Leveraging Systems to Steal Back Your Time and Regain Freedom In Your Biz with Korbett Miller

Serial entrepreneur – Korbett Miller

Korbett Miller is an authority on creating, monitoring and optimizing systems that transform businesses. He shares easy to implement advice on how to create the crucial systems all entrepreneurs must have to intelligently leverage their time and maximize their freedom.

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• De-Mythify by Korbett Miller
• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker

Check out De-Mythify.com and MMAA.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 excited to have Korbett Miller on the show. One of the things I love about him is that he has a website at MMA.com because he does mixed martial arts, which everyone knows that I adore, but he also has a brand new book out called "De-Mythify" which talks about systems and Google Drive for business owners so I'm really excited to have him on. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Korbett.

Korbett: Thank you, Jaime. Great to be here.

Jaime: I looked at it and I was like "Oh, he loves martial arts too!" I don't know why I get so excited but it's very interesting that you're on the business side of it. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into that and how you made it so successful? Because I know a ton of people who want to be instructors and have horrible businesses.

Korbett: For me, I've always been a martial artist, ever since I was a kid. I remember when "The Karate Kid" movie came out and it just so happened, back in Michigan where I'm from, that there was this great martial arts school with this fantastic instructor and as soon as I got to the school I just loved the culture - I loved learning new things but I loved the philosophical part of it too, so even back then I knew that I would wind up doing martial arts as a profession so it was really about being able to get myself to being a black belt and working my way through school and I actually moved to Seattle to work in one of Bruce Lee's original student's schools - I was recruited out of college. So I graduated from college on Saturday and I left for Seattle on Monday and lived like a monk in the back of this person's martial arts school. He was a travelling instructor, I went to Europe with him and did seminars there, I just had this great lifestyle. I have a business degree, which has helped me somewhat, but it's really given me a way of thinking about how I really want my life to be, to construct my school and the practice of martial arts. I still train, I still compete, I still learn and I love doing this. I'm going to be on the mat as soon as I'm done with this interview. I'm going to run to my school, strap my black belt on and train some more. But really, the martial arts thing was the impetus for me to do the book because I have friends, just like you were saying, who have schools and we literally run around in our pajamas having fun for a living. One friend has a school that's "more successful" than mine and he hates it and I was like "What's going on? How can someone do this job, that's a great lifestyle business, something they absolutely love doing, and then wind up one day absolutely hating it," and when I started to drill down into that, it's that I really started to create systems, and a lot of martial arts schools have done that but I've done it with some new technology that really helps people to be able to do that. My mission now is to help other entrepreneurs, even if they have nothing to do with martial arts, helping other small business owners with that Achilles heel of developing systems using 21st century tools.

Jaime: I love that. I want to get a good handle on this because even my very first mentor was a third degree black belt. I don't know what it is but I'm surrounded by mixed martial arts all the time! I know you also do rare breed horses and real estate and other things but what does a successful karate school make? Because a lot of people think it's a lifestyle business and it doesn't make any money. I remember my old karate school got a lot of things for free and they weren't making any money.

Korbett: Just like with any endeavor I think there are outliers. I make what a good attorney makes so I have no problems with that. I think it's really how you spin the profession - we do a lot with youth in our martial arts program and, for us, I think one of the reasons people are attracted to martial arts, people like Anthony Bourdain or Ashton Kutcher or Robert Downey Jr., these people who can anything they want with their life but they're attracted to martial arts and it's because there's this growth mindset that goes with the martial arts environment. That's maybe one of the reasons I've forayed into different things, to be an entrepreneur on different levels, but I've had my school for 18 years and I had MMA.com before there was MMA - it's Miller's Martial Arts Academy.

Jaime: Oh my gosh, I never would have known! That's hilarious!

Korbett: It's the truth but some people think that, which is fine, but at the same time there are martial arts schools that are like us and there are some martial arts schools that dwarf mine in terms of numbers, what they do in their gross and their net, but that's another entrepreneurial myth as well. The title of my book is "De-Mythify", it's taking this idea of what a successful business is and what success means to you. I think people want to be wealthy on a lot of different levels. Financial wealth is one thing, and I'm sure you've met people through the podcast and found that sometimes people who are really wealthy are also really unhappy and so people want a lifestyle that goes along with that, where the business doesn't bother them too much. In the CIA hallway I think it says something like "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Well, in the small business world that could be rewritten to "You shall know the system and the system will set you free," because if you want to be free in a business you have to know the systems and I think that's the difference between a successful hardware store, a successful martial arts school or a successful plumber or a successful solo-preneur that's going out on their own and creating things.

