The Millionaire Master Plan with Roger Hamilton

Singapore-based author, educator and social entrepreneur – Roger Hamilton

Ever wondered why millionaires tend to contradict each other? Why does Warren Buffet play it one way and Richard Branson does the opposite? Roger Hamilton says its because we have different genuises. We need to know how to play to our strengths to know which path to take to our millions.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The Millionaire Master Plan by Roger Hamilton

Go to MillionaireMasterplan.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

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'm super excited to have Roger Hamilton on the show today. His vision aligns perfectly with everything that you guys are doing because he has a brand new book called "The Millionaire Master Plan". You need to make sure you take a look at it; it's really, really interesting. I read a ton of stuff about millionaires and yet this had some really cool information that I had never heard of before. You have your own systems, which I think is killer. He is also a futurist and a social entrepreneur and I'm really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Roger.

Roger: Great to be here, Jaime.

Jaime: This is really cool. I get sent books all the time - thanks to the people who send me lots of books - but your book, I was like "This is so cool!" and it aligns perfectly well with what we have so I was really excited to have you on. Why don't you give us the primer on what the book is about?

Roger: First of all, I kick it off with my story but then I have lots of stories about other people who have gone on their path as well and I'm probably the same as you - when I started off I read all of the books and what I found was that every book I read, no matter how convincing it was, there was someone who said the opposite. I'm not talking about authors who haven't been there - you could read Richard Branson's book and Richard Branson would say "Go and start a business and take risks" and then you could read Warren Buffett's book, who would say "Actually, you don't have to start q business at all - you can just invest in other people's businesses - and don't take big risks, just take small risks." So they're the total opposite of each other and I got confused by all of this information. In my mid-20s I started to realize that there was a bit of a map going on that people were following and they were following different paths so the book is all about a personalized path which is why I have this test at the beginning which finds out what your genius is and what your level is. It's like going to Paris - you'll still be lost if you have a map but you don't know where you are and where you want to go. The minute you know where you are and where you want to go you can use that map in such a way that you can say "I'm following Richard Branson, not Warren Buffett. He's going to the Louvre, he's going to the Eiffel Tower, that's where I want to go." Information is when you get overwhelmed with everything and we've now got all of the information in the world on our smartphones. Direction is when you're deleting 99% of the information so that you just know what to do to get from A to B and then you go and do that. So that's what the book is about.

Jaime: Which is one of the hardest things ever to do. I took the test at the beginning of your book. I've interviewed 150 millionaires and after each show they'll give me advice for my business and the funny thing is that they don't really know my business very well and yet they're great at giving advice. At the beginning I thought it was amazing so I would go this way and then I'd be over here. It was so bad, so that's why I think it's huge to know what your strengths are. How did you come up with that test?

Roger: I still remember my first year at Cambridge - I went to study architecture and I couldn't understand why, in the entire first year, we designed no buildings. Everything we did was studying humans. There's this saying by Goethe which is that "Architecture is like crystalized music. Every culture has a fishbowl; architecture becomes that bowl so if you don't understand people you won't understand how to design for people who are in your generation today," and by understanding people what was really clear is that every group of people were different and it wasn't like anyone was right or wrong. We learned all about psychology and sociology. I got so interested in that and I had no idea that later, when I started my entrepreneur career, it would come back and I would be like "Why is it that that person is so great with people but they hate the numbers, they're not following any of the things that people say you have to do about finances and they're still successful? Those people there hate the people and they don't want to meet people and everyone else is saying go out there and network and learn sales and marketing but they're not doing that and they've created a system which has made them a million." So what I did one day in my late 30s when I had different people that I was working with and mentoring - and I didn't start as a mentor, I started just sharing with other people, the same as you, just out of curiosity but then people started to say "Hey, you know this person and this person - can you spend some time in my business?" and that was before we even knew what mentoring was. So I was doing that, and the difference between writing a book or putting out a blog where you're saying "Here's a way of doing things" where you might get one out a thousand people writing back, saying "That's great advice" and you never hear from the other 999 so you don't even know whether what you're saying is actually working, and mentoring someone is that you're showing up every month so you know pretty quickly if you say "Go and try this, because it works for me," and then a month later they come back and they say "Well, I tried it and that sucked. It didn't work at all," and you're like "Huh, okay?" So I sat down on the beach one day in Singapore and I said "Well how many different types of people are there?" and when I started working that out and seeing what that looked like that's really where all of this came from but it wasn't just like five minutes sitting on the beach doing that, it was all of that history that I'd had experiencing different types of people through my entrepreneur career and also looking at all of these different tools like what Carl Jung created, the things that Plato had, the four archetypes within society, and in the I Ching it talks about the five different elements and I started to draw all of that knowledge into the kind of structures that we can use for modern day.

