SPI 417: Have a Vision or Be Doomed to Failure. Vision Scripting, with Michael Hyatt

SPI 417 Have a Vision or Be Doomed to Failure. Vision Scripting with Michael Hyatt

Pat Flynn:
I want to quiz you. Do you know what this quote means? Have you ever heard of this quote? “Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.” What do you think that means? Well, the first part of it, “vision without action is a daydream,” essentially means, well, if you have this big idea but you never do anything about it, well, it’ll just continue to be a daydream, a wish, something that will never happen, but you can think about. But the opposite, the worse one: “Action without vision is a nightmare.” Well, that’s doing things without knowing exactly where you want to go. Sort of like a car that you drive around without any sort of destination. Well, how do you even know which way to turn, which way to go? Eventually you’re going to run out of gas and potentially burn out, and we don’t want that to happen.

Pat:
Today a special guest is joining us here on the show. His name is Michael Hyatt. You might’ve heard of him before in the leadership space. He’s been a guest here on the show several times in the past. One of our favorites actually. And he has a book that just came out literally last week called The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business. And we’ve talked a lot about taking the approach as a business owner, as somebody who sort of steps into the CEO role, even if you’re just a solopreneur. The difference between a scrappy entrepreneur that sort of reacts that sort of comes at it day by day versus the one who plans and whether you have a big team or a small team that plan, that vision, that execution behind that is going to be key to your success.

Pat:
So today I’m excited to bring Michael on to talk a little bit about what a vision actually is. How do we structure it? How do we understand it? How do we define it so that our teammates can understand it too? And whether you have employees or not, this is going to be something that’s really, really beneficial to understand because we need that direction. We need that vision because we don’t want our business, our dreams, to become a nightmare. So first let’s get to the music.

Announcer:
Welcome to The Smart Passive Income Podcast where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he secretly wishes he could work on a movie at Pixar, Pat Flynn.

Pat:
What’s up everybody? Welcome to session 417 of The Smart Passive Income Podcast. My name is Pat Flynn here to help you make more money, save more time and help more people too. And today, like I said, we have a dear friend of mine, Michael Hyatt. We actually went fly fishing together last year through Wyoming and Idaho and it was awesome. We talked a lot, and I’m excited because I learned about this book coming your way and it is available now on Amazon. Again, that’s The Vision Driven Leader. Here he is, Michael Hyatt from michaelhyatt.com. Michael, welcome back to The Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thanks for being here again.

Michael Hyatt:
Thanks Pat. It’s so good to be on again.

Pat:
Every time you come on you have something amazing to share—this time related to your upcoming book Vision. Vision is so important. And I think that most entrepreneurs, we often dive into something without fully realizing the vision of where we want to go and we want to get our hands dirty so quickly. But why is it a mistake to sort of take action without first thinking about where we want to go and the vision that we have?

Michael:
Yeah. Well, to use a metaphor, it’s almost like jumping in the car with your entire family and say, “Hey, let’s go on a trip.” “Where are we going, dad?” “Not really sure, but it’s going to be fun.” You can waste a lot of resources, spend a lot of time and be very busy the entire time and never get to a destination that’s meaningful. And so I think that’s true in an organization too.

Michael:
There’s so much sideways energy, so much waste of resources when we’re not clear about the destination. And I think even in productivity, which is a space that I’ve written a lot about and I know it was a particular interest to you, Pat. Productivity without a vision you can end up very busy doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. And I think that the secret to having more margin in your life, to having a business that you run instead of a business that runs you, is to have a clear vision where you can create alignment and then drive the execution around that vision.

Pat:
Well, here’s my question around that. Because I know as an entrepreneur sometimes we don’t fully know exactly where we’re going and we often hear, especially from people like Seth Godin just ship, right? And then kind of ready, fire, aim, right? So how does your thoughts about finding a vision versus, well, we have to take actions somewhere and a business plan is just kind of a best guess. How do we balance that and what is truly the methods for really realizing this vision that you were speaking of?

Michael:
That’s a great question, and certainly you’re not going to have the kind of clarity at the beginning of the process that you’ll develop as you move toward the objective. But I still think it’s important to take a stab of it, at it. Just because you can’t have absolute clarity doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. To have a vision for where you’re going is critically important in terms of shaping your activities. Like I tell the story in the book in The Vision Driven Leader where I started the publishing company back in 1984, and we had all kinds of energy. We had investors, we had a mission and we were certainly had lots of opportunities.

Michael:
But unfortunately because we didn’t have a vision, there was no filter to really help us to determine where we were going to put our resources, where we’re going to put our effort. And as a result, we were kind of just, every opportunity became a new thing that we pursued. And it was at the end of the day, it was our opportunities that were our undoing because they were all over the map and we were just spread too thin. So a vision provides that focus. It provides that clarity that directs our actions so we don’t squander our resources so that we don’t waste our energy so that it’s focused and so that it has an outcome that we’re pursuing.