Jaime: I agree with you 1000%. My mentor said the first book you ever have to read is the "E-Myth" and it's all about systems and how important they are because I don't think, especially as you start out as a solo-preneur or you're just doing whatever the career is on your own, you don't think of that. You're a technician, as they say, just chugging along. Just like with martial arts, that's what I see a lot of people doing, even if they're martial artists, they say "This is what I do," and they forget about the business side or the systems side and they drive themselves crazy. So give us what you think, the premise of the book, what should we do as business owners to have better systems? We know we need them but how do we get better systems? It's hard.

Korbett: Like I said before the interview, it's a great time to have a podcast like this because for a small business owner the New year's resolution is very often "I'm going to get more organized; I'm going to create more systems in my business," and you were talking about the "E-Myth", my book is really a homage to that but it's taking that idea and using the tools of the 21st century because I've had my school for 18 years, I've been in the same spot and I think the people at the school think I'm a Jedi because I know if they haven't washed their hands when they come out of the bathroom because I can hear the water going through the pipes because I've been in the space for so long but the point is that I was trying to create systems when there was no internet and we didn't even have e-mail so we would create systems on paper and then someone would lose the checklist or they would complete the checklist and they would lose the notebook. Here's how old I am - we used to create systems and put them on VHS tapes, not even DVDs. We would tape over an episode of "Friends"! The point is that, nowadays, if you could have told me back then that there is going to be a technology where I call it "camming" your business. A "cam", for anyone who's mechanically inclined, is a part in an engine or a piece of machinery that translates rotational movement into a straight line. So the feeling that a lot of entrepreneurs have is spinning their wheels - if you can CAM your business - Create, Assign and Manage your system - because I think a lot of people do that, they create a system and that's great, you've created something, but now you have to use it, so you have to find the right person to assign it to and then you have to find a way to manage it. With Google Drive it's crazy - you can create systems with video, with charts, with pictures, with a checklist and then you can assign it on a calendar, you can e-mail it to a virtual assistant. The actual teaching of that system is done for you because it's pre-made and once you assign it you can manage it remotely and that's the fantasy of the entrepreneur, is to have wealth of place. That's something that entrepreneur's want but they don't really have because they're tied to their business. Google Drive can free you up. I can be anywhere - I can check my systems if I go to San Diego to train with my professor, I can check it on my phone, I can check it on a computer, I can do it anywhere. You can check your systems with this technology quicker than you can read a social media feed, you just look from left to right to see if they're done. That's exciting for me because I really feel that it's about having a tool and then having a structure in order to do that and there are things that I talk about in the book and in my course, I call it the Magic Hour. If you're a small business owner you should be devoting at least an hour a day to CAM-ing your business - creating, assigning and managing those systems and getting around those business process activities. If you can do that, I think that builds up freedom. There was this great podcast that Tim Ferriss did a couple of weeks ago talking about decision fatigue, this idea that it's like hit points and the more decisions you make throughout the day, the less self-discipline you have. There was evidence from these people, a scholarly study where they would have people make decisions throughout the day with a control group that didn't make decisions and then they gave them a standard self-discipline test where they plunged their hand into a bucket of ice cold water to see how long they could hold their hand underneath. The people who had made all of the decisions could only hold their hands in the water for 40% as long. If you don't have systems in your business, you're making those decisions all day, it's relying on you, and then people wonder why, when they come home, they don't want to exercise or they're crabby with their family. It's death by a million paper cuts and if you don't have systems that's what you're going to suffer from in a business.

Jaime: I know that's really, really important. I actually use Google Drive in the business that I have. I have an online business manager and an assistant but the thing is, though, that I'm not sure that I'm using them optimally. I love systems and I help people create systems. We have spreadsheets, we have all that sort of stuff, but you said you could use video and that sort of thing so tell me about how you go about it. If you were to start at square one with Google Drive, what do we do in order to create one of these systems?

Korbett: I explain this in my book - I employee teens, it's their first job. I have professionals who have worked with me for 15 years but I also have kids where it's their first job. I tell this funny story about how I thought I had a systems-driven school and I was trying to teach a teen boy how to clean a toilet. That's a simple system, right?