Jaime: Which is really, really cool. It must be really empowering to go through the history and be like "I can figure this stuff out too!" Because I think that's what's really interesting - usually we get tests or whatever but you created your own test based on everything that you've known from before and it was killer. I was really impressed with it. So being able to pull the pieces and then come up with something like this must be insane now that your book is in the world to have people give you their thoughts on you sitting on the beach creating something.

Roger: Yeah, it's really great. One of the things that people may be unaware of is that most personality testing, psychometric testing, which is used in the army, in the government and in all of these different companies, most of it came out of the work of Carl Jung at the beginning of the 20th century. He was the student of Sigmund Freud and what most people don't realize is that he was really inspired by the I Ching which is the Chinese book of changes, in fact he was the first to publish the I Ching in the west and the I Ching was actually relating different types to time. Now, if you're an entrepreneur, the most important thing is relating what you're doing to time because we know that our businesses go through cycles - from when you start it in the spring all the way through to when it gets to autumn and winter and everything's got to get bedded down - we know that industries go through cycles and we feel what happens when we have a winning formula that's working and then suddenly that winning formula stops working because the industry has moved on and that winning formula has become a losing formula and you have to reinvent yourself because your leadership or your marketing is not working anymore. What Carl Jung did, by creating these four seasons, which are like the four different types that I talk about, that became part of things like MBTI profiling, was that he spent the rest of his life on this idea of time. That's what he was so fascinated by and that's where things like synchronicity and collective unconsciousness, that he came up with, came from - and that's what entrepreneurs work with every day. But until I started creating things like the Genius Test and Wealth Dynamics there was no personality test that you could take which linked who you were to the cycle of time and I think that's why it's become so popular with entrepreneurs - because we have to do that, it doesn't help you if you're in the winter phase of your business, you have to know what to do differently if you go through the cycles so I think that's a really important difference in what I'm doing and probably why it's taken off so much.

Jaime: That's awesome. I've taken Myers Briggs multiple times and sometimes I'm an introvert and sometimes I'm an extrovert so putting it through time is insane because we're people and we change.

Roger: That's exactly right.

Jaime: So let's talk about your entrepreneurial journey. You said you read all of the books, you were really gung-ho, what was that beginning start for you?

Roger: The very first thing I tried was almost out of necessity. It was when I was at Cambridge and I was in my second year as a student there and my director of studies had told me that if I didn't work on my portfolio - because you have to have a big portfolio of stuff to get a good mark - if I didn't work on my portfolio over the summer then I was going to fail. I had gotten really into the rowing scene, because Cambridge is major in rowing, so I really wanted to go to rowing camp, which was a conflict straight away, and all of my friends had been to Greece and they were off on this amazing trip and they had jobs in London. I had come from a family living in Hong Kong, I had no job, I was like "Oh, man, how am I going to make some money out of this?" I was stuck in this situation and I did the thing accidentally that all entrepreneurs do which was I combined all of the challenges together into one big thing and I asked myself "How can I build my portfolio while being on rowing camp and making enough money to go on a trip to Greece'" and when I figured that out what I did the next day was I went out and started doing drawings of different parts of Cambridge and I put up a big sign that said "Genuine Cambridge architecture student. One drawing for "2, three drawings for '5," and I went and photocopied them and put them into freezer bags and they looked really great so that was the first business that I started. What I learned from that over the next couple of weeks is really what got me hooked on being an entrepreneur because what I really learned wasn't "Go and get a product and go out and sell it," what I really learned was the power of flow, which is something I talk about a lot. I'll give you an example of that - I would notice on the first day that if I was just drawing everyone was just walking by and nobody would actually stop to buy my drawings. If someone stopped just to look then two or three other people would look and invariably I would sell my drawing so I realized that if I stopped people I would sell in a way that I wouldn't if I didn't stop people. So I started stopping people by asking them for the time - they would stop, then other people would then stop, then they'd buy. Then I noticed that if I stopped a kid they had whole families so then five people were stopping so I stopped asking for the time and I started asking kids "Hey, do you want to watch me draw for a bit?" and they'd go "Sure. Mum and dad, can we stop?" so then they'd stop and a whole bunch of people would stop and I'd sell even more. I realized what Richard Buckminster Fuller meant about wealth being controlled time - flow and managing flow, whether it's coming from your website or your retail store, and slowing it down and speeding it up is how money is actually made. So that got me hooked and I think entrepreneurs are masters of time - if you're too far ahead of yourself or too far behind yourself you're out of that sweet spot, but the moment you get in that sweet spot the money starts showing up and all lack comes from going too fast or too slow, just like in a car, that's what's going to slow a car as well. So it's all about that pacing and that got me hooked and from there I just started one business after another. That sounds exciting but until I was about 25 years old every single business I started failed.