Pat:
It makes me think of, and I’m really bullish on Tesla right now at this time of recording, the stock is up like crazy. There’s a lot of fun and exciting news happening in the world of Tesla and it makes me think of their sort of mission and vision, which is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. And a lot of us have heard of obviously Elon Musk and his sort of overall plan to change the world. And it started with the vision of just, okay, we want sustainable energy. But then it started to help him determine, okay, well what might the steps be to make that happen? And of course he started with the Roadster, a higher level car that he was going to sell for lots of money to a few people that would then supply the income and resources for the Model S which came out in 2012 around that time, which then made money to then make the more production ready Model 3, which has just recently come out.

Pat:
And it’s coming in stages, but obviously it’s always based on this vision of accelerating the world’s transition. And it couldn’t have happened with the Model 3 at first. And so the hard thing is Elon is just in another world, but I think that we can all benefit from seeing these things that we want to get into in such a way, kind of farther into the future. How do we begin to determine what our vision is? Do you have any thoughts or questions or exercises that we can do right now to figure this out?

Michael:
Absolutely. Well, I think first of all, it’s important to define what a vision is. And so in the book, I define it this way. I say vision is a clear, inspiring, practical, and attractive picture of your organization’s future. In other words, it’s something that’s a superior state to where you are right now. Typically, I recommend to our business coaching clients, we have about 500 people in our program right now, business owners, that it needs to be about three years from now. Beyond that, technology is changing so fast that for most businesses, and there are some exceptions, but for most businesses beyond that, it’s just a wild guess.

Michael:
Less than that, and it’s not going to be strategic. So a written statement, really a script, I call it. A statement’s not sufficient, but a script that encompasses four areas where you talk about your team, your products, your marketing, and your impact in the world.

Michael:
And so it needs to be written and it needs to be written in the present tense. But this is not something you’re going to cook up by going into the mountains and meditating and having some mystical experience. This is more like just like when you’re trying to draft a blog post or draft anything you end up with something that approximates what you want to do, but you’re going to refine and edit it over time. But I recommend to people that are trying to formulate a vision to get away for a day and to go through a series of questions. In fact, I have these questions in the book, they’re vision prompting questions because I know how difficult it is for most people to sit down and stare at an empty screen. It can be quite intimidating. So this is almost like, not quite, but almost like paint by number. So I have a series of questions. If you did nothing but answer these questions, you would have probably 85 to 90 percent of your vision script done.

Pat:
And is this something you do on your own or do you do it with other members of your team together?

Michael:
I highly recommend that you start by doing it alone. I’ve been a part of a process where I worked for a company where the CEO came in and said, “Look, our investors are asking me what my vision is. I’m not really a vision kind of guy, so I want to appoint a committee to figure out the vision.” And he put me in charge of it. Well, it would’ve been awesome if he’d had a seat at the table or if he’d given us some kind of idea of where he wanted to go. But this is not something you delegate. This is something that I think is integral to being a good leader. Vision or being a leader means that you’re leading people somewhere. Well, where’s the somewhere? Where is the destination you’re taking everybody? So I recommend that you get alone.

Michael:
You get very clear step into the future, stand in the future as it were. Use your imagination, which is I think a God given faculty that we have to begin creating the future and describe what you see. Write it down. Write it in the present tense as though it were already happening, and then once you get that first draft, then it’s time to go back to the team and say, “Look, I’ve been thinking a lot about vision and where we’re going and this isn’t perfect. It needs a lot of work. This is just a draft. But in order to take it to the next level, I need your input.” That’s when you share it and really invite their input. What did I miss? What am I not seeing clearly? What could be improved here?

Michael:
Then in that process, you’re beginning to create buy-in so that it becomes not just your vision but a collective vision. But it will also ask to act as a filter for people that just say “that’s not really what I signed up for,” and that’s fine. You want people that are aligned around that vision. The right vision will attract the right people and repel the wrong people.

Pat:
How do you differentiate between this vision that we’re creating and scripting out for ourselves and just our wishlist of things that we hope will happen? I think a lot of entrepreneurs, we have ideas of where we want to go, but because it feels more like a wish and almost so far into the future that we don’t even know how to get there. It almost feels deflating sometimes when we see this vision or this wishlist that we’ve created and we go, “Oh man, I don’t even know where to begin on this.” And it almost is sometimes deflating I’ve heard from people. So how do you create the vision without deflating yourself but get excited about it at the same time?