Jaime: Google it, right?

Korbett: Pretty much! So I had a paper system where it was like "Go in, clean the bathroom, clean the toilet," and I was getting complains from the families about the bathroom cleanliness and I was like "But I've got a system?" I went in there and it was like "No?" so I asked him "Did you clean the toilet?" and he was like "Oh, yeah," so I look and there's some blue stuff in the toilet bowl but the rest of it is grungy and icky so I was like "Okay, maybe I'm not being specific enough." I think the first thing for anyone is to really understand their business process. The toilet story is just indicative that sometimes the map is not the territory so you have to understand that sometimes it needs to be very specific. One of my pet peeves is re-teaching a system that I've already taught someone. I've had my business for 18 years and it's really just the same year over and over again in our school but for me to reteach someone how to clean a bathroom or how to clean our mats or how to do an info call or how to do inventory or how to enter someone into our database, that's something I don't particularly like doing. You can take a YouTube video and embed it - that's an option in the Google forms - to teach someone your inventory system and you can literally walk around with your smartphone and show them how to take inventory, how to enter it into your system and add screen captures off your computer as well. You're lifting that task off of your brain and assigning it to someone else. The "E-Myth" is a great book and that's what I'm patterning my book and my course on but it's really a 30,000 foot view of what business life is like.

Jaime: Yeah, and it's how do you actually implement it. It's one thing to say "You need systems, this is kind of what they're like, this is how they can help you."

Korbett: "This is an org chart."

Jaime: Exactly.

Korbett: An org chart doesn't help me teach that 14 year old kid how to clean the toilet. So this is a much more micro view of the small business world and how to be able to get those systems off of your mental space to free you up to do the important thinking in your business. Again, I think that's what a lot of entrepreneurs crave ' they want to be able to do that but they've done it before and it's kind of clunky and it's hard to do. Google Drive, especially when you're talking about systems, is like something out of a science fiction book for me because you're telling me that I can take a video on my phone and upload it onto this page and it shows someone how to do something and then they can click on it when they've done the task. You can put Yes/No questions on there, you can put questions, gradients, it can be a drop-down menu.

Jaime: So it's forms, okay. So they have to enter information? That makes more sense, because I was wondering how you were using Google Drive. My people mostly just get into the spreadsheet and add to it but you're saying they can even go to a website, like MMA.com/toilets and put in all the information.

Korbett: I have it even better - I have it on a tablet for my staff. So they'll sit down and go "Monday" and there's my face and what you're going to do on Monday, this is the beginning part of your shift, and they submit it and then it's the end part of your shift. The other part, that I show in the course, is how to manage it, so on my desktop I have my "Monday" folder. I right click on the folder and it opens up the results of that form in a spreadsheet so I have four different spreadsheets for my four employees and I see how Monday went and in the time it took me to say that I can critique what they did.

Jaime: Because you can just look at it in a glance and know what's going on.

Korbett: I look for "No's. It's predominantly Yes/No questions so I just look for where it says "No" and I just check on those and I've managed my staff's work - as opposed to driving to the school, looking for the notebook, "You didn't do that right. Can you go back and look at the video?" It's just an easier way of doing it. I'm coaching people in the martial arts community and some people who are not in the community and it's just amazing what we can do in a short amount of time to create this flywheel effect. I think that once entrepreneurs do that, that's when they start to feel that they're getting momentum and a direction, if you will.

Jaime: How do you figure out what those systems are? You go into someone's business and if it's another MMA school it makes a lot of sense when they're talking to you because you already know the systems that are working for you, but for whatever the different business is, they're sitting there and they're like "Okay, great, this week - make systems. Now what?"

