095: From $500M Sale to Bootstrapping an 8-Figure Business with Michael Hyatt

Today, I’m talking with Michael Hyatt, the founder and chairman of Full Focus – an 8-figure coaching company that helps high achievers accelerate their performance. 

The company was named one of INC’s Best Workplaces 5 years in a row and appeared on the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in 3 of the last 4 years.

Before starting Full Focus, Michael worked as the CEO of a 9-figure publishing company. As he worked upwards of 80-hour weeks, Michael saw the toll it was taking on his family, his relationships, and his health. He created a system for balancing success at work with a healthy life, which eventually turned into Full Focus.

Today, you’ll hear about Michael’s system for achieving more while doing less, how to handle working closely with family members, and how to work toward your goals without sacrificing your personal life.

Inspiring Quotes

• “If you can’t have the boss you want, be the boss you wish you had.” – Michael Hyatt

• “One of the little appreciated axioms of business is that constraints are your friend, constraints in capital, constraints in time, all of that because it forces you to prioritize.” – Michael Hyatt

• “It’s important to approach business with humility, because you’ll either be humble at the beginning or be humble at the end, because business is tough.” – Michael Hyatt

• “I love bootstrapping because I think you make better decisions when you don’t have so much money.”  – Michael Hyatt
  

• How Michael started his 8-figure business
• The importance of humility
• Bootstrapping vs. running a public company
• Handling finances when bootstrapping
• The desire zone vs. the drudgery zone
• Mindset shifts for scaling
• Working with family
• The interplay between work and relationships
• Hustling vs. breaking
• Setting boundaries around your work
• The secret to success as an entrepreneur
• Writing books to drive business

Brad Weimert: Michael Hyatt, thank you so much for carving out some time after some technical difficulties. We are here almost in person. 

Michael Hyatt: We’re here. Thanks, Brad. Good to meet you. 

Brad Weimert: Absolutely. So, we’ve got some mutual friends. Justin Donald introduced us not too long ago. Great, great, great friend. And it sounds like you have been serving him very well as a coach for the last little bit here. 

Michael Hyatt: Well, thank you. I love him. We have such a values alignment and I love what he does for investors. And he’s got one of my favorite podcasts out there so it’s a privilege to work with him. 

Brad Weimert: Absolutely. Well, I’ve known him a very, very long time and I echo that sentiment. Well, there are a lot of things that I’m curious about with you. You have a long, interesting sort of ranging career, life, business, etcetera. For the people listening that don’t know, can you give me sort of the accelerated path of how you got to now? 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. So, I went to college as a philosophy major and a music major and decided that that really wasn’t going to work commercially. And the competition was fierce on the music front so I thought, “Well, I’ll just dig into the philosophy thing,” which I did. But I got a job at a book publishing company when I was a senior in college. I met my wife at that time. We got married and I went to work for this book publishing company. And after I graduated, I continued to work there. So, I’ve always loved books and I thought, “This is my life calling.” So, I worked at that company for maybe four or five years, and then I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I am today, and I worked at Thomas Nelson Publishers, which at the time was the seventh largest book publisher in the U.S. and I was a divisional vice president. And then I eventually made my way to the C-suite and became the CEO of that organization. When I was leading it, we were doing about $250 million a year in revenue with about $42 million a year in profit. And we decided we were going to take the company private, which we did.

We sold the private equity. We sold it for half a billion dollars, which at the time was the largest sale of a publishing company ever. And then we eventually sold to HarperCollins. And at that point, I decided to make my exit and start my current company, Full Focus. And initially, I just wanted to do keynote speaking and writing books but it eventually grew into an organization and we’re now an eight-figure business. We’ve been featured on the INC 5000 list three times on the INC Best Places To Work last year. And so, yeah, that’s kind of how we got to where we are. Probably our most successful product and the product that we’re known for is we do a physical planner called the Full Focus Planner. And we sold 1.2 million copies of that and it just continues to grow year after year, which is kind of interesting given the fact that most people use digital apps. But there’s a large group of people that realize the limitations of that, including me. 

Brad Weimert: So, I have a thousand questions about this. So, first off, the planner thing, I want to pin that because that’s a fascinating proposition as a sort of a book to sell. But before you’ve accelerated through this course in your life, am I right that somewhere in there you had started your own publishing company as well? 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, I did. I kind of glossed over that but I actually left Thomas Nelson after a couple of years and decided to start my own company. I was very dissatisfied with Thomas Nelson at the time, and I thought I was in my thirties, I thought I could do anything. I thought this can’t be that hard. And so, I went out and started this company with a business partner, and it grew like crazy for five years. We got into a distribution partnership and that didn’t work and the whole thing took the company down. So, I would say we filed bankruptcy but we didn’t have any assets to pledge. So, as it turns out, we didn’t even have enough assets to go bankrupt. So, we just went out of business and I started a literary agency from there with the same partner. We did that for a few years, and then I found my way back to Thomas Nelson. So, that was basically, I don’t know, maybe a seven-year hiatus of my career, wandering in the desert but a time in which I learned some of the most important lessons that I would ever learn in business. 

Brad Weimert: You leave me hanging. So, what is one of those? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, first of all, it’s important I think to approach business with humility because you’ll either be humble at the beginning or be humble at the end because business is tough and running a business is tough. And I did some research recently using the U.S. Department of Commerce data but of the businesses that start this year, small businesses that start this year, like 80% of them will go out of business within the first five years. And the 20% that remain, 80% of those will go out of business in the next five years. So, what that means is if you do the math, you’ve got a 4% chance of surviving ten years. So, those are pretty steep odds. And I think it deserves humility and it deserves learning all you can and really try to give yourself an advantage, which is one of the reasons why I believe in business coaching. 