Michael:
Yeah, I think that’s where the three-year time horizon make sense because it needs to be something that you could see reasonably happening in a three-year timeframe. But one of the things that’s really critically important to do is to suspend that how question. Because if a vision, if it’s properly formulated, you’re not going to see the entire how. Vision has to precede strategy, and I’ve said this in my book, Your Best Year Ever, when it comes to goal setting. But once you get clear on the vision, what you’re trying to accomplish, then the strategy has a way of showing up.

Michael:
Until you get clear on where you want to go, it doesn’t really matter how you’re going to get there. That only becomes relevant once you get clear on where it is you want to take your company. So yeah, so it’s going to be in your discomfort zone. There’s going to be parts of it that make you uncomfortable and that’s how it should be. If it’s something that doesn’t make you uncomfortable and it’s just in the realm of kind of business as usual and it recommends, sort of relies on an incremental gain. That’s not really vision, that’s not going to inspire anybody, probably not even you.

Pat:
Right. Do you have an example from your own business, a vision that you had and created or you didn’t quite yet know exactly how it was going to happen three years or so into the future? And then can you tell us how you figured out what to do to realize that vision?

Michael:
Yeah, so one example of that is that we had this vision of really helping leaders and we thought it’d be awesome if we could do something in the realm of coaching. So initially we thought, well, let’s just take my bestselling course, Five Days to Your Best Year Ever, and let’s create a coaching program for those that want to go deeper around it. And so that worked kind of, and we did the same thing with my Free to Focus course on productivity. We called them activation workshops and we did a deeper dive for people that want to go deeper in that.

Michael:
What we didn’t see at the time was that people wanted to marry those two things together so that they were both pursuing goals but doing the productivity thing together. So we kind of zagged from that and went into our business accelerating coaching program, which has just taken off like crazy. We’ve got about 500 clients in that program now and it’s become more than half of our business. So a lot of times at the beginning of a vision, you kind of have sort of it’s almost like the Bible says we see through a glass darkly. We don’t have the clarity that we might need when we get there, but it gets us set in the right direction and the clarity comes as we begin to make progress. So that’s just an example.

Pat:
I love that. Thank you for that. What are some of these questions that we could prompt ourselves with and maybe even think about? I’d like to perhaps navigate some of those for those who might be getting into the book later.

Michael:
Yeah. Cool. So again, I talk about a vision script, not a vision statement. One of the things I found, Pat, was when I was trying to create a vision for my company, I thought I had to come up with this short pithy clever thing that you could put on a T-shirt or a coffee mug and would just motivate the heck out of everybody. That’s like an impossible burden for anybody to create. I mean, maybe there’s occasionally a person that can do that, but for the rest of us that are mere mortals, that becomes an impossible task and it actually inhibits the process. So I said, what if we made that a vision script, something that actually was not so long that it was daunting, but long enough where we could flesh it out and actually describe what we see in four key areas.

Michael:
So I start with team. Team is critically important. I think that’s the first and most important priority as we’re beginning to fulfill our vision and move into the future is to think about what kind of team it’s going to take. I’ve often said that if your dream doesn’t require a team, your dream is too small. So the team is going to be the primary vehicle, the primary mechanism by which you get to the future. It’s going to take the collective effort of several people, maybe a lot of people, that they’re going to help to accomplish that vision. So here’s some of the questions that I ask around team. What kind of teammates do you want to attract? What characteristics do they share in common? How do they work? What is their work ethic? What do you do to attract top talent? What is your compensation philosophy?

Michael:
What does your benefits package look like? By the way, this was a huge breakthrough for us when we began to think of prospective employees as customers that we had to sell on the product, which was the company. So we began to think of our company as a product, and we built out a sales page, which we call our careers page. You can see it at michaelhyatt.com/careers, but a sales page that would sell our company to prospective employees, because we wanted to attract the right people. And then we began to think what kind of benefits would we have to have that would really attract the best top talent? So that’s where we got to the place where we said we want to cover 100 percent of healthcare. We want to give people unlimited paid time off. We want to give people a 30-day paid sabbatical every three years.

Michael:
We want to give people a personal development allowance every year that they’re not accountable to. They can just use it to spend on a hobby or something else that enriches their life even outside of work. So this all came from this vision and answering these questions. But then there’s these three other sections. There’s a section in the vision script on product. What is it about your products? What results do your products create? What value do they deliver? Who do your products help? How do your customers feel when they use your products? What’s the user experience like? Then there’s a section on sales and marketing. What markets do you serve? How large is your customer base, how do you reach them. And then impact: What are the results, or what metrics are you using that are meaningful to you and your team in terms of defining the win ahead of time? So anyway, all that leads to a first draft that you can polish and turn that into a vision script that can really become the guiding or the driving force of your business.

