SPI 837: The Best Tips for Success Without Burnout with Chris Ducker

SPI 837: The Best Tips for Success Without Burnout with Chris Ducker

Chris Ducker: where the concept of the long haul leader came about. So everything is about going slower for a longer period of time, enjoying the journey, understanding that yes, you’ve got to be adaptable. Yes, you’ve got to stay grounded. But ultimately, you’ve got to be very healthy while you do it everything I do moving forward is with legacy in mind now, but business and personal. And so, you know, these are the concepts of that long haul leadership kind of framework.

Pat Flynn: You know, I feel very blessed to have this podcast because not only is it a great way to reach and teach you, not only is it a great way to I mean, it’s definitely helped me with public speaking and becoming a better communicator, but it is an incredible platform to connect and be friends with people.

And in this case, like today, it’s not only a way to connect, but it’s also a way to catch up. And so we’re going to be talking today with somebody who’s been on the show before. Mr. Chris Ducker from ChrisDucker.com, founder of Youpreneur, and he’s got some stuff coming up that we’re going to dive into.

Because a lot of it is a result of certain things that have happened in his life and recently in the world, and some changes have had to be made. He’s recently had some businesses that were sold, he’s recently had to shut some things down, and there are new things that are coming out of this. And so there’s some big lessons here.

In this particular episode, we’re going to talk about health and how important that is, especially as both Chris and I are getting a little bit older and we talk shop. So this was a great way for Chris and I to catch up. We recently were together in Nashville, Tennessee for an author’s retreat. We both have books coming out pretty shortly coming in the next year.

And I know a lot of you who are listening are fans and remember that he and I used to run events together. The One Day Business Breakthrough Podcast was a thing in our one day event. I spoke and have keynoted a couple of his events. And a lot of events have happened between the last time he was on the show and today, which we’re going to dive into and talk about and unpack. And hopefully you’ll pick up some lessons through this conversation today, because we’re not just catching up. We’re learning. We always learn from each other. And we want you to be a person in the room with us when we’re talking. So here we are.

Chris Ducker from ChrisDucker.com.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he tries to hit 160 grams of protein a day for his diet, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Chris, welcome back to the show, man. How are you?

Chris Ducker: It’s good to be here, brother.

Pat Flynn: What is it? Your sixth, seventh, eighth time on the show?

Chris Ducker: I don’t even know. I’ve been back a while. You keep bringing me back. So clearly I’m doing something right.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And clearly you keep bringing different kinds of value and we have a lot of fun, new things to offer to the audience today.

A lot of people who have listened to the show know you obviously, and knows that you’re one of my best friends, but hasn’t heard about your business in a while. Tell me a little bit about what you got going on in business and life now. Just a quick update before we get into some. Some meaty stuff.

Chris Ducker: Yeah. So we sold the call center facility that we had in the Philippines, almost 400 employees. We sold that last year. So that was cool.

Pat Flynn: How long do you have that for? 16 years, man. 16 years and you sold it. Yeah.

Chris Ducker: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Did that feel like a relief? Was that exciting? Was that bittersweet?

Chris Ducker: I think it was. Yeah, bittersweet is probably the right way to, to describe it.

I, you know, it was, it was sweet to know that after 16 years of building a business, quite literally from the ground up, like bootstrapping all the way. I never borrowed any money, never owed any money. Whenever we expanded, we did it through profit, you know, all that sort of jazz. And that’s cool and everything, but then equally a little bitter because it’s been a big part of your life for 16 years.

And, you know, to know that you’ve, you know, by the time we had kind of closed the doors or, or given the door to somebody else, we ultimately had thousands and thousands of employees over that time. Right. So it was cool, you know, but yeah, bittersweet, but also more sweet than anything, because also. We survived the pandemic when a lot of people in that industry did not survive the pandemic.

So to come out on the other side after that and still be acquirable was kind of cool. That was kind of cool.

Pat Flynn: How hard was it to sell a business like that? Like scale of one to 10, how painful was it? To get to that point.

Chris Ducker: I mean, I knew a lot of people in the industry and I knew that we had some good IP we had built all our own internal predictive dialers and all that kind of stuff software wise over the years.

So we had a lot on the table to offer. To be honest, it was just a couple of calls.

Pat Flynn: The relationships, man.

Chris Ducker: The guy ended up taking it over. I’d known him for over a decade. Right. So, you know, and he was a competitor and we used to go hang out and have lunch. So, you know, just goes to show you.

Pat Flynn: That’s cool, man.

Chris Ducker: So that’s, that’s been going good. And then obviously we’ve got virtual staff finder, which I know we talked about on the show on a new, you know, numerous, okay.