Brad Weimert: I love that. Well, I think to highlight that point further, that doesn’t tell the whole story of those people, of those the 96 that wonder, the vast majority are taking home less than they would be if they just had a job and are living a much more intense life, right? Most of them are not hyper-profitable businesses. Most of them put in far more than 40 hours a week. So, your path is interesting because you started corporate. You did your own thing. You, I think, learned humility and then you went back to the same company to be the CEO. The first question for me there is, as somebody that has not sat in a public company as a CEO and always been bootstrapped and beat my head against the wall 15 times before I learned the lesson, which do you prefer? And do you find one harder or easier than the other? 

Michael Hyatt: They’re both difficult but in different ways. And I think if I had to choose, I’d rather be an entrepreneur and start my own business and bootstrap it because you’re going to end up with, from my perspective, equity that’s worth more flexibility, more ability to accommodate the business to your lifestyle. So, when I was running Thomas Nelson, initially, it was a public company. We were traded on the New York Stock Exchange. I had a board and that was actually more freedom than I initially thought because the whole pitch of private equity is that if we take your company private, you can stop focusing on the quarter-by-quarter results and having to report to the market and making these short-term decisions that don’t benefit your company long term. So, I went from reporting to the market quarterly when we were a public company to when we were private equity, I was reporting weekly. And the private equity partners that we had, you know, I think this is typical in private equity companies. I’m sure there are some good ones out there. I haven’t met any but I’m sure there are some good ones out there.

But it tends to be a lot of people that have an MBA and they think if they can make the business work on a spreadsheet, you ought to be able to pull the levers and make it work in reality. But that’s not always the case. So, their information is largely borne of academic research. It doesn’t really come out of experience working in the real world. So, I found it very frustrating trying to educate the board, keep them up to speed, and every time we’d make a move, they would get like really nervous. And in fairness to them, we sold the company in 2006 so within a couple of years we were in the Great Recession and nothing was working like we had modeled it and we were doing a lot of pivoting and a lot of trying to figure it out as we go. So, they were understandably nervous. They had a big investment in the company but it was really challenging for me as a CEO, and I would never go back into that situation again. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. You know, it seems like a nightmare to me as the bootstrap entrepreneur that “doesn’t have a boss.” Ironically, I feel like all of my clients are my bosses. But I guess one of the things that I want to know from that perspective is both public or private equity. It seems like you have bosses which are the board. How is that sensation compared to when you worked for Thomas Nelson initially, when you weren’t the CEO and you filled a different role in the company? Did you have the same sensation of a boss or somebody looking over you? Or as the CEO with a board either way, PE or public, do you feel like you had more autonomy? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, I definitely didn’t have more autonomy when I was working in the organization but not the CEO. You know, I had a boss and I really think I probably learned most of the leadership lessons I’ve learned based on reporting to bad bosses. You know, I learned watching them and seeing the mistakes they made. And I started saying to myself, “If you can’t have the boss you want, be the boss you wish you had.” And so, that really informed my leadership and the way that I ran the company after I became the CEO and certainly when I started my own company. But I felt like I have the most autonomy now because, yes, like you, I consider my clients my bosses in a sense but the truth is I can fire my clients. You know, if I don’t like working with somebody, I can get rid of them but it’s hard to do that, especially in a public company where they’re elected by the shareholders and then in a private equity company where they’ve got the lion’s share of the investment so they’re not going anywhere. So, you’re just pretty much stuck with what you’ve got and if they’re good or bad, you have to live with it. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I can only imagine right now, though, I will say that when I talk to people that raise and look at the growth trajectory of some of them, they are accelerated, right? Their path moves faster when there’s money present. When you moved out of that role as CEO and ultimately started Full Focus… Full Focus, yes?

Michael Hyatt: Yes.

Brad Weimert: When you started Full Focus, you chose to bootstrap that, right? 

Michael Hyatt: Right. 

Brad Weimert: Would you have done that differently? 

Michael Hyatt: No. I love bootstrapping because I think you make better decisions when you don’t have so much money. I think one of the little-appreciated axioms of business is that constraints are your friend, constraints in capital, constraints in time, all of that because it forces you to prioritize. And to use a very graphic example that most people are familiar with, look what happened to Twitter when they had too much money, and then Elon Musk comes in and he fires 80% of the staff. And from my perspective, the product’s only improved since he took over. They’ve done things to the software that many of us who were active Twitter users were trying to get Twitter to do for years and years. And he’s made so many improvements and he iterates and some stuff works and some stuff doesn’t but he quickly learns from it and moves on. So, I think that too much money can be a problem. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that’s an interesting construct because the flip side of that is with a lot of entrepreneurs when they’re getting going and even into many millions, their relationship with money prevents them from moving forward. So, yes, they don’t frivolously spend but often they don’t spend enough to iterate quickly enough to move. And Elon, of course, is in a different category. How do you find that line? And when you went into Full Focus, you had run this large, large organization. What was your relationship with the money getting started because it was yours at that point? 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. Well, I think initially when I stepped into the position, job number one was generate cash flow and generate sufficient cash flow to cover my expenses. And so, I had very modest goals initially. I thought if I could do that and I was scrambling to do that but if I could do that, that’d be awesome. So, one of the things I knew that I could monetize quickly was my speaking. So, I was out there speaking 60, 70 times a year and I was doing that for a fee, trading my time for dollars. But I quickly realized like after year one, I don’t want to do that again. That’s just like I’m grateful for the cash flow and it’s exceeded by my personal needs but I don’t want to live on the road. My family is too important to me. And so, I said to my very small team at the time, I had an executive assistant. One of my daughters was working the business, and I said, “Look, we need a plan to give me off this treadmill of constantly traveling and speaking.” So, we did. We said, “Okay. Let’s do that.” And we started a membership site and then we started doing online courses. And all those things were way more lucrative and they weren’t trading my time for dollars because you build an online course and you put in the time initially, and then it scales beautifully because no matter how many copies you sell, the production costs are fixed.