Pat:
It’s interesting—it reminds me of my book Will It Fly? which is about finding a business and validating that idea, but it really starts internally with you and validating where do you want to go personally in the next three to five years of your life. And that then becomes very similar to this, the guiding principle, and I love how this is specifically a similar exercise, but just for your business specifically related to team, products, marketing and impact. And so I can imagine this being helpful such that when you come to a decision-making point or there’s an opportunity in front of you, you can kind of just use this as a litmus test to see, well does this actually fit into where I want to go here or does this prospective hire fit this vision that we have? Or are getting the results that we actually shot out to get? What are some results that you’re seeing from some of the people in your coaching program that are using this?

Michael:
Well, it’s been huge. We gave them an advance copy of the book, The Vision Driven Leader, and gave them an opportunity to read through it, formulate their own vision, and then report back and they’ve seen extraordinary results. Now, in our coaching program in general, we track the metrics. How much does the business grow, for example, that’s an important metric to us. And in the first 12 months, our average coaching client and we spent an entire day on vision, our average coaching client will grow their business by 61 percent in the first year.

Pat:
Wow.

Michael:
But that’s not all. And this is why a vision is so important. Our average coaching client shaves 11 hours off their work week. Now, how do those two things go together? Well, I would maintain that vision has got to be the foundation of meaningful productivity. In other words not all tasks, not all projects are created equal.

Michael:
You can spend a ton of time doing things that are really should be outside the scope of your vision, but are not leading you anywhere. But once you have clarity about a vision, now all of a sudden you have, and you kind of mentioned this before without using the word, but you have a filter, right? So you could decide which opportunities are relevant, which are a distraction. You can talk about which work is relevant, which work is just a distraction. So everybody can skinny down their workload because now we’re focused on the vision and fulfilling that. We’re not just trying to do everything sort of the shotgun approach. We’re using a rifle to get laser locked on the stuff that matters. It becomes a filter and a way to measure which priorities are important and which are not.

Pat:
Wow, massively helpful. I think that this can either become something that people can embrace with welcome arms or often be afraid of because perhaps they internally know that they aren’t really sure where they want to go. How do you begin to approach this process if . . . or what are some of the questions you can ask yourself if you’re just not even quite sure what the direction you want your business to be?

Michael:
You know this as a writer. I know this as a writer too, but I don’t get clear until I start writing. I might sit down and I think I’m going to be writing about one thing, but there’s something about the process of writing, and I often quote this, I don’t even know who said it originally but, “Thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips.” Sometimes we’re not clear because we haven’t subjected ourselves to the discipline of trying to write it down. Something about writing forces you to get clear and particularly when it’s a guided writing assignment like I’ve outlined in the book. And anybody can do this. I mean we’ve had so many people, hundreds of people now that have gone through this exercise who wouldn’t consider themselves a writer and we say, look, this doesn’t have to be some kind of beautiful prose.

Michael:
It could be a series of bullet points. The most important thing is: get it out of your head. You can polish it later. This is advice I give to writers, but it’s true and coming up with a vision statement too, but you’ve got to get clear. I spend a good amount of time in the first part of the book. What happens when you don’t have a vision? Well I went through a business failure because I didn’t have a vision. But there’s a lot at stake. Your people are counting on you to give the vision. There was a big research project I cited in the book where they said, “What’s the number one trait that people who work in companies look for in leadership?” Well, the number one as probably everybody could imagine was integrity. Number two, vision.

Michael:
They want a leader who knows where he or she is taking the company because they know what happens when that’s not present. Everybody is very busy, everybody’s doing a lot of work, but it’s not going anywhere and people can sense that. It’s critical. Even if you don’t feel like you can do this, you’ve got to do it. You can’t delegate it. You can’t hire it out. This is something you’ve got to ask yourself the question, where do I want to take this? What’s personally interesting to me? What’s compelling to me? What do I want to give my time and resources to? If you can’t answer that question, what are you doing?

Pat:
It sort of reminds me of the difference between that scrappy entrepreneur who’s sort of starting and figuring things out, but not really kind of planning ahead, but just kind of being more reactive to what’s happening in the market or selling products when they get interested in it or what have you. Versus somebody who is stepping up and into the CEO leadership space, which I remember that very particular moment in around 2014, 2015, when I had to consciously tell myself I’m no longer just a scrappy entrepreneur. I have to step into this role as a CEO to go to where I want to go. I need to start building my team. I need to start thinking more clearly about where I want to go. And a lot of things happened as a result of just mentally stepping into that space.

Pat:
And that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a giant team. But when it comes to building a team, and a scrappy entrepreneur—solopreneur—is wanting to step into more of the CEO leadership space, what would be one or if not more hires that you would recommend a person start thinking about in order to help them get to where they want to go? Versus just hiring a VA to answer emails? I know there’s some really important people that need to be with you on this journey.