Korbett: Exactly, there's a blank piece of paper there, I get it. I think, as much as businesses are different, there are similarities. That's coming from my business background, as scholarly as that is. A PNL from my school is going to look pretty much like a PNL from a roofing contractor. There are inputs and outputs and it's really examining what a customer looks like - and that can be an internal customer or an external customer - you're building a recipe for that business. How does a customer get in contact with you? Is it online, is it on the phone? How does that transaction happen? What happens in that process? And then you break that down. What's also kind of neat is that when people start to create these systems it allows you to test and have a baseline, whereas if it's just up to someone's personality, someone's personality is running your systems. There should be an optimized way that you're able to do that and we can't even have that conversation until we've created that baseline. So that's what I do with a client - I work with them and walk them through what a customer will look like as they walk through these steps and then what I do with my clients is we start talking about the daily work as the micro view and we pull out to monthly work and then quarters and then yearly goals and we create systems within the drive for that and it's really neat and that's very satisfying to me because I love my life, I love being able to train martial arts, I love our horses even though two of them, babies, were weaning last night and kept me up most of the night. I love being an entrepreneur but I also know that a lot of people can get burned out - it's not always rainbows and unicorns, there are always going to be challenges, but I think it's like sandpaper: the more decisions you have to make ' and if your systems don't think for you, you're going to be making those decisions - you're going to wind up waking up one day and what you initially loved doing, like running around in your pajamas and choking people like I do, you're going to be like "What? I hate this!" So it's a challenge.

Jaime: It's one of those things - as a business owner, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. You're my fourth interview today because I batch things - that's my system - and when you come you we send you to a scheduler, the scheduler books you however many months in advance - I think it was six months for you, or something crazy like that, because I'm so booked - so we've got certain types of systems, which I think is great, but the thing that I see, and it probably works very well for you because you've been doing this for 18 years, is that things pop up as you go. When you sit down and go "Okay, I'm going to create some systems," you can't create every system right now, especially if you have staff and need to catch them up.

Korbett: Of course.

Jaime: So if you were to give me a "This month" action plan, maybe something you do with your clients, what should I do for step one, step two and step three so that I'm not super overwhelmed. It's the 80-20 rule - I want to know the 20% that I can do this month that will really make a huge difference to my business.

Korbett: I think, first off, for anyone, it's really about being a student of your business. No social media, no phones on, no nothing. Open up an old school notebook and start writing out what it is you want from this business. That was the impetus for me with the book - my mother-in-law, who was a Jungian psychologist and a CPA, helped me with my original business plan so much that my original business plan wasn't just about "How much money do you want to make?" it was "What do you want your lifestyle to be?" I think that journaling is so powerful and for a small business owner it gives you so much depth of being able to think about what you should be doing. Forget systems - really, what should you be doing to make a difference in your business? Again, I think we can get so overwhelmed that we forget that there are basics to our business, no matter what it is, and the process of writing and journaling can really help, even if it's just 10-15 minutes a day. I think that's something that anyone can do in the small business world. If you're not, if you're trying to leave a corporate gig, start those plans now - sketch out what your ideal is and that will help you to get clear on what exactly it is that you want. I don't think you can do that enough.

Jaime: I love that. I love having people on the show when they reconfirm the stuff that I do. This is my 2015 journal. Every year I get a new journal and this is my 2015 one.

Korbett: Nice, hilarious!

Jaime: And this is the business one, not the personal one. I don't do it exactly like you do but that's a great idea, I should probably do 10 or 15 minutes a day about what's working for me, what's not working for me, and just jot down some stuff. Business changes, I'm sure you know - 18 years, your business has probably changed and tweaked a lot along the way, even though it's still the same business model.

Korbett: The skeleton is still there, for sure.

Jaime: Exactly. So once I start doing that, what do I do with it? How do you take that information and make it super actionable?

Korbett: If you're in the business, it's really understanding the flow. There is a flow for any business. Again, it's a PNL thing. With martial arts schools I say "PNL" and they're like "What? Is that a move?" It's really getting an understanding of what your business is and the flow of a customer. Then you can start to identify and CAM it. What's going to be the needs? What is your vision in terms of employees? A lot of people hire employees thinking that they're going to solve their problems and they just multiply them so I think that's part of the CAM process. Again, I call it the Magic Hour and that's the hour that you devote to planning in your business, Creating, Assigning and Managing. Once you have a flow identified, how someone moves through your business, then you can go back through and try to make it better. When people are creating systems they sometimes feel that it's kind of stifling creativity, like making robots. It's not really, because if someone has an idea about how to make the system better, sit down with them, and that can be part of that process as well. You can include your staff in that process of what's working for you - get it to where you can share it with someone else who is going to need to be in that job at some point, then you'll have that system tight. So, again, it's making the flow actionable through that CAM process and that's the lens that you view the business through - Create, Assign and Manage. Having been in business 18 years, January is always the same sort of month for us and July kind of is too so as you get that experience you know what to expect and then it's about really thinking and I think that's part of that, the journaling process where you can go back through. I changed something that I did this year that made a huge difference to our bottom line and it wasn't that I was working harder, it was just one of those blank notebook times where I said "Okay, I'm going to shift this, I'm going to raise this price, I'm going to lower this," and all of a sudden we came out with the best year we've ever had in 18 years. You can do that but I think you can't be caught in the thick or thin things with your business because me teaching someone to clean a toilet is not as important as me teaching someone how to be dynamite on the floor or working with my instructors to bring the best techniques back to my mat and make future generations or martial arts champions - that's what I need to do.