So, I loved, loved, loved that business model and that also generated a lot of cash. And so, then it became the case where investing the cash, as long as the customer acquisition cost was decent and the advertising expenses were covered, I was willing to spend as much as we needed to, to grow the business because I could see specifically where the return on the investment was, which, by the way, working for a large book publisher where you’re just running ads in newspapers or on the radio or whatever, you have no idea what’s working or why it’s working, and you’re just kind of spending money hoping that somehow it has an impact on sales. But this is very precise. 

Brad Weimert: Got it. So, more of a direct response model with your ad cost. 

Michael Hyatt: Exactly.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. I can see how that would be more comforting when you’re going into your own and you have a way to actually measure things. 

Michael Hyatt: Well, it’s true. And I didn’t mind not growing the company as quickly as I could have. For my publishing company, the publishing company that went broke, we did go raise outside money, and I just think there are some lessons that you can learn in those initial stages when you’re bootstrapping that are really, really important. You know, you learn to look for the ROI where if you just got lots of money to spend, you just spend it. You know, I bootstrapped everything. You know, I didn’t get a physical office until probably ten years ago. So, the first several years I was just working out of my home. I had a small office downtown in the community where I lived that was just enough for me. But honestly, that’s all I needed. You know, I didn’t have a business where people had to come in and make a judgment about the quality of our business based on the office environment. You know, I was pretty much invisible. So, I did bootstrap that and was very frugal but I spent on the things that were important. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It’s an interesting path to go into bootstrap mode after you have all of this experience as a public CEO and then private CEO. When you made the initial transition, presumably, your responsibilities as CEO are very different and you talked about the public speaking side of it and quickly realizing, “I’m not doing this.” But it sounds like it allowed you to fund the initial proposition and get things moving, which is awesome. As you went into sort of membership mode, how did your responsibilities change? And I want to tell you why I’m asking this, because I have heard you speak about operating in and I think this is not your language but your zone of genius. And I think you have a construct for this of your own but spending your time only on the things that you want to do. And that’s a lovely sentiment for lots of entrepreneurs and I think a lot of people have a very hard time bridging the gap between being the busy, chaotic founder, CEO and getting to the place where they can feel good about that without utter chaos happening and things hitting the floor. So, can you tell me about sort of your journey through that process with Full Focus? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, when I was the CEO, Thomas Nelson had a big staff, had 750 people. I had two full-time executive assistants. You know, I had a CFO, 70 people in the accounting department, several financial analysts, you know, big team. When I went into business for myself, I said, “I’m tired of that.” I mean, literally in the corporate world, my day was wall-to-wall meetings from the time I got up to practically the time I went to bed. And I got tired of that. And so, I began to fantasize even before I stepped out of that corporate role, “What would it be like to be in a business where I had control of my time and I didn’t have any staff and I could just do it all myself?” And so, that lasted for about three months. And the reason that lasted for about three months and speaking to the zone of genius, my construct for that is we have a tool and a framework that I teach in my book, Free to Focus, called the Freedom Compass. And it’s basically where your passion and your proficiency come together. So, what do you love doing? And what are you really good at, so good at that people will actually pay you money to do that thing? So, we call that the desire zone.

And as it turns out, there are a lot of things that I was doing as a solopreneur that weren’t in my desire zone. And the thing, the zone where you have no passion, you hate doing it, and you’re not very good at it, I call that the drudgery zone. And I was doing a lot of things in the drudgery zone. So, I was doing things like trying to find the FedEx box, which I’d never done before. I just handed it to an assistant and they went. So, I’m trying to figure out all that stuff, booking my own travel, managing my own email inbox, all those kinds of things, managing my calendar. I was constantly screwing up and I realized that I didn’t enjoy doing it, and I sure wasn’t very good at it. So, I initially hired and I was really, really nervous about taking on overhead but I hired an executive assistant part-time and she was virtual. And so, there was a company called Belay Solutions that had just started right before I started. And so, I kind of put out on Twitter at the time, I said, “Look, I’m looking for an executive assistant but I don’t think I want to get one full-time at this point.” And so, the CEO of that company contacted me immediately. Long story short, that really worked.

She was working 5 hours a week for me for about two weeks. And then I said, “This is amazing.” So, then we kicked her up to 10 hours a week and then 20 hours a week. And before long, I had a full-time executive assistant, and then I started adding people to the mix. And I realized that there’s a lot of difference between having a team of 10, 15, 20, 50 than having a team of 750. I can handle the smaller team and I like the smaller team. I still enjoy that because it gives me the ability to specialize in those things where I really add value and stay away from the things where I don’t. 

Brad Weimert: So, I like the fundamentals of that, and the fundamentals of that to me make a lot of sense early on, meaning that the basic stuff that is just drudgery, I think, is the word we use here, getting that off your plate. I think where I know I struggle and where other entrepreneurs struggle is once the business is sort of sizable, a few million, 15 million, 30 million and beyond, where you’ve got a gap with higher level skill sets that you need to replace and maybe you’re great at them, or maybe you’re good at them or they require subject matter expertise. And you feel like balls are going to hit the floor if you just jump to the land of, “Everything is going to be rosy. I’m going to spend all my time exactly how I want.” Does that make sense? And how do you handle that or how do you think about that? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, I think when you’re first starting a business, you have to be willing to do stuff that you don’t enjoy. And in that model that I gave you from the Freedom Compass, there are two other zones. One is your disinterest zone where you’re really good at stuff but you don’t enjoy it that much. And for me, that would be accounting. You know, I’m really good at accounting. I had no formal financial training. But when you run a public company, you get really good at it or you die. And so, I can do that but I don’t have a lot of passion around it. Then there’s something where you have a lot of passion but you’re not very good at it and I call that the distraction zone. And you have to be willing to do the drudgery zone and the disinterest zone. You should never be doing the distraction zone but you have to be willing to do those initially. But then you’ve got to either eliminate those, automate them, or delegate them as you grow. And you have to be thoughtful about it and strategic about it because your world, in terms of the scope of your responsibilities over time, should shrink because the truth is you’re not that good at that much stuff.