Michael:
Definitely. And so my team right now is 40 full-time people. We’ve got openings on our web page right now for 12 more because of the growth we’ve experienced the last couple of years.

Pat:
Forty?

Michael:
Yeah 40.

Pat:
Holy moly. Wow. That’s incredible.

Michael:
And so I can tell you what the different positions were. The first person I hired in my business, it can be different for different businesses, was a copywriter because that was consuming an enormous amount of my time. And so I hired a copywriter to take that load off me so I could focus more on product development. The next person I hired was somebody to help me with content creation. And now I’ve got six people on my content creation team, which is phenomenal. Sometime we’ll have to talk about how we create content. It’s been an awesome thing to do as a team. And one of the first hires that I made, and this is one that a lot of people put off, was I hired a bookkeeper and now I’ve got a chief financial officer, and that’s one of the most important hires to make to keep you on track.

Michael:
Yeah, you may be familiar with this stat, but this comes from the US Department of Commerce, but there’s about a million businesses started in the US every year, new businesses started every year. Twenty percent of those will survive the first five years. In other words, 80 percent will go out of business within the first five years. Of those that survive, 80 percent of those that survive will go out of business in the next five years. So you basically have a 4 percent, if you run all the numbers there, you got to have a 4 percent chance of surviving 10 years. So I do think that comes back to vision and it comes back to hiring the right teammates. Who are the people that are going to help me get to that vision because nobody just needs to hire people to hire people or hire people because you’ve got more work than you can do. But you’re hiring people to help you row the boat that’s going to get you to the destination you envision.

Pat:
I love that. Thank you. Wow. I’m just kind of blown away because I remember when I got familiar with your work in 2013 through Platform and Platform University and all that great stuff. Your team wasn’t that big and now you’ve scaled up quite nicely, and how do you manage to stay sane while growing a business to this level? I personally don’t have an interest to get to that scale. I have a team of about eight full-time people now, which is a good sweet spot for me. But when you go bigger than that, I mean what are some of the things that you need to start thinking about in order to manage because that’s a lot of people to take care of and a lot of moving parts and pieces. What’s, your secret?

Michael:
Well, I would say I feel like I’m playing one string guitar, but I do think it comes back to vision. We wouldn’t have a team that big if we didn’t have a clear vision. And the thing that keeps that from becoming complex and bureaucratic and more than any one person can manage is the vision, the discipline that staying focused as a result of that vision. For example, we pruned out some pretty important products this last year. One of them you know of, Best Year Ever, just because we didn’t see it in our future. Great program had a wonderful season in our business. It’s still alive and people can still buy it, but we’re not spending a lot of effort on promoting it out there anymore because we just didn’t see it as part of our future.

Michael:
But I would say that if you do see your company growing bigger than eight people, by the way, there was a point at which I saw eight people and I thought this is probably enough. So I wouldn’t be surprised, Pat, I’ll just put this bug in your ear that your team doesn’t grow as your vision expands.

Pat:
We shall see.

Michael:
Just saying. We’ll see. Bigger is not always better. So I certainly want to acknowledge that, but I do think that if you’re going to lead a team, the thing that they’re counting on you for is that vision. Because they need to have a filter. They need sort of some overarching schema that guides their work, that tells them what’s a distraction and what’s an opportunity. Those often look like the same thing on the front end. But if you don’t have a vision, you don’t have a way to discerning the difference.

Pat:
How do you get the team on board with your vision? I think that I can imagine cases where a leader will go to their team and say, “This is where we’re going.” And the team is just not happy or, “Okay, sure boss, whatever you say.” But how do you get them excited about the vision? How do you align them with you?

Michael:
Okay, here’s the first and foremost important thing. You’ve got to be excited first. If it doesn’t motivate you, people can sense it. If you’re just going through the motions, people know it. They can intuit that. People are a lot smarter than sometimes we give them credit for. But if you’re jazzed about it, then you’re going to communicate that enthusiasm. But this is not like a one and done communication thing. Like if you were to interview the employees at our company and said, what’s the vision for Michael Hyatt and company? They may not give you the letter of the laws that were be able to quote from the vision script, but they’re pretty clear. And it’s because again, it’s not a one and done thing where we did the vision thing, we’ve got the vision script and now it’s in a shelf on the bookcase.

Michael:
No, this is a living document. So let me just tell you what happens with us. So every year we have an annual team meeting. We just did this in January. We brought everybody together. I mean every single person in the room. And in the past we’ve also invited spouses to that. We didn’t do it this year, but typically we do because we want buy in from the spouses as well, but only do we report on the company’s financial results and some of the big milestones that we achieved this past year. So it’s really a time of celebration, but it’s also a time of vision casting. So I literally got up in front of the entire company and I read through the vision script and in our case, it’s a four page document, but I read it with conviction and with enthusiasm, I invited people to visualize it.