Jaime: Good to know.

Roger: I just want to let you know it was very, very painful and going to Greece was a long, distant memory. I was ready to give up by my mid-20s, it had just gone so horribly wrong. So I knew how to start, I just didn't know how to finish.

Jaime: Let's talk about the failures because I think that's important and everyone likes hearing about the failures. I think one of the things is that you can say you need to become a master of time - that sounds great, I would love to do that, but how do I do that? So let's go through your story of failing and how you figured that out.

Roger: So what happened with that business was that one thing lead to another where, instead of me making money from doing drawings for tourists, I ended up doing drawings for retail owners who had more money and I actually ended up with these maps all over England, called Cityscapes, and by the time I was 20 we had 40 different cities all over England and we were a multi-million dollar business so it was great.

Jaime: What?

Roger: Yeah, it was a wild story. But then what happened was I sold the business to a printing company and what was interesting about that story was that, in selling the business, the whole process of selling it was like "Hey, do you want to paid in one lump sum or do you want to be paid over time?" I could have been paid over time and never have to work again but I had no idea about culture, how to build a culture in a company, I had no understanding of how much my own personal individuality was driving the business so when I stopped applying myself to the business in the same way that whole business collapsed without me so I ended up getting nothing - in fact it was worse than that because there were things that I didn't understand in the details, like in order for me to sell the business I had gone from having a partnership where you have all of the liability yourself into a limited company which meant that the liability was in the company so I went from making all of this money that I owed the tax for personally and turned it into a company that I could then sell and the company collapsed under the new management and I ended up having to pay all of this tax which I didn't have the money for and it was just a nightmare going from having all of this money to owing all of this money and I didn't have it. That was my first failure where, if I was to sum it up, I had used my strengths, my genius was just what I called it, which was my creativity, and with creativity comes a weakness - it's like your Kryptonite - which was my lack of attention to detail. I can look back in hindsight and it wasn't my creativity which made me fail, it was the opposite - it was what I wasn't good at that made me fail. It's like I turned on this tap, which I was good at, but there was this leaky plumbing which I wasn't looking at so no matter how much I turned it on it was never going to come out of the other end anyway, so that was a big insight and pretty much every one of my failures was a different failure somewhere else in the plumbing.

Jaime: So before we go through the rest of the failures let's talk about the geniuses.

Roger: That could be a painful conversation!

Jaime: Everyone wants to know how bad it was! So tell us about the geniuses. I love the Kryptonite piece. I haven't heard it talked about like that before. Can you give us a rundown of that?