And so, to figure out what you’re really good at where you add value and where you can find teammates, they’re actually better at the things that maybe you thought you were good at. Like, for example, business coaching. This would be in my desire zone. So, we’ve had a large business coaching operation. We just announced that we’re sunsetting it but we had a pretty large like 300 clients in business coaching. And when we first started to scale that business, it was pretty clear I wouldn’t want to coach 300 people. And so, we had to bring in outside coaches and we had a format where we would do a one-day workshop every quarter for our clients, and we do those in cohorts of 50. And so, I do a few of them. And then we started bringing in some other coaches that would lead those as well. And I remember the first time I sat through somebody else teaching my content, I turned to my daughter, who’s now the CEO of our company, and I said, “John’s actually better at this than I am. And I’m not trying to be humble here. He’s objectively better at this than I am.” And so, that freed me up to do some other things.

So, I think sometimes entrepreneurs think, “Nobody can do what I do as well as I do it,” so they don’t even think about delegating it. But if you just kind of reframe that and think there may be people out there that actually do it better than I do it, that’s when everything begins to shift and you can begin to scale. 

Brad Weimert: So, from a tactical perspective with that approach, does that mean making sure that you’re prioritizing, sourcing, and screening talent all the time as a CEO to get those things off your plate and not being a big rock on an ongoing basis? 

Michael Hyatt: Yes, definitely. And I think it also means that you have to get crystal clear on what you’re looking for. And so, for example, one of the things, we create a lot of content. We have an entire content department with people that help me with my writing assignments. And one of the things that we learned early on is a principle that we now call the 10-80-10 principle, where I’m involved in the first 10% and the last 10% but that 80% in the middle, like researching of content, finding the relevant science or statistics, interviewing past clients or current clients, all that stuff is that middle 80%, I don’t enjoy that. I’m not actually that good at it. But we needed somebody that could write in my voice so that it would be seamless. So, one of the things we did, and this is one of the things I think in sourcing is if there’s something you’re doing now, deconstruct what it is that you do and why it works. And this takes some real thinking, and sometimes it takes some input from other people that sometimes can see why you’re good and you can’t see it. So, my head of content basically deconstructed my writing in the speaking style and created a two-page cheat sheet for new writers.

So, when they would come in, he would say, “Okay. When Michael speaks, whether in written form or in speaking form, he uses short sentences. He tries not to use big words. He doesn’t use a lot of jargon. If he uses an acronym, he explains it.” So, this kind of thing, so this is all there. So, when they try to write for me, again, whether it’s a speech or talking points or a blog post or a book, that it’s going to be closer to the final thing. And I’ve got less to review on the back end because they’ve done that. So, I think getting the clarity about what you need is important and most entrepreneurs don’t go to that depth. And in fact, I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs when they’re hiring a position, they didn’t bother to do a job description. Well, the job description is your vision for that position. And if you don’t have clarity about what it is that you need, how in the world do you recognize when the right person shows up? And this is when you have a mishire. You hire somebody and you go, “Gosh, they’re not really that good.” Well, the truth is you weren’t that clear on what you needed on the front end, and 90% of the time it comes right back to you. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s some hard truths for a lot of people. 

Michael Hyatt: It is, unfortunately. And I’ve learned this the hard way. 

Brad Weimert: Likewise. Likewise. I’m still learning it. You know, I think that a lot of people want to run full speed and frequently miss the planning and preparation phases, thinking that that’s a shortcut. And as you just said, if you don’t define the outcome that you’re after, you’re probably not going to get there. 

Michael Hyatt: Well, and if your business is taking off, you’re feeling a little overwhelmed and you’re thinking, “I just need a warm body in this seat.” And so, people end up hiring their friends or they hire family or they don’t do the necessary vetting. By the way, almost no entrepreneurs that I know or have met check references on hires. And if they would just do that one simple thing, they would figure out or they would keep from making a lot of mistakes, hiring mistakes, but I’m amazed that people that we’ve let go from our company that just didn’t cut it, there’s some other entrepreneur here, they picked him up. We never got a phone call. We could have saved him so much grief. You know, maybe they’ll flourish in that environment where they didn’t flourish in ours. But if I were them, I would at least want to be informed by what transpired so I could ask the right questions and then just consider, is this going to work in this environment better than it didn’t work in the last environment? 

Brad Weimert: Where does hiring fit in your quadrant for you? 

Michael Hyatt: I would say it’s probably somewhere between my drudgery and my disinterest zone. My problem when I’m trying to hire is that I spend most of my time trying to sell my company and close the sale with the prospective employee. Like, if we click, left to myself, that’s enough. And I’ll make all these same mistakes, and I’ll be trying to sell them to come aboard. And I think it’s going to be great. And I paint this rosy picture to myself, and that’s why I’m not involved in hiring. So, I let my team do that. I need somebody that’s pretty analytical, somebody that’s pretty much what on the Kolbe assessment it’s called a fact finder, somebody who’s willing to do the research, ask the tough questions, be a little bit skeptical. You’ll certainly want to sell them on the company but I usually come in at the last minute if I do come in and even then it’s rare unless it’s somebody in our executive team. But I’ve come in at the last minute after pretty much the decision’s been made. And I think my team’s just trying to make sure that I feel like I had a part in it. 