Jaime: How many people do you have working for you now?

Korbett: I have three full time employees and then I have about four or five junior staff.

Jaime: And how many hours are you teaching? I know what certain schools are doing and sometimes it's the teacher teaching a bazillion classes and burning themselves out and other people going there and the main instructor leaves and it's just their people. How often are you there and is it by choice?

Korbett: I'm a very non-traditional martial arts teacher but at the same time I think there are certain structures in the school that are important to have. I don't work with a lot of the super young students or the super inexperienced new students; I work with my advanced students. One of the reasons is that my kids go to competitions and they do really well in competitions and I still love that. There are some owners that are absentee owners but I'll get on the mat, today it might be a little bit later, but normally about 5:30-8:00 at night. That's my day on the floor.

Jaime: But business-wise!

Korbett: Business-wise I'm always doing stuff and I'm always trying to improve things, my curriculum and how I approach competitions and my comp team and how I might be able to spin students up. Especially with jujitsu, there's so much great technology out there that's being invented every day.

Jaime: I want to dive a little bit into the systems of the martial arts and hopefully people can take that as an example. What are some of the top systems that you use? Yes, clean toilets definitely makes sense because you have a physical location.

Korbett: There are six systems - I work with school owners and the conversation we always have is about these six systems in a martial arts school. I don't care if it's John Bouchard, who has giant schools all over Maryland, or a school owner who's struggling with 20 students. You have an info call system, you have an introductory lesson system, an extension system, a retention system, a marketing system and an upgrade system, if you do upgrades in your school. So those are the six systems. When I speak to a school owner, that's the lens that I talk through, but you can extrapolate that into any other business. If someone calls a roofing contractor and they want a bit on their roof, that's an information enquiry. The introductory lesson is somebody going out and bidding on a job. It's this flow that you go through in the business. Again, it's really using that as a lens to focus someone's effort and energy on that they're doing. I think the most important part of my business education was when we had things like business policy class and we'd have case studies from the Harvard Business Review and we had to give these solutions. They were single solution case studies so there was actually a right answer to what was going on and we didn't have the internet back then so we actually had to think and use our business brains and that was the most useful thing for me at business school, that idea of being able to process and solve problems.

Jaime: Can you break one of those systems down? There were a couple where I didn't understand the wording for them. Can you break one of those down so that I know what it looks like and what your Google Drive system looks like too?

Korbett: Well some of them are single systems and some of them are a battery of systems that you need to have. Some schools don't do some of those systems; some people do not do upgrades at all in their academy. Business, unless it's a franchisee, there's some levity and there's some leeway in terms of your personality entering into it. Like for an information enquiry, if someone makes a phone call,  that's pretty standard - on mine, there's a video of me doing an info call and there are sections within that, like the meet and greet, so that would be me "Hi, this is Korbett Miller. Thanks for calling Miller's Martial Arts Academy. How can I help you?" That's the meet and greet. Then they can input information about that info call underneath. Then, the next part would be where I paint the picture of our martial arts school - "Oh, well our martial arts school is about far more than just kicking or punching or doing throws or grappling. Our martial arts school is really a finishing school. We talk about things like grit, self-discipline, respect, empathy. Those are the most important parts of martial arts training for someone who's 4-12 years old and our school really has a very well developed life skills program that helps students to understand what martial arts is at a very deep level. That's what our school is about." So that's me in the video, then there are headers underneath that, that they can follow along with when they're doing an info call. There are little parts to that. Then, when they hit "Submit", I can see on the spreadsheet how that info call went and I aggregates onto my folder so I can see all the results and what's going on at the school.