Roger: In summary, think of a square. In the square think of four seasons - spring, summer, autumn, winter - and the  fact that we all have a genius so, as the saying goes, we're all born a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it's going to go through its whole life believing its stupid. We are trained when we go to school to not focus on our strengths - like I'm great at being creative so I didn't spend that much time on art because I got an A pretty quickly on that so I spent the extra time that I would otherwise be doing art trying to study my French, which I was terrible at, so as a result of that I was getting Cs and Ds in the things I wasn't good at and I had to spend most of my time trying to improve on that instead of getting my As to be plutonium As. It was "You got an A, that's it, go on to other things." So we get trained in life to do things that feel like hard work. it's a bit like folding your arms where, without even thinking about it, I fold them left over right - I can do the opposite but it's uncomfortable, I have to think about it, it's hard work and I'll forget about it the next time I have to do it. So it's understanding that, for a lot of us, we're trying to learn things that we're not so good at and every one of us has something that we're not so good at. So the geniuses are, number one, the dynamo geniuses who are the spring energy, so think of people like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Richard Branson would get criticized for not doing numbers because he's dyslexic, he doesn't read a balance sheet, and Steve Jobs would be criticized for not being so good with his leadership skills but he's so awesome with his products he doesn't have to worry about that, other people can do that. So these are people who are very good at starting things and not so good at finishing things, so many people relate to that. Blaze geniuses are the Oprah Winfreys and Donald Trumps of the world, so it's all about the extrovert side now - they're really great at relationships and they build business models based on that, which is a very different type of business model. They're also good on the numbers side but they don't need to be. People like Jack Welch and Rudy Giuliani are all coming from that pot. Tempo geniuses are the opposite of dynamos - dynamos are head in the clouds; tempo geniuses are ear to the ground, they create value through innovation as opposed to through timing. So Warren Buffett and George Soros, people who are really good at timing. They don't have to create anything new - in fact they go out of the way from doing that because they've got their ear to the ground so they're actually watching things in a very different way. I'm a dynamo genius - I'm terrible at timing. I will always think that it takes five minutes to do a 15 minute journey so I'm late for every meeting. I'm in my 40s now and I still haven't figured that out. Then you have the steel genius which is the opposite of the blaze. So if blaze is right brain, steel is left brain. Think of the introverts, people like the Rockefellers, the Jeff Bezos, the Mark Zuckerbergs. They don't have to create a product, they don't have to have a TV show, because they've got such a great system that everyone is using instead. So these are the four different geniuses. They break out more into something I call Wealth Dynamics to create eight different profiles but, just as a summary, understanding those four you can suddenly see why a team, which it goes from Form, Storm, Norm, Perform has a different leader at each one of those four levels, how an industry, as it goes from spring to winter, has different people that become wealthy at different times, and how the reasons that people who are great at being creative are making most of their money outside of America because the market is in winter seasons right now so they're travelling to other parts, whereas the people who are coming into America, like the Chinese who have got money to invest, the Carlos Slims, the Warren Buffetts are making all of their money right now because of the winter season. Understanding that cycle is really powerful to be able to move forward as well. So that's really it in a nutshell, the four geniuses.

Jaime: I love that. I think it's funny that you're saying you're not great with time and yet you're the futurist and you talk about time for absolutely everything. So you're not good with management but you're good with everything else, like forward thinking, which is really impressive.

Roger: Just a point - we think about our attention and someone who is a dynamo genius has an attention like a hose - they're the ones that can create a jet, which means they can see 10 or 20 years into the future, so most futurists are dynamo geniuses because they're like "Wow, I can see 50 years ahead," but knowing where I'm going to be in five minutes is the difference between the jet and the sprinkler, which is the tempo genius. So we've all got a different frequency of time. You can call them geniuses, you can also call them frequencies, like frequencies on a radio station, where when you tune into a frequency you can hear music, and for me, in my 20s, I was just tuned to static and hearing the noise and trying to dance to it and it's not a pretty sight when that happens.

Jaime: Let's talk about that because I really want to know the rest of the story about how you figured out you were a dynamo. I love how you said you made the switch and then it was easier from there and I want to hear about how it went from hard to easy because of that switch.