Brad Weimert: That’s interesting. So, CEOs across the board, when I asked them what their role is or what their responsibilities are, I get a bunch of different answers. And one of them is, one that seems to be a pattern, is hiring, is focusing on hiring. For you right now, if hiring is not one of your three, and I guess actually this is a good transition because you are not currently the CEO of your company, is that right? 

Michael Hyatt: Correct. 

Brad Weimert: I love that. And who is your CEO? 

Michael Hyatt: So, my oldest daughter, Megan, is the CEO. And that transition happened three years ago. 

Brad Weimert: Wild. So, I want to ask you about that. But first, I want to ask you what her core responsibilities are. 

Michael Hyatt: Well, her primary responsibility is vision and strategy. In culture, I kind of think of that as all the core ideology of the business, and we place a strong emphasis on culture because it’s our conviction that culture is the unseen force that drives operating results. And I really saw this in the corporate world big time, where if you had a culture that was dysfunctional, it would dramatically impede your operating results. And at Thomas Nelson, when I first got there, that was the case. And fixing the culture was integral to fixing the business. So, that’s one of our primary responsibilities. I think in addition to that, just kind of coordinating the team, making sure sort of like a conductor in a symphony, making sure that everybody she’s got the best people in the best roles. She’s very involved in the hiring and the sourcing of those hires. 

Brad Weimert: Got it. Okay. That tracks for me. So, the burning question here for me is you have your daughter running your company, and you work with her on a routine basis, and you have another daughter in the company that is also working for you. This is a very divided topic amongst entrepreneurs. Some people love doing this but the majority speak vocally about this being a horrible proposition, working with friends and family. How did you come to this place and how do you feel about that? 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. Well, I’ve experienced both sides of it. My predecessor at Thomas Nelson had two of his brothers involved in the business in a public business, which is kind of interesting. And honestly, neither one of them was very good. It was clear that they were in their positions because of their familial relationships, not because they had any core competency that was important to the business. And I reported to one of those brothers for a couple of years, and ultimately the CEO saw how frustrated I was and I was going to leave the company again because of it. And he said, “Hey, from this point forward, you’re going to be reporting to me,” and that changed everything because he was amazing. But, yeah, so I think it can definitely go negative. I would think twice before I did it. And maybe every person, every entrepreneur who puts his family into the business is blind to the fact that they’re incompetent. I don’t think so in my case. My daughters are amazing, you know, all of my daughters except one. So, four of the five are entrepreneurs, all very successful in their own right. And the fourth one is married to an entrepreneur and has decided to kind of check out for this time to raise a family. And that’s awesome.

But, yeah, I think it can work. But the key thing is you got to be really objective. You got to hold them to the same standards that you hold everybody else to. You got to make sure that you’re paying attention to the information and the feedback that you’re getting from the rest of the team. You can’t give them any special privileges or whatever. In fact, I like to think that they’re judged by a stricter standard because I know how important this is to the rest of the team. So, holding them accountable, all of that is critically important. And I will say this. It won’t work unless you have strong relationships outside of work. And so, we’re a very, very close family. I was saying to you off air before we got on, I think it was before we got on, that all five of my daughters live within 20 minutes of me. All ten of my grandchildren are within 5 minutes of me. And so, we’re very close as a family and we have very healthy relationships. But if your relationships are unhealthy, there’s a lot of past stuff that hasn’t been resolved, if there’s passive-aggressive behaviors, that’s going to work itself out in the business and be detrimental to the progress of the business. So, it’s important to keep your accounts clear and make sure that you have really healthy relationships with your family if they’re going to be involved in your business. 

Brad Weimert: Does that mean that it sounds like for you that means and obviously this is family, not just close friends, but prioritizing out-of-office time just as much as in-office time or significantly? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, yeah, Brad, I would say that everything flows from the quality of your relationships. That’s true for people that aren’t your family. It’s true for people that are your family. You know, it’s kind of the oil that makes the machinery work, the quality of your relationships. So, yes. And I used to be one of these guys, like I don’t know if this means anything, but I’m an Enneagram 3 on StrengthsFinder. My second strength is achiever. You know, I’m one of those people that, man, I’m very task-oriented, not naturally people-oriented. And so, I kind of saw small talk or building relationships as kind of a distraction from getting the work done. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I see, “No, no, no, no, no. Small talk, very important. Investing in relationships, very important.” Non-productive relationships… Like, I’m taking somebody with me from the company this weekend. We’re going fly fishing in East Tennessee, and I know that will pay huge dividends. And I want to do it just because I want to spend time with this person but I know it’ll have to pay huge dividends in the business because we will have conversations in the context of fishing on that river that we would never have any other time. He’ll get to know me and I’ll get to know him in a way that’s really important. So, yeah, you got to invest in the relationships. 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. And I couldn’t agree more in general with relationships. I have found that experiences like what you’re talking about, unique experiences, specifically, those that have some sort of heightened emotional engagement drive relationships very quickly in one direction or another. Either you connect right away or you push away right away but you get to know each other right away. For key relationships, that makes sense to me inside of a business. For all relationships in a business, I think people sort of thread that needle differently. Some people like to separate work and personal life, and some people want to make sure that there’s a mix throughout their companies. Do you think that there is a right way to do that? 

Michael Hyatt: I’m not sure. I can tell you that our mission as a company is to help people get what we call the double win, which is winning at work and succeeding at life. And we believe that life is multifaceted and work is only one of several domains. And people don’t show up just like they just carve out that piece of the pie that’s work and they show up with that piece at work. No, they come with everything. You know, they come with the health they have. They come with the relationships they have. And there’s enormous overlap and interplay between all those relationships. If things aren’t going well at work, that person’s going to bring that stress home and it’s going to affect their relationships. It’s going to affect their health. Likewise, if their relationships at home are in good shape, if they’re in relatively good health, that’s going to impact their ability to be productive at work. So, we can’t just create this wall of division and keep it nice and neat and make this separation because that’s just not how life works. I show up as a whole person.