Jaime: That's huge and can be implemented by anyone who's getting enquiries for anything. I think that's awesome. So, as you're going through, that's the management side, you've told the staff, they practice it, they make sure they're doing okay and then all your management skills are looking at that every day and making sure they're going okay. Is that how management goes?

Korbett: That would be the best case scenario. Again, it's that whole idea that the map is not the territory. Sometimes your instructions are not as clear as you think they are. It also gives you a barometer to see if that system is being implemented in the correct manner, so then you can go back to them and say "You seem to be losing people when you're asking them to come in for an introductory lesson. What's going on at that point?" Then you can have this conversation with them. That's a big part of it because, again, I have those six systems in place at my school and I don't really have to do that so a lot of my CAM time, my Magic Hour, is looking at and analyzing the stats of what's going on in the business, so that's the paradigm shift for more mature businesses. I feel old when I say that! This is my grey hair moment, because I have been teaching students when they were 4-5 years old 18 years ago, so when they bring their son or daughter into my school to be a student of mine I'm going to go to the side of the mat and cry for a while and then come back out and teach them a good class.

Jaime: It will be soon!

Korbett: That's a part of it. I don't browbeat staff - some of my staff have been with me for over ten years so we have a good relationship but there's an accountability with that as well. There are ups and downs, like in any business, but when you have the system it gives you a very solid footing to make sure that things are done in a way in which you want them to be done, as the owner.

Jaime: I think it's huge that you said you have to tweak it afterwards. I remember when we were in grade school we had to give the instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without looking at the person. So you're not looking at them and you go "Okay, grab the peanut butter jar and open it," and they're like "Well, how do you open it?"

Korbett: Right, there's peanut butter everywhere.

Jaime: "Put the peanut butter on it.", "On what?" It's crazy the amount of detail you need in these systems because sometimes people don't know, they're not coming from the same frame of reference. Do you have an implantation strategy? Do you put the basics together and run through it a couple of times with different people? How do you know you've done the right thing?

Korbett: I'm a coach, a teacher, and I pride myself on being a pretty good coach.

Jaime: You could make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich like nothing, couldn't you?

Korbett: It's the same thing to me - an arm lock or a choke or a throw or a kick - it's really about coaching people and this is the way I coach my staff. I do it, we do it, then you do it, then you teach someone. So I, we, you, then they teach. If you go through that process of coaching someone in your system it's almost foolproof that they're going to have it. For me, the "I" part is look at the video, look at the system. There it is, there's a painted picture, there's me asking for the introductory lesson, everything is spelled out for you. Then we do it - so ring, ring, "Miller's Martial Arts Academy," and I might say "You want to do that a little bit differently. I'm not going to coach you; you do it. Now you're going to go and teach someone to do that system." That can be cumbersome in many ways but I think it's frontloading the coaching. It helps you so that you won't be spending a lot of time doing touch ups if the person is actually teachable with the system. For me, that's the way that I do it and I have pretty good results and the people that I work with have a similar methodology, being martial arts coaches. In the "Outliers" book they talk about 10,000 hours - I've taught 20,000 martial arts classes over my lifetime and I have more questions than answers still. You get certain ways of structuring material that you think might be helpful and that repetition platform for teaching a system can be very helpful for someone.

Jaime: How has having the mixed martial arts background helped you as a business owner? The people that I know in your industry use the things on the mat off the mat really well and I wonder how you pull the stuff that you're doing in martial arts every day into your business. Can you give us some insights? I think some people get a little too stressed and a little too crazy in business in general.