Roger: Sure, okay. That was a critical moment. There were two critical moments that happened soon after each other in my mid-20s. the first was a very emotional one and I start with this in the book, where I was so wrapped up in my business, trying to make it work, I wasn't paying myself enough, I was ignoring my own personal finances, saying "One day I'm going to make the business successful." I was now in Singapore with a publishing company that I had set up and I was putting all my time, all my effort and all my money into this company, believing it was going to be successful tomorrow and there was no evidence to show me that it was going to be but I was a forever optimist, which is what dynamos are. I went home one day and when I got to my house a tow truck driver had come to repossess our car and I was like "Oh no, I can't believe this." I was walking down the street and I could hear my wife, Renate, pleading with the tow truck driver. I hadn't been honest with her so she didn't know how bad our finances are. We'd just had our first daughter and she was on my wife's arm and all of the neighbors were out and I was like "I can't believe this?" Everyone was out, it was a major, humiliating public spectacle that was about to happen. I went down and tried to explain to the tow truck driver that we would be able to pay and I had to get the money from the business. He was the wrong guy to ask, he wasn't interested so he took the car away. Renate realized what was going on so she just went back inside. She was totally unhappy about it. All of the neighbors were like "Better for us not to be here," and they all left and I was just left there. I think a lot of us have had those moments where things get really bad and we might have a reason for it - we might have lost our job, the industry might have changed - but I had no one to blame but myself. I was there thinking "I'm supposed to be smart. I went to Cambridge University. How could I end up in such a stupid situation as this, where if I were to say "What would be your worst nightmare possible?" this would be it?" and it was that night that I thought "I'm going to change stuff here. Whatever I believe that is clearly not working I've just got to be real about this," and it was that day that made me shift everything and I made that shift and the biggest shift I made came from what a mentor said to me several years earlier. I had gone out to see a mentor and gone over all of my ideas for my business in my early 20s and in my levels, which I talk about in my book, I was at infra-red level, which is someone who is getting more into debt every month. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who quit their job and get into this state, which is high frequency stress, it's almost like putting on goggles where everything is heatwaves, and I showed up to my mentor saying "I'm going to do this in my business and I'm going to make money tomorrow," and he could see straight through me - his first question was "How are your personal finances?" I was like "What does that have to do with anything? I'll make my money later," and he goes "If you're not willing to invest in yourself I'm not willing to invest in you either." Basically what he was saying was that our business is a mirror of ourselves - we all pay ourselves first but this is different, this is about the vibrational energy in which you're showing up every day and I can guarantee that anyone who is out there at the moment who might be watching this will go "I feel that. I've got this great idea, I go out and I speak to people about my idea, they glaze over once I start talking about it, then someone else comes along with ideas not even as good, they go up and talk to them and suddenly they're in this conversation. What is it that's happening that makes them not even want to listen to my idea?" and it's this energy that we're giving off because there's this stress level that we've run out of time and we've got to go chasing after stuff. I remember him saying that and I also remember what happened at that point which was he went through this process for me to sort my own stuff out which was not just going cash flow positive myself but creating a ladder where I said "What would it take to go from $100 cash flow positive personally, myself, not my business, to $200,to $400, to $800, to double it up ten times and it would become over $100,000 a month, which is over $1 million a year?" and we had a conversation several years back where he said "Just go and do that and you'll be a millionaire in a year," and I remember that because I went to school in England so I was a big sceptic and I thought 'That crazy American guy is telling me this stuff. It isn't ever going to happen that way because I can see how I can get from $100 to $200 per month if I pay myself more but I can't see how to get from $50,000 to $100,000 by October. It isn't going to happen," and he said "If the frequency of month by month is too short for you and you don't believe it, what about year by year?" and I was 22 when I had this conversation with him and I was there thinking "In ten years? time, if it was ten years to get to the $100,000, I would be 32, that's so old," and I was like "I'd be really disappointed if it takes me ten years to get to that," and he said "Okay, now we're just talking about frequency. It's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's a matter of when it's going to happen." I totally disregarded that conversation and went straight back into my business again but when I remembered that, standing on the street without my car, I thought 'If one year at a time wasn't exciting, if one month at a time wasn't believable, what am I actually going to do?" and I set a three month frequency and every quarter I went from $100 to $200, $200 to $400 and I just religiously kept to that. Within two and a half years, after ten cycles, I was over $100,000 a month and how I was making my money was very different. I went from a publishing business, which got me up to about $3,000 per month extra. It was too difficult to do it in the publishing business anymore and I was like "Hey, look, events! Those guys are doing conferences. I want to partner with them." That got me up to more like $8-10,000 and then I was like "That's not going to get me any further up. What about those guys that do property?" and I got into that. Within two and a half years I was in different industries making money in different ways because I was seeing that the number one thing that was important was the flow that was coming through me and, coming back to time, what this is really about is not the money; what this is about is how much you value your time. Like those stories about how you wouldn't wake up in the morning for less than $10,000. What are you willing to do with your time? Because fundamentally your business is just a reflection of your value of your time and if your valuation of your time is really low because your self-worth is so low then of course you're not going to make any money in your business either. So that was really the turning point which then shifted my whole thinking and my life has pretty much been that way since where, instead of my business being the sun in my solar system, where I'm spinning around it getting dizzy, and my poor wife is spinning around me, myself and my family are the center now and my business can be the Earth, going around, and I can have multiple businesses, multiple planets in my solar system, and my only focus is how can I make my sun, which is me - and Richard Branson and Warren Buffett all do this - how can I make it brighter and attract more mass? Because if I do that I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to get dizzy and then you've got something that actually creates a dent in the universe, which is really the big shift.