Michael:
I had somebody that had just started with the company about three months before that, who was in our customer service department. She came up to me; she’d never spoken to me in her entire time at our company, three months. And she came up to me with tears in her eyes and she said, “I cannot tell you how motivating that is. To know that I’m part of a bigger story gets me really, really excited.” And that’s pretty much the consistent response that our clients see with their employees when they get connected to the vision because all of a sudden, and here’s the thing that people are desperate for, meaning. People want to know that what they do on a daily basis means something that is connected to a bigger story. That this is going somewhere; that their life matters. And it’s your job as a leader to make sure that you connect the dots, you connect that vision to their daily actions.

Michael:
But it can’t even be once a year. So every quarter when our team gets together, we get together for one day, once a quarter, we call it team training. But we do a similar kind of thing on the annual, we review what’s happened in the last quarter. We celebrate that. We set our goals for the next quarter and we read one of the four parts of our vision script, but I don’t read it. Somebody on our team does it, so they kind of interpret it in a way, but we talk about it there. We talk about it in our daily work. When an opportunity comes up, we ask ourselves, does this square with our vision? Can I just give you a piece of our vision?

Pat:
Yeah, please.

Michael:
So this is a part of our vision script and this is under the team framework and by the way we highly recommend that people write this in the present tense so that you begin to believe that it’s happening. As it turns out all the brain science says that your mind can’t differentiate between something vividly imagined and something you’re actually experiencing. This is why in the world of professional athletics that a part of the practice regimen is actually visualizing the practice.

Michael:
Somebody asked Michael Phelps one time when he’s just kind of looked like he was staring blankly into space before a race. They said, “Are you envisioning the finish?” And he said, “No.” He said, “I’m going through mentally every single stroke.” Why? Because that rehearsal, that mental rehearsal was key to performance. Okay, so this is in the team section of the script. This is one of the things we say: “Our employees experience reasonable autonomy, planning and executing their own work without the impediment of overbearing management, stifling bureaucracy or procedural red tape. We encourage innovation and experimentation. If something doesn’t work, we learn from it and move on.” That guides the policies that we set up in HR. The way that we manage, we do not micromanage.

Michael:
We have an office, beautiful office. Nobody’s required to come in. Nobody’s required to keep office hours. Everybody’s invited to come in, but we really don’t care. We’re looking at the results. We want people to have reasonable autonomy. Daniel Pink says in his book Drive that that’s one of the three key elements for retaining people, for retaining the best talent. They’ve got to feel like they’ve got autonomy. But it also informs policies. Like we have a no-hassle software policy where if you feel like you need an app, you don’t have to get approved by your boss. You don’t have to get it approved by some central IT department, just buy it, we trust you, you’re an adult. So that vision informs how we run the business. And that’s the key thing that I think people need to understand about vision.

Pat:
I really love that. I think, I mean now I want to go work for you for a little bit. This is really cool. You had mentioned earlier the content team and how you all put together your content and it’s really neat. I’d love to learn a little bit more about how you do that, especially with multiple team members involved.

Michael:
Yeah, this has been really fun and this has been a journey for me, but in the old days, let’s just take a book for example, I wrote every word. And as you know from writing books, it’s a ton of work, right?

Pat:
It’s true.

Michael:
And it’s daunting. And there were I mean, almost every book I wrote there was a point at which I wanted to throw in the towel and just say, “This is just too hard. What was I thinking? I’ve sold myself into something I can’t complete,” but eventually worked through the messy middle and completed. So now what I have with the content team, we follow something I call the 10-80-10 principle. It’s also a principle I teach to our coaching clients. And it works not just in content development but in almost anything if you’re in a position of leadership.

Michael:
And that is where you’re involved in the first 10 percent of the project and involved in the last 10 percent of the project. But other people who are more gifted in the middle parts of the project take that on. So for example, now when we do a book or we do a podcast or we set up one of our coaching days, one of our workshops, I’ll go in and brainstorm with the team. Take several hours, sometimes a day, maybe two days if it’s a book, and just do a brain dump. Everything I know about that, everything I’ve thought about it. We sketch on the whiteboard, all that stuff. Then the team takes it. This is the 80 percent, they do the research, they find the case studies, they interview the clients, they do all that tough stuff in the middle that, frankly, I hate. That’s the hardest part of the work. Then it comes back to me for my fine tuning, for my review and ultimately for my approval, and that’s how we produce almost every piece of content today.

Pat:
10-80-10.