Korbett: Well I'm going to do the commercial for everyone to do martial arts but one of my instructors in Australia has this great saying - a ballerina doesn't walk down the street knocking into people, knocking over garbage cans and clumsily walking around. When they walk down the street they do it with grace and beauty and a martial artist is the same way - you should be self-disciplined, you should have a growth mindset, you should be humble, you should be always looking to learn. Those are things that I look for in my staff and I try to portray that. One of mentors always said that the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement so I'm always looking for ways to make myself better. I'm hungry to look at things through a different prism so that I am able to help people. I love my life, I've been married to the same person for the last 18 years, she's been part of my school from day one and we have this great relationship and division of labor and I get to go travel - I was in Thailand for two weeks a couple of years ago, I went to Europe, I get to go train and teach and do all of these things - and I love to be able to share that with people because I want people to enjoy that same freedom but at the same time my school produces great students. We produce great martial artists, people that have hardware to back it up; we have people that do great. A part of that is really have the mindset of a true martial artist. MMA is a moniker that sometimes has mixed messages in terms of objectifying and the craziness of all of that money being infused into that arena but the technology is just amazing and, for me, Bruce Lee, who was my instructor's teacher, was the first mixed martial arts person - he told people to stop doing forms, hang up a bag in their basement and punch it, and he was getting death threats back then. Robert Downey Jr. credits martial arts with his recovery, him being able to function and get out of that drug culture. Martial arts can do that for people, especially jujitsu. Josh Waitzkin, who wrote this great book called "The Art of Learning", was the subject of the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer" a few years ago. Josh is a chess grandmaster - if you know the movie, they're looking for this elusive chess champion and they find him. But if you fast forward, Josh Waitzkin works with one of the most sought after jujitsu instructors, Marcelo Garcia, and gets a black belt in jujitsu and he is as much a jujitsu as he is a chess person now. There's a reason it appeals to people who have brains that work that way because it's this nexus of having to predict and be in the present moment and to problem solve and to think things through and to have intensity and be able to titrate you mood. There are so many great things that martial arts can do for people, especially young people. If it hits the right person, it's magic.

Jaime: You're preaching to the choir for me - I got followed, probably about five years ago, when I did a speech in Vegas and thankfully there was somebody there, I ended up going to their room, but it was one of those things that freaked the heck out of me so I started karate a couple of weeks later and I loved doing karate, I did it for many years, but then, when I moved to Austin, I found a jujitsu club and it's way different, it's harder. I wasn't a fan of forms, I wanted to learn how to protect myself and fight. I got followed again about a month again from the grocery story - I don't know what the heck it is -' and the cops came, the grocery store people called the cops on him because he had followed a woman home before. The fun thing is that I was going to the grocery store because I injured my neck in jujitsu when we were rolling so I was there because I was fighting in Entrepreneur's Fight Club and the police were like "Maybe we should have let you?"

Korbett: Take care of things, right! It's interesting, the whole self-defense world versus martial arts is an interesting discussion too. There's a great book by a guy called Gavin de Becker and I always recommend this book to people that are interested in the dynamics of self-defense because there's a big tension between sports martial arts and self-defense martial arts. It's called "The Gift of Fear" and Gavin de Becker was an expert witness in many high profile cases and it's a great book, it's a quick read just because it's so riveting, but his whole premise is that fear is a gift that we have that has been deconditioned out of us as humans. We're the only animal walking the planet that, when it feels fear, will stay in a situation. If you try to sneak up on a squirrel, as soon as the squirrel feels fear, it runs, but humans will sit there and stay in that state. There are tons of examples of people learning to listen to that small voice in the back of their head that is really helpful in terms of understand the role of fear and how it can really be a great asset in terms of self-defense.

Jaime: Someone else just told me about that book earlier this week.

Korbett: Isn't that funny?

Jaime: One of my mentors.

Korbett: Yeah, it's a great book.

Jaime: I think that's highly recommended to people - not that we're pitching martial arts, but a lot of people in my fight club are people that I've interviewed - Tucker Max and Josh Lee, all of these guys that I've had on my show ' because they see the benefit in so many aspects of their lives, the growth-orientedness and how you can bring everything back to your daily life and to your business. One of the things we do every Sunday is talk about how everything we learned on the mat can relate to our business, because we're all business owners.

Korbett: Nice!

Jaime: That's something that's huge - everything seems to correlate somehow and it's an amazing thing, it's not just that I'm a business owner and when I'm doing my hobby I'm talking about my hobby, it all integrates, which I think it's amazing and it's awesome to have you on the show and talk about it and you totally get it.

Korbett: There's no stress buster like doing martial arts. Whether it's Maui Thai pad work or rolling with somebody. I feel most alive, mentally and physically, when I'm matched up against an awesome black belt that's just taking it to me and I'm doing everything I can to keep this guy off me. I've rolled with the best on the planet and it's always humbling to roll with someone like Professor Saulo, where you can't even get the needle to move off of zero. At 42 I was a brown belt in jujitsu and I won the world championships as a brown belt, senior three, but whenever I roll with Professor Saulo the needle doesn't even move off of zero. It's amazing, the layers to the onion that there are with people in the martial arts community and that's humbling, it's great, it's such a fun thing to have.