Jaime: "Dent in the universe? is a cool term just in general. So it sounds like way back then you were trying to go from A to Z without going through all of the points - you were like "I want that!" I see this all the time with people I talk to and people who e-mail me who are like "I'm here now. I want a $1 million business next year," and I'm like "Okay? let's look at B first." So you said you decided on the timeframe - three months is exciting and interesting - but you went hopping from different things to different things and most advice I hear is to focus on one thing and to make that successful and then go forward but when you only have so many months to work on something how do you mitigate and manage all of that?

Roger: The analogy I give is it's like trying to learn how to ski by starting on the black run. You can see everyone doing loop-the-loops and jumping around - "Well that's what I want to do so I'll just start there," which is kind of crazy.

Jaime: Because you might die.

Roger: Yeah, and you'll get in everyone's way. Everyone will get annoyed with you. And you can't even do the snow plow on the black run. It's not like you can get the basic skills you need to get balance when it's too steep and the flow is too much. So you have to start on the easy slope and you have to grow up and of course you can get to the black run, provided you take it step by step. I believe that the two assets that are necessary for us to get what we're looking for, for us to get traction in our business so we don't have to go chasing anything, the two most fundamental things are confidence and credibility. Confidence is our eternal commitment to ourselves. The moment we lose our confidence, like you get on a ski slope and you keep falling over, you just don't want to be there anymore. So your progress has got to be one where you say "Am I doing things in a way where I'm not failing; I'm learning things but not to the extent where I'm losing my confidence or my money?" and there?s always a way to take that next step which stretches you and then you?ve then got that stronger muscle to go forward. Credibility is the same thing - this is not so much how much are you willing to commit to yourself, which is your confidence, it?s how much other people are willing to commit to you. The moment you say "I?ve got this big idea and I?m going to do it tomorrow," and they can look around at what you?re doing today, you lose all credibility. They?re not going to say "That?s not credible," because people are too polite. They?re just going to say "Good luck with that."

Jaime: And make a face.

Roger: That?s right. And then it?s like "What did they not like about it? Why are they not supporting me?" there's always a way to take that next step which stretches you and then you've then got that stronger muscle to go forward. Credibility is the same thing - this is not so much how much are you willing to commit to yourself, which is your confidence, it's how much other people are willing to commit to you. The moment you say "I've got this big idea and I'm going to do it tomorrow," and they can look around at what you're doing today, you lose all credibility. They're not going to say "That's not credible," because people are too polite. They're just going to say "Good luck with that."

Jaime: And make a face.

Roger: That's right. And then it's It's frankly because you haven't earned the right to talk about big game. So it's knowing that there is a timeframe and a structure by which you can be growing your credibility as you go. By launching my book in the US we've managed to get a whole bunch of different partners. I was very aware that most people in America haven't heard of me because I do most stuff in Asia so I could either spend years and years trying to build my credibility here or I could partner with other people who have really strong credulity who are bestselling authors who would be willing to support me and that way I could parachute in as opposed to climb up. But understanding how important credibility is so that you don't have to be out there trying to promote something that might be a great product but people don't want to listen to you about it is really important. So there's a step by step and knowing which level you're at allows you to know what the steps are to get to the top of that level and then you've almost got to reverse it to get to the level above that.

Jaime: I think that's a huge point because Stephen Covey was one of the people on your book, and also Phil Town, and I was like "Well I respect those guys and I like the name of the book so I'm assuming, based on their credibility, that I can rely on you too," which is an interesting piece, especially not knowing someone beforehand. So I think that's really awesome but how do we start doing that? There's something that you talked about before, self-responsibility - knowing where you are and taking responsibility for where you are, because sometimes we're not very good at that - but how can we take where we are right now, like if someone is just listening to this right now, hasn't read the book yet but really wants some advice on how they can increase their confidence and increase their credibility so that they can be taken more seriously and get in the flow and make more money, what would you give them for advice?