Well, on the employer side, I want to recognize that and I want to make sure that I’m encouraging people to take the time they need, for example, to cultivate deep, meaningful relationships. I know that if they have that at home, they’re going to be way more productive at work. If they’re sleeping well at night, they’re going to be more focused, more creative, more productive at work. So, I want to do the things that lend to that. So, for example, we encourage people not to work more than 40 hours a week. And in fact, if you work more than 40 hours a week, we’ll probably have a conversation with you about that because we know eventually the business is going to pay the cost of that. That’s going to have an impact back on the business. And when people know you care about these other areas of their life, it makes them even more committed to the company’s mission. So, we want that for our clients. We want that whole double win for our clients but it’s got to start at home by us practicing what we preach and also encouraging our employees to have the same thing. We want them to be the models of that so that they’re representative of what it is we’re trying to sell. 

Brad Weimert: So, I’ve read about this with you. You wrote a book recently called Win at Work and Succeed at Life. There are several things that I took away from that and I want to talk about the book a little and move away from this being my personal coaching session as a CEO and dive into some other parts of your life. But one of the things that you have in the book that’s interesting is this concept of hustling and breaking and pushing really hard and then grabbing the handbrake and taking time off. I think for a lot of people, they perceive that to be balanced but the way that you frame it in the book, it’s sort of an aggressive, jarring proposition for individuals. What is the difference between balance and hustling and breaking? 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. So, I really start with telling a story and this happened back when I was at Thomas Nelson but before I was the CEO. So, this would have been about 2002. I became a divisional manager for one of Thomas Nelson’s 14 book publishing divisions. So, that division was dead last in revenue growth. In fact, it was shrinking. It was dead last in profitability and the previous year we lost money. I didn’t know that when I accepted the job but I quickly found out that we were in trouble, 14 out of 14. So, the CEO asked me, he said, “How long is it going to take you to turn this division around?” And I said, totally pull the number out of the air, I said, “I think three years.” He said, “It was kind of what I was thinking so go make it happen.” So, I did. So, I went back to the team. They were pretty demoralized, given their current position in the company but I painted a vision for how I thought we could become the fastest-growing, most profitable division in the company. It would take about three years. Here was the vision. Everybody got excited about it and we roll up our sleeves and went to work. And we were working like so many do in corporate life, 70, sometimes 80 hours a week.

I was traveling constantly, almost never at home, eating junk food, eating at my desk, sometimes skipping meals, all this stuff, not paying attention to my most important relationships. But in 18 months, we turned the company around, turned that division around. We went from number 14 to number one in revenue growth, in profitability. Morale was off the charts and I got the biggest bonus check I’d ever received in my career. It was more than my annual salary. I was giddy. So, I went home to share it with my wife, Gail. We’ve now been married for 45 years but this was 20 years ago. So, I go home. I knew she would be so pumped and I was so excited about this. This was kind of the validation of all my hard work and everything I’d done for a couple of years. So, I showed her the check. She wasn’t that excited. And she said to me, she said, “We need to talk.” Aw, man, my heart sank because I thought, “Uh-oh.” We went into the den, we sat down, she began to tear up and she said to me, she said, “You know I love you and I appreciate all that you’ve done to support our family but I’ve got to be honest with you.” She said, “You’re never home. And even when you are, your head’s somewhere else. You’re not fully present and your daughters need you now more than ever.”

And then she started to cry and she said, “Honestly, I feel like a single mom.” Well, that was not what I was going for but I felt like I was facing this impossible choice. I can either win at work or I could succeed at life but I couldn’t do both. And on the one hand, I felt like I had this obligation to my team at Thomas Nelson because they had worked so hard. They wanted to continue to lead. They liked the bonus checks. And so, I felt obligated to them but on the other hand, my wife and five daughters who also needed me. So, typically, I think that when people are faced with this choice, they do one of two things. Either they apply what I call in the book the ambition brake, which is, basically, “Look, this is too expensive for the things that I value most. And so, I’m going to throttle back my vocational ambitions so that I can give time to my family, give time to my health, and all of that. I’ll just settle.” The problem with that is that there’s a lot of potential that’s left on the table. And the other approach is what I would call the hustle fallacy, which is basically, “Someday I’ll retire. Someday I’ll get to the point where I can give my family the time and attention they deserve but in the meantime, I am going to work 80 hours a week, do whatever it takes to succeed, hopefully, have a big payout someday, and give my family all that they want,” which usually that happens, so many people lose their family by the time they get to that point or lose their health before they get there. So, it’s not a viable solution.

I kept thinking to myself, “Is there a third alternative? Is it possible to win at work and succeed at life?” And so, I just kind of held out that possibility and went in search of it. And one of the first things I did was I hired an executive coach who is enormously helpful to me in helping to find that third alternative. And that’s really what I’ve dedicated my life to is helping entrepreneurs find that third alternative because I really believe it’s transformational and I believe that if you do that, you’ll have even more success than you could ever experience if you just engaged in either one of those without the other. 

Brad Weimert: So, we talked a little bit about this earlier relative to getting out of the drudgery zone. And you said for entrepreneurs bootstrapped in particular when they’re starting, inevitably, you have to do a bunch of these things. In your eyes, is there a period of time to just put your head down and grind and “make the sacrifice” for a better life in the future? And I’m in complete agreeance that if you’re not careful, look, you’re never getting to the finish line. It keeps moving. So, it’s very easy to rationalize a never-ending race where you are doing 60, 70, 80, 100 hours a week. How do you look at the startup phase versus the iterative phases to get to scale in that particular frame of the double win? 