Michael:
10-80-10. It allows you to accomplish so much more than you can do when you’re responsible for the whole part of the project. And this really goes back to something, Pat, I talk about in my book, Free to Focus about the desire zone, where your passion and your proficiency come together. That creates the greatest leverage for you personally and frankly creates the greatest leverage for the company. When you stay in your lane and you’re doing your desire zone activities, you’re satisfied, you’re happy, you’re fulfilled.

Michael:
When you stray outside of that, that’s when life becomes drudgery. And so for me, there’s really today in my business there’s only three things that I do. I create content, I deliver content, and I work on the vision. Other than that, that’s somebody else’s work. And I just say no, I pass it to somebody else that’s more equipped to do it. And even within the content creation, there are certain parts of that that I’m better equipped to do than the other parts. Like, I’m great on the ideation part of it, building frameworks, coming up with the overarching part of it, but filling in the details, the case studies, all the things I talked about, the research, that’s not in my desire zone, that’s not the best and highest use of me.

Pat:
And this is why we build a team so that we can do these things and only work on the things that we want to do. And this is why I have my team and it sounds like you get to do things that you love to do as well. And the machine just keeps running, which is fantastic.

Michael:
Yeah, exactly.

Pat:
I also want to talk about you had mentioned the four parts—team, products, sales, marketing, and then impact. I want to talk about marketing and sort of scripting the vision for marketing. Because that seems like a means to an end, but you’re scripting the methods and how to get to the impact, to get to the results that you want. So what might a script look like for marketing in particular?

Michael:
Yeah. Let me just read a few parts out of the Michael Hyatt company vision script as it relates to sales and marketing. So we say we start by saying kind of an overarching statement. We employ customer acquisition strategies that make our offers irresistible. So here’s what we say and you’ll see where we got this in a minute. “We understand our clients and customers are the real heroes. We serve as a guide, offering a plan that helps them overcome their obstacles, and achieve their desired transformation.” So that’s StoryBrand from Don Miller 101.

Pat:
Right, exactly.

Michael:
Okay. Then we say this, “We offer our products from a profound sense of what’s at stake, both positively and negatively. Therefore, we believe selling and marketing are a noble and essential activity that we exercise without apology. As such, we confidently call our customers to action, believing our products are precisely what they need to help them get what they want.”

Michael:
So I think a lot of times people in sales and marketing depending on your background or whatever, feel a little bit like they’re, I don’t know, second rate citizens in the company that what they do is not quite clean, not noble. And we’re saying no. Do you understand what’s at stake? I mean it’s critical that we get the message about our products out to people and the people that are involved in that are doing something really important and something really special. And so we want to elevate them.

Pat:
I love that. I love the positioning there and I think that’s something that we all need to hear that selling is noble. I often say you can sell and serve at the same time. And for a sales team that you might have because I know that I’ve been on floors where there’s the sales team in the corner, but they’re often the most hardworking but they’re often are the least appreciated because there’s just about the numbers. I think that when you can put perspective into it with the human element and the fact that, well, we are creating solutions and helping people out, well selling becomes crucial. It becomes the most important thing or else no transformation would happen. So I really absolutely love that. And to finish off here, again, everybody should check out The Vision Driven Leader. You can probably get on Amazon. Is there any special page you want people to go to, to see it instead?

Michael:
Absolutely. We’d encourage you to go to visiondrivenleader.com/smart as in smart passive income because we have a special suite of bonuses for people that visit that page. All you got to do is buy the book, whatever better books are sold, go to that page and you could redeem using your receipt, a whole suite of bonuses including you get the free audio book, you get the free ebook there, you get a tool that we’ve created that’s online that’s amazing called the Vision Scripter Tool that will actually walk you through the process online to get you a draft of your script.

Pat:
And that’s thevisiondrivenleader?

Michael:
No, just visiondrivenleader.com/smart.

Pat:
Perfect, and we’ll have that linked to in the show notes as well. To finish off, I’d like to have us discuss a little bit about just sort of leader energy levels because I think that especially in the moments of developing a script like this and thinking about the future and the vision for the company, it can get really exciting and then you present it to the team, everything’s going. But then of course within the lives of our business, there are moments where we’re feeling down—the dip, if you will. What are some strategies that you employ for yourself and your team to get that energy back so that we can realize that vision when perhaps we had a failed launch for example, or things just didn’t go to plan or something happened that was unexpected that threw us off the rails. How do we get back on the rails and toward this vision that we have?

Michael:
Well, Pat, there’s so many of these things that relate to mindset, but I think the single most important thing you bring to your team, apart from vision, is your energy. It determines everything inside of your company. People cue off you. That’s part of what it means to be a leader for good or for bad. People are going to pick up on your energy and they’re going to reflect it. But I think that’s where we’ve got to be the thermostat, not the thermometer. It’s not original with me. Somebody else said it, but I think it’s beautiful metaphor.