Roger: The first thing is you need to know where you are. If you're got a map, you need to say "Where am I? Where am I going?" That?s generic, but let?s get into specifics about what it looks like and what changes depending on where you are. We?ve been talking quite a bit about what I would call the foundation prism which is how you sort out your personal flow. Many of your listeners will be people who have already moved past that - they?ve sorted out their personal stuff, they?ve got a business going, they might be enjoying their business and making a bunch of money but they?ve run out of time and can?t find the team they need to grow things. What are they meant to do to find that team? I'm just going to very quickly go through three of the nine levels which are the enterprise prism which is how all money flows in all of our markets. They're yellow, green and blue, and if you think about it like music, yellow is the player, like the guy playing the guitar, you know people are going to turn up and listen to them because they're great at what they do but the moment they stop playing that guitar, the money stops. Then the next step up, which is green level, is the performer, where you might be playing the guitar, you might be playing the drums, but they're coming for the band now, not for you - you could even leave the stage now and the money would keep playing. If we talk about familiar people, people like Seth Godin, people like Tim Ferriss, they are 100% yellow level. The number one value of someone at yellow level is freedom - it's like "Everything revolves around me," one person doing all things, they can outsource stuff but they have freedom of time, they can travel around the world. Green level isn't about that anymore - green level is about having a high performing team, people like Stephen Covey where you've got to show up every day, you've got to be at that finance meeting, it's almost like you've gone back to a job. You're building a culture for your company, you're asking them for advice, and it's like "Wait a minute, I thought I just gave up all of that stuff," but you need to go to green level to know how to attract high performers so that you don't have to keep playing yourself. Some people decide to stay at yellow level for all of their life but if you want to go up to green I'll go through in a moment how to do that and it's the opposite of what got you to yellow. Then the step above that is blue level and that's the conductor - they're not even facing the audience anymore. Someone like Richard Branson is at blue level - he's not facing his audience, he's facing his performers. As long as he finds great performers he'll make sure they're in rhythm and they're the ones that run his businesses. A lot of people misunderstand multiple streams of income - I actually think multiple streams is when you put your time into a bunch of different things which is the worst thing you can do because it's like you're pushing multiple cars up a hill and every time you push one up the others fall down again. Richard Branson doesn't have multiple streams, he has multiple teams of income. He's at conductor level where every instrument is being played on its own - he's not trying to play all of the instruments. I call that octopus. Some people at yellow level are like "I've got all of these different businesses, I must be super successful." No, that's an octopus. An octopus basically means you've got many tentacles and they're all connected to you - many tentacles, small brain, everything sucks.

Jaime: That's great.

Roger: "Everything's successful!" No it's not - the moment you stop, everything falls down. So how do you move from one to the next? Yellow level is all about something called independence. Independence is something you learn that allows you to start a business without having to have a job. The one below that is people who are stuck in a job who can't figure out how to get to yellow because we're not taught that in school. But if you learn how to do the yellow thing and you've got an online business where you've got a small business of some sort and you keep on wanting to grow but you can't, I guarantee there are one of three excuses you are using - excuse number one is "Yeah, I definitely want other people to run my business for me but I can't find people as good as me." That's the first one.

Jaime: "Because I'm amazing."