Michael Hyatt: I think what you said, Brad, is important and I would say it this way, “Never underestimate your ability to deceive yourself.” And we tell ourselves so many lies and one of the most prevalent ones and one of the ones I told myself is that this work situation right now isn’t permanent. It’s only temporary. And I would say to Gail, my wife, many times I’d say, “Well, honey, I’m without a marketing director right now but as soon as I get that position filled, then I’ll give you and the girls the time and attention you deserve. Or once we get this new product out the door, once we get it launched, then I’ll give you and the girls the time and attention you deserve.” But the problem is that temporary situation leads to another temporary situation to another temporary situation. And before long, the whole fabric of your life is permanent. And that’s where the self-deception comes in. And people wake up and they’re 50, 60 years old and they’re going like, “Well, this is not where I expected it to be at this time in my life.” But it was kind of predictable if you looked at it back at the beginning. So, I don’t have any problem if people go out of balance for a season.

And it’s very helpful that that season part of it is really important but I think to have an agreement with your spouse or your significant other and just say, “Look, it looks like…” And I had this last year for about three months and I sat down with Gail and I said, “Look, I need to work like 60 hours a week because we’re trying to get this product launched. And I don’t think that’s going to take longer than the next 30 days but I don’t want to do this without your agreement and the accountability to you that this is going to end in 30 days.” And so, it may be 90 days and maybe six months or maybe a year. Again, I don’t really care as long as you just don’t inadvertently, unconsciously drift into this place where that becomes your lifestyle. So, sometimes it is important at the beginning but here’s the problem with it, too. It’s like having too much money. Time can be this way. If you have too much money at the beginning, you make stupid decisions and you won’t prioritize. And constraints force you to prioritize and it’s true with your money and it’s definitely true with your time. So, before I hired this executive coach, when I was trying to get out of this impossible choice, my work life looked like this.

The middle of the afternoon, I might waste some time just shooting the breeze with somebody and I would say to myself, “Well, doesn’t really matter because tonight when I get home, I’ll have dinner with the family and then I’ll crack open my laptop and I’ll get back to work. And I could work until 11:00 tonight or I can get up early tomorrow morning.” And so, I wasn’t forced to prioritize. But one of the things the executive coach said to me, and this is like the most valuable advice I ever got, was he said, “You need to set boundaries around your work for the sake of the work and for the sake of your family and your own health.” And so, he said, “What time are you willing to go home in the evening?” He said, “I want you to set a hard boundary that you’re willing to be accountable for.” And I said, “Okay. I’m willing to go home. I’m willing to be home at 6 p.m.” And he said, “And not crack your computer until the next morning?” And I said, “Yes.” And boy, I was really reluctant. I thought, “How is this going to work?” And he said, “Are you willing to not work on the weekends?” Because that was one of Gail’s complaints, too, and frankly, it was one of my complaints.

And he said, “Are you willing to not work on vacations?” because I was the guy that would go on a vacation, get up early before the family, churn through a bunch of email, and take calls in the middle of the day, all that kind of stuff. I was on call all the time. He said, “Are you willing to network on vacations?” I kind of took a gulp and said, “Yes, I am.” And he said, “Great.” He said, “I’m sure you won’t mind if I called Gail occasionally to find out how you’re doing.” It was at that moment, Brad, that it got real. And he did call her and called her several times and checked in on me. But what that forced me to do was to make decisions about my priorities because I knew that once the clock was approaching 5:30, I had to leave so I could be home at 6, which is the commitment I’d made to my coach, Daniel, and I made to my wife, Gail. And so, it forced me to make better decisions with my time. I got uber productive. And all of our tasks are not created equal. Some are more important than others. It forced me to focus on the things that really moved the needle and not the trivial kind of I call it downhill work but the work that just keeps us busy but doesn’t really advance the business. 

Brad Weimert: I love it. So, I want to highlight a couple of things. One, constraints were a huge part of that story. What you just hit on is constraints force prioritization. The other was accountability that I heard. And having accountability partners becomes more and more important as your resources increase. So, as you become rich and make a lot of money and your business scales, less people are going to hold you accountable unless you really drive that and you make it a priority. There is a quote that I want to read from your book, which is, “An over-busy life is not an economic necessity. It’s a failure of imagination.” And I think that’s a beautiful sentiment. I want to ask you the question again. When you’re starting the business, is it okay to hustle? And I think I know the answer but is it more okay to hustle when you’re starting for a longer period of time than later on? Or is that more fitting? Or is that just a failure of imagination? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, I think that definitely, you should explore it from an imaginative perspective first. And there may be times that you have to go out of balance at the beginning. But if I were starting over again, what I would say to myself is, how can I build a business that takes, that’s uber profitable, that scales but it doesn’t require me to work more than, this is going to surprise you, 20 or 30 hours a week. That’s where the imagination comes in. And I think that people do the reverse. They say, “How can I build this enormous business that’s really scaling, that’s highly profitable? And if I have any time left over, I’ll take care of myself and I’ll take care of my family.” I think the reverse ought to happen. It’s like, “What kind of life do I want? And how can I enforce these constraints on my work such that I’m able to have all these other things too, a rich, deep, meaningful life?” Because there are people that do it. You know, we were talking about our mutual friend, Justin Donald. You know, he doesn’t work that much and he makes a lot of money. 