Michael:
We going to be the thermostat. We set the temperature or the energy inside of our company. Therefore, as leaders, one of the most important things we can do is manage our energy level. And when it comes to that, and boy, I manage my energy. I’m a lot older than you, so I really have to manage my energy, but I’m very thoughtful about it. So for me it begins with something very simple, but it’s probably the single most important thing when it comes to energy. And that’s the amount of sleep you get. Did you ever notice that when you get tired, how much dumber everybody gets?

Pat:
Yeah.

Michael:
It’s not them, it’s you because you just… Sleep is key to productivity. It’s key to focus. It’s key to energy. When I wake up in the morning and I’ve slept eight hours and that’s my goal, eight hours, the average adult needs eight to 10 hours. So I’m on the short side of that. Unfortunately, about 78 percent of Americans get six hours of sleep or less. But to get eight hours of sleep, it’s amazing what that does to your energy level. What you eat is important. Whether or not you exercise is important. We’re not talking about health here, we’re talking about how you can be the best leader for your business and you’ve got to manage that energy. How you show up every day matters. What happens when you get a setback, like you were talking about a launch doesn’t go as well as it should.

Michael:
And I mean we experience that constantly. People looking from the outside and say everything you guys touch turns to gold and people probably say the same thing to you Pat. That’s absolutely not true. We’ve had a lot of failures, a lot of things that didn’t work as well as we had hoped. But the key in terms of maintaining your energy and the key to getting through that successfully is to be able to process failure in a powerful way. And there’s a whole series of things I can say on that, but failure’s inevitable. Failing is optional. So taking that failure, being able to metabolize that, and I think it begins first of all, by owning it. What will prolong failure? What will send you into the death spiral is when you’re in that sort of victim mentality where you’re blaming everybody else.

Michael:
So my business, I tell the story in the book, The Vision Driven Leader, at the front of the book. I started the publishing company in 1984; after five years, and enormous growth, we outran our capital and we went broke. In fact, we didn’t have enough assets to declare bankruptcy because there was nothing to distribute. Everything had been pledged in loans, but we went broke. And at first we wanted to blame the distributor that didn’t deliver the sales that they had promised. And in fact, we met with a lawyer and we thought we’re going to file a lawsuit against the distributor. And the lawyer said, “Look, I’ll do this if you want. It’s going to take a retainer, by the way, but I’ll do this if you want. But I want to just kind of give you a preview of what your life’s going to look like. You’re going to spend the next three years in and out of court having to answer questions about every decision you ever made. And at the end of it, even if you win, you’re not going to get what you think and you’re going to end up angry and bitter.”

Michael:
He said, “I want you guys to think about it over the weekend.” So we did. So my partner and I thought about it. We came back and we said, “You know what? The truth is we got into that relationship with the distributor. Nobody held a gun to our head. It was our fault. We didn’t do our due diligence.” Once we owned that, all of a sudden the power came back to us. We realized we weren’t victims. We could begin to change the future. We could begin to change the outcome. And we went on, both of us, to very successful careers after that. But you got to be able to process that failure. You got to be able to metabolize it so that you can use it to grow and I’ve often said about that experience. It’s not one that I would ever want to repeat, but it’s one that I wouldn’t trade for any amount of money because that was the beginning of my education as an entrepreneur and that has served me so well through the years.

Pat:
Hear hear. I hope that encourages everybody because we all go through failures all the time, but failing is optional. I really love that. Thank you. Michael, I appreciate you coming on and spending time. I know you’re busy especially with a book launch coming up, but The Vision Driven Leader is the book. Head on over to visiondrivenleader.com/smart and you can pick up all those goodies there. Mike, always a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much, and I look forward to connecting with you and fishing again with you and all that great stuff.

Michael:
Pat, we got do it.

Pat:
Hopefully very soon.

Michael:
Thanks so much.

Pat:
Cheers. All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Michael Hyatt. You can find his book again at visiondrivenleader.com/smart. Go ahead and check it out there. And thank you again Michael for coming on. I always appreciate it and I hope we get to go fishing again very soon.

Pat:
For those of you listening, you’re amazing. If you want to check out the resources and the links mentioned in this episode, head on over to smartpassiveincome.com/session417. Once again, smartpassiveincome.com/session417. Just want to say I appreciate you all. Thank you for listening in. Team Flynn you’re amazing, and make sure if you haven’t done so already, head on over to Apple podcast and leave a review for the show if you have the opportunity to do so. And if you haven’t yet subscribed, well now’s the time to do it because then you’re also going to see all the other amazing content that’s available for you right now too. So Team Flynn, thank you so much and as always, #TeamFlynn for the win, peace.

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