Roger: And the reason that that happens Is because you've designed a business that works for you, where you're the center of it, and in order to move forward you can't do that anymore, you've got to fragment your job down into things that other people can do and there's a particular way to do that, that most of us never learn at yellow level because we're always taking it all on ourselves. It's not having a to-do list, it's having a not-to-do list, it's having a "Who's doing what? list, which is very, very different and that's a very different mindset - it's not independence; it's interdependence. It's not "How do I make money every day?" it's "How do I help other people make money?" and you've actually changed your business model where the majority of it goes to other people, it's not even money coming to yourself. What's your marketing cost? What are your partnerships? What's your leadership margin? You don't have this and usually what it means is you're redirecting the market you're going for to have high margins, you might stop selling those products because the only way you can deliver it is if you're the one who has to do it but if you create this product in this way now it's a partnership and you don't have to do it anymore. So there are specific ways and I've worked with many people who have gone up to that level. It could be the second excuse which is"I know there are people as good as me, I could even organize that, but I don't have the money for them. I can't pay them because it's too expensive." It's the same thing - you setup the margins and the structure in a way that allows you to do that and you can create a bridge into that and the bridge is not about you being Superman all the time because even Superman has to be Clark Kent some of the time so it's about saying "I'm going to spend more time with Clark Kent because I've got to have more than one set of stretchy pants, it can't just be me out there saving the world, I've got to get a whole pantheon of superheroes, so now I've got to spend more time as Clark Kent, making the money that allows me to have this team and off they go." The third thing is "I don't have the time," which is back to this whole time thing, but most importantly it's realizing that the success principles and formula that are used to get me to yellow level and be a player are actually the opposite to the ones that are needed to get to green level. I pride myself on being to show up and figure things out on the spot but a band on stage, they spend more time in rehearsals before they even get on stage to plan this stuff out and have it in place. Have I sat with my team and have we set up a plan for 2015 already? Have I asked them what the culture is that we're going to be part of? What's the plan? Or is it me telling them what to do? Everything is basically around you having to basically create something which is called learned incompetence. I'll tell you a quick story - when I met Richard Branson last year he was down having a drink at the bar. I came up and we starting talking about Bali and within two or three minutes he says to me "You know, it's interesting, you do all of the social entrepreneur things and so on. I'm trying to work this out. I don't know if I have the right model or not. What do you think?" and I said"Well I think this, this and this," and within five minutes of meeting him I'm thinking to myself "What just happened here? I'm giving advice to a billionaire. Who do I think I am?" and it was his skill of being able to come across with a learned incompetence. "I don't have the answers. I don't know. What do you think?" At yellow level it's the opposite - it's "Hey, I've got solutions, I've got answers,' and you have to pull back from all of that and when someone has an idea or when you bring out the idea you start attracting great people because they're like "Hey, I'm being appreciate here. I'm able to share my view," and he has such a skillset of doing that and it's a skillset you need to learn because it's not what allows you to actually get started in the first place, because you had to have, if anything, an inflated confidence to begin with, but you've got to deflate that down again. So just by appreciating if you put your foot on the accelerator in first gear that does not get you to second gear - you actually have to do the opposite, you take your foot off and move up a gear. That glass ceiling is the one that I think most of us don't really appreciate until we get stuck at it for too long and then we realize we clearly have to change everything to get to the next level.

Jaime: I think this stuff is so interesting. A lot of people listening in are either stuck in day jobs and want to get to yellow level or they're yellow level right now and going "Oh, wait, that's why it's not totally working, because I need to take some of this down in order to go to the next step," which I think is really huge. Being able to see into the future and predicting what's coming so you know how you have to change is huge. We have to start wrapping up. I know we can only go through so much and it's way easier to read it in the book and really understand it, because I'm just asking you all different pieces. If you actually read the book it's really well laid out and you can take all of the assessments too. I'm going to ask you the same last question I ask everybody and it's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million? Besides just buy your book!

Roger: I think that the biggest one is being very aware that we wake up with the same 24 hours of time every day as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. For many of us, in our minds, we're thinking that in order to make more money we need to have more money, "I'd do that if I had the money," without realizing that all the most successful people become successful, coming back to this point about time, the moment they add a zero to their time. If you think about what your time is worth right now with the things you're doing - $10 or $100. What would it be if it was worth $1,000 an hour? What would you need to be doing differently, right now, today? Who would you be working with? Where would you need to be showing up? Because there's a pretty good chance you wouldn't be answering your e-mails, there's a pretty good chance you wouldn't be there just coming up with a strategy to make another $10,000 - you'd be doing something that was going to deliver far more value at a much higher level somewhere else and if you just challenge yourself with just that one thing which is, instead of me thinking about the massive big goal and everything, tomorrow I've got another 24 hours so how can I invest that time more effectively so that it turns into more and actually allows me to deliver more value, probably not doing what I'm doing right now but doing it a little bit differently or with different people - what would I do? I think that when we get that we realize that when we spend money we can always get more but when you spend time it never comes back. So start by really investing it well.

Jaime: I love that. Where can find out where to get your book and find out more information about you, Roger?

Roger: Come to MillionaireMasterPlan.com. We have the book there. We also have this big contest with trips out to Bali and Hawaii and where we do our events out in Asia as well so just come along to MillionaireMasterPlan.com.

Jaime: We'll definitely link everything up. Best of luck. I can't wait to see you on other podcasts too. I would love to meet you in person. Your stuff is really interesting and I haven't seen anything like that before. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Roger, I really appreciate it.

Roger: Thanks, Jaime. Thanks a lot. Bye.

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Tags: Business Marketing, business strategy, business success, millionaire interview, Millionaire Master Plan, Mindset, Roger Hamilton

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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