Jaime: There's always room for improvement, right? "I thought I was pretty good?"

Korbett: Forget about it.

Jaime: In business, too, there's always going to be somebody who's got that little thing that might be better and we can always learn from them instead of being like "Well, they suck." I see that a lot with people, especially people who don't like wealthy people - you might be listening to this show and being like "Oh, millionaires?" It's not about that at all; it's about learning from people who are in different spots to us. If they know more, why aren't we learning from them?

Korbett: Again, bringing it back to systems, bringing this back full circle, I think a lot of people passively listen to a podcast like yours and that's another reason for getting a notebook out, to be able to capture these ideas and implement them. During that Magic Hour, focus on taking something that you've gotten through your podcast, from interviewing these awesome minds that have made massive changes in their lives and in their business lives. To be able to implement just one or two of those things is gold. I don't know who said it, but in the 21st century we're drowning in information and starving for wisdom and I think the wisdom really comes from implementing what we see and hear and the simple notebook idea sounds kind of foo-foo but it's not, it's something that can make a huge difference.

Jaime: Awesome, that's perfect timing for us to wrap up. My last question is what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Korbett: I think it's really looking at the business and looking at it as a system, as an organic, living thing that you can nurture and create from nothing. It's one of the most empowering things in a small business to look around the four walls of your office and look at what you created from scratch. But to be able to do that takes some imagination and also some willpower to use the Magic Hour to find information that can really help you to make those dreams a reality. So, again, make creating and really using your notebook Magic Hour whatever you need to do to be able to flesh out and de-mythify that world that you're moving towards so that it's really something that you being with the end in mind so that it's something you're really satisfied with when you get there.

Jaime: I love that. So where can we find out more about you? Where can we find the book and the course and all of that fun stuff?

Korbett: I have a website - de-mythify.com and there's a free course on there that has me talking more about the whole CAM process. Then there's a more extensive course within there that will take people through. What I do is I actually teach you how to use Google Drive as a tool and take you through the creation part of the systems and show you exactly, mechanically, how you embed a video, how you create a checklist, how you create a text field, how you put a date in there. Then I show you how to assign it to people in a folder, on a calendar, in an e-mail. Then I show you how to manage it. Then, I also have a Magic Hour course where I come on your screen and we talk about what you're doing for your Magic Hour today. It's a month long course where I'm, Monday through Friday, taking you through and trying to create five systems for your business in one month. It's a lot of work but when people do that they feel like it's a weight lifted off of them and it's a great process. They can also look for my book on Amazon, it's "De-Mythify - Finding Freedom in Your Small Business."

Jaime: It's funny because I was like "What can we do in a month?" and that's exactly what your course does.

Korbett: You're creating five major systems - in other words, the major flow in your business that you go through - then you also work on five PIAs.

Jaime: What are PIAs?

Korbett: Pains in the asses. Things that you absolutely hate doing, like I don't like teaching people how to do the bathroom thing, so I delegate those PIAs to someone. Some people can probably do it a lot better than I can - my wife would probably say a lot of people could do the toilet thing better than I can - but the idea is that you're getting that momentum that people want. Especially at this time of the year people are looking at making the New Year's resolutions come true about organizing their business.

Jaime: I was just chatting with my wellness coach and he was like "So you hate doing the dishes? Find someone else to do them," and I was like "Well I kind of do sometimes," and he was like "Fix that."

Korbett: Okay.

Jaime: I know. Who knew, right? It's so funny, this happens all the time when you have PIAs and they come up over and over again. Imagine having this whole year without five of those, that's insane. Imagine how much better your year will go.

Korbett: Exactly. It's the longevity. That's why I still like having my business after 18 years. A lot of things change. I remember bringing my daughter in her car carrier to look at the space and now she's going to college next year. It's amazing how time flies.

Jaime: Time does fly. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Korbett. I really appreciate it.

Korbett: Thank you, Jaime. It was great speaking with you.

Jaime: I hope you have an awesome day. Take care.

Korbett: Thank you. Bye now.

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

Tags: Abundance, business freedom, Business Growth, Fear, Focus, Korbett Miller, Mental Clarity, millionaire interview, Mindset, productivity

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

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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