Brad Weimert: This is very true. Very true. Well, the other thing that you said that I think is great that I want to also highlight is the notion of a concrete endpoint. And one of the things that we do internally at Easy Pay Direct is anything that we perceive to be a test, meaning something that we’re trying and we’re unsure of the ROI or we’re unsure if it’s going to be a good fit or in good alignment is we set a timeline to review. And we say, “Hey, let’s do this thing. Okay, how long are we going to do it for before we make a decision if this is a perpetual thing?” Because we don’t want to get stuck in an ecosystem of, “Wait, why are we still doing this? It’s not making any money, we don’t like it, and we’ve just put it into our schedules and it’s sucking up time, energy, and focus.” So, I love that. And I also love the accountability with your partners doing that.

Well, I know where I’ve got a million questions. I know we’re coming up on time here, so I want to focus on content creation a little bit with you because you are sort of a – my perception is that you are sort of a content machine and you’ve written a bunch of books through tons of different eras now. You were also a very early blogger, a very early podcast starter, host, and the types of content and how you create them have all changed. And also, their value in the marketplace has changed. How do you perceive the creation of content and the value of it today versus when you published your first book? 

Michael Hyatt: You know, I think that blogging, which I started in 2004, was really important at the beginning. It helped me build a mailing list that enabled me to step away from the corporate world and start a business where I didn’t really have to start from scratch. I had a mailing list and, man, that’s like one of the most important assets to this day that I have. You know, all the money comes out of that mailing list, basically. But I don’t think blogs are read as much as they used to be. I think that social media is more important than it used to be, and podcasting and YouTubing is super important. I don’t do enough with my YouTube channel. It’s almost an afterthought but podcasting is really important. Almost everybody that finds their way to our company, it’s because they heard a podcast episode, and that intrigued them and that’s what got them to our site. So, I do think content is important because people are really drawn to clarity. And if you create content that’s clear with frameworks that make things simple, make the complex simple and make life more understandable and figure-out-able, you’re going to draw an audience. I don’t care if you’re talking about marriage or talking about parenting or starting a business or organizing your day or whatever it is. You know, I still think content is king.

And if I were starting any kind of business, I don’t care if it’s a plumbing business or anything, I’d figure out a content component because it builds authority for me as an entrepreneur and it convinces people that I have solutions that will actually solve their problems. To me, that’s the secret of success as an entrepreneur. First of all, figure out what people want. That’s number one. Number two, what’s keeping them from getting that? And if I can solve that problem, I’ll stay really busy. 

Brad Weimert: How do you perceive as somebody that’s written a bunch of books, where do books fit into this content machine? Because presumably, well, there are many people today that write books solely as sort of a credibility piece business card. It’s become an entrepreneurial thing to do. Where do books fit in the content equation versus some other thing that you’re trying to accomplish with them? 

Michael Hyatt: Well, I still think they’re critically important. And any content that I create is something I create first and foremost for myself. So, I’m trying to understand something or I’m trying to make sense of something or I’m trying to put it together in a way that I can convey it to somebody else. And I think there’s nothing to this day that credentials you more than being a published author. I don’t care if you get a Ph.D. If you’re a medical doctor, I don’t care what it is. I mean, some of those things are table stakes just to operate in the world but they won’t credential you with the general public like being a published author will. You only need to look at keynote speaking. If you’re not a published author, you’re probably not going to get many gigs or they’re not going to pay much. But once you become a published author, and particularly if you’ve hit a bestseller list, that changes everything then people begin to know you by that thing. And if you’re serious about marketing it, like, I’m never the kind of person that’s just going to self-publish a book and I don’t really care if it sells any because I give it to my clients or whatever. That’s a legitimate strategy.

But I want to market it every time I’m trying to hit the bestseller list because I want the book to be working while I’m sleeping, to be introducing me to people that I can’t reach right now that are outside my sphere of orbit so that I can bring them into my orbit. And books do that. You know, I think they’re a great tool for filling the top of the funnel. 

Brad Weimert: That’s great. Well, for the sake of time, I’m going to tease people with your book because I know we don’t have time to get into it but Win at Work and Succeed at Life. There are a couple of things. I encourage anybody that is, I think there are lots of lessons for entrepreneurs but anybody that wants to write a book looking at the framework of your book is interesting. There are two narrators in the book. That’s unusual. And so, as you talk periodically, you interject and say, “Hey, this is Michael,” or “Hey, this is…” Sorry. I forgot your daughter’s name. 

Michael Hyatt: Megan. Yeah. 

Brad Weimert: “This is Megan.” And so, you have two narrators. That’s totally unique. The other is that you have actionable items for each chapter. You have activities that go with the concepts that you’re outlining in the book. And I think that that’s a really, really interesting framework to engage people in the book and probably encourage sharing. So, I encourage people to check it out. I don’t know how much thought went into that or if I’m just fawning over it but I loved it. 

Michael Hyatt: Well, thank you. You know, I think part of that came from, you know, I spent a lot of my years in the book publishing industry as an editor. And so, I worked with, I don’t know, hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand authors over the course of my career. And I learned what worked in books and what didn’t. And I’m never about the transfer of information, not even application. I want to try to effect a transformation if I possibly can. And so, like, what are the components? Again, reverse engineering. If I want to see a transformation on the part of the reader, what are the necessary components that the book has to incorporate in order to effect that transformation? And if you start from that perspective and just look at your own experience, you’ll come up with some stuff. You know, not everything works the greatest. It’s not just enough to tell inspiring stories, although they’re necessary. It’s not just enough to have good research, which is important. But there’s a whole suite of things that have to be present to affect change. 

Brad Weimert: That’s great. Well, for the sake of time, we got to call it quits here but I want to ask you a thousand other questions. In lieu of that, where can people find out about you if they want to dig into the company, the books, where would you want to point them? 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, all of that, people can find at FullFocus.co. 

Brad Weimert: I love it. Michael Hyatt, I appreciate the time. 

Michael Hyatt: Thanks, Brad. Great to get to know you.