebook. So get again Hugh Culver on Facebook and Twitter it's Hugh_Culver and everywhere. The best thing is just go to my website and all the links are there. Just go to hughculver.com and all the links are there. And ask me questions too because I really, I'm making a big shift in the next two years. So I have committed to making quite a big shift where I'll be working a lot more with people who are keynote speakers, seminar leaders, coaches and authors. In fact, in one week, my first yearlong program starts. So this is really, I'm quite excited. It's a new venture for me.

So on top of everything else that I do in my work and I am calling it Team Coach and so we have a group of very experienced and very inexperienced keynote speaker, seminar leaders, authors and coaches coming together and we're going to work together for one year. So this is my way of not only improving their businesses dramatically but as I move more into that market, I want to be able to prove that I know what I am talking about. So I want to be able to use them to show other people that as a guy that has been there for 18 years, has created multimillion dollar companies, purportedly a business expert, I want to be able to say, "Well look, I can do this with your company." So that's my new venture and it starts in one week.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. Now is that just local or can anyone do it anywhere?

HUGH CULVER: This first one, we're actually holding it in the beautiful city that I live in. I live in a city called Kelowna which is a very popular tourism city internationally. We're very well known for our wineries, golf courses and ski hills.

JAIME TARDY: So it will be fun to visit there.

HUGH CULVER: So we're holding it in a multimillion dollar show home right here in Kelowna and people are flying in from all over western Canada for it so I am really excited. People can learn more about that by going to hughculver.com/coach. So very exciting. I mention it for two reasons. Obviously I would love to know if people are interested in that program or how I can serve them but also because I want to use it as an example. I think that as entrepreneurs there is nothing more valuable than to keep reinventing yourself.

When you do that, not only do you keep your business interesting, but you've got, there's a certain energy that comes from that next book, that next program, this new model, this something. There's a certain energy that comes from that the client likes, the client values and the client sees. It's a reason to get out of bed in the morning. For me, that's what I am working on right now and I am really excited. I'm super excited about the response that this has gotten. I had no idea how popular this would be. So this is definitely going to be something I will be developing more as I go through the year.

JAIME TARDY: Perfect. Thank you so much, Hugh. I really appreciate it. I loved having you on today. I hope everybody enjoys it and emails Hugh and lets you know any questions and stuff like that too because he has been a great resource for me too so I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on.

HUGH CULVER: My pleasure. It has been really fun.

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Tags: business strategy, business tips, Hugh Culver, millionaire interview, speaker career

Categories: All, Best Life, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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