Pat Flynn: A lot of clients who are listening likely or clients from Pat.

Chris Ducker: A lot of clients. Yeah, we’ve had, I think we’re coming up on almost eight and a half thousand VAs have been hired through that service now since 2010.

So that’s going from strength to strength. And then, you know, Youpreneur, which we’ve also talked about, we are, dude, it’s, it’s crazy to think. I don’t know whether your audience knows this or not. My audience definitely knows this fact, but I don’t think yours does. We may or may not have discussed it, but Youpreneur, the term, the brand that everybody knows as Youpreneur.com was given birth to in Pat’s home office. And I mean, Pat was the gynecologist. He was the one that gave birth to the baby.

Pat Flynn: We did come up with that together here, right where I’m sitting right now. And it’s been quite literally, how many years has that been?

Chris Ducker: Well, that’s what I was about to say. It is coming up next year.

It will be 10 years of you celebrating this 10th anniversary.

Pat Flynn: Man, we’re old. We’re old. We’re going to talk about that today. Not how old we are and the old man problems and back problems and pains we have, but rather like what are we doing as people of our age to plan for the future and to, you know, unlock the next phase of our life and enjoy it.

And I know that there’s a lot of new things that you’ve now started to do, both in business and in hobbies and in life. So we’ll, we’ll get to that. But so. Youpreneur, I know perhaps the last time we chatted, the event was a thing, the summit, and I had, had the pleasure and honor of, of keynoting that. One of the years you continued to have amazing guests come on, on your stage, and it was a just highly, highly regarded event.

And then. The pandemic hit, tell me about what the pandemic did to that event.

Chris Ducker: Killed it, two words, simple, killed it, killed it. Anybody who runs any kind of business events on a consistent basis, I’m not talking about one off, I’m hosting a little mastermind at a hotel boardroom kind of thing. I’m talking about building a brand, building an asset around that brand and putting on an event on an annual basis, right.

And, you know, genuinely putting real time, energy, effort, blood, sweat, tears and money, quite frankly into building that as an asset, anybody that does that knows the amount of energy that goes into it, both mentally, physically, emotionally, maybe even spiritually, if I may say so to a certain degree as well.

But here’s the thing. If you’re an attendee to that kind of event, you don’t know what goes on behind the curtain. You just see everything that happens and that’s cool and everything. But understand with every passing year that you hold an event like that, you build up more and more and more brand awareness and momentum.

And so three years in a row, we sold out Queen Elizabeth Center, right opposite Westminster Abbey in the heart of London, 360 guests from 40 plus countries every year from around the world. We sold that event out three years in a row, 17, 18 and 19. Amazing momentum. Unlike a lot of people in the industry, they struggle to sell tickets to live event.

It actually became easier to sell tickets to that event year on year because of the momentum that we built up. And that was another reason why we continue to get amazing speakers fly in from quite frankly, every corner of the globe for free as well, just because of relationships and to come and speak on stage.

So the, when pandemic happened, the level of uncertainty around that event was so high that nobody really knew, including myself, nobody knew what it was going to do to the event as a thing at all. So, March 2020 comes around and we’re like, Oh man, this, this kind of sucks. Like what’s going to happen?

Nobody knew, right? We didn’t know how long, Oh, it’s going to be over in six weeks or six months or whatever it was. And so, for us, our event always happens in November. So initially when everything hit the fan, we were like, well, Hey, we’re just going to carry on as normal. We’re going to carry on selling the event, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. And then by the summer, we kind of all knew that it was pretty darn serious. And, and then the event venue came to us and said, like, are you still planning on when the event venue starts asking those kinds of questions, you have to start really asking some pretty hard questions of yourself. So we decided to postpone it to 2021.

There’s a very big business lesson coming up here. So we decided to postpone it to 2021. We had really good relationships with the conference center and they let us just roll that baby over. We didn’t lose any money or anything like that. So that was great. So 2021 comes along. We historically would start selling tickets around April time for an event in November, long story short, I wasn’t comfortable in April of 2021. I didn’t feel good at all about how the UK was handling that, how things were being handled outside of the UK. And my biggest fear was if we put this thing on and we go forward with everything and there are no more rollovers from a venue perspective or AV companies or, you know, hospitality companies, let alone ad spend and all the rest of it, we are going to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds here and we can’t afford to do that as a business.

So I did, and here’s the business lesson, what I teach all of my coaching clients to do, and that is I validated the idea. I validate, will it fly? Right? I validated it. So I sent an email out to everybody who had been to the event before and everybody that was on the wait list for the event. All in all, it was about 1200 people.

And I said, okay, things are still a little uncertain, but we really want to run this event in November. We want to know that you want us to do it as well and that you will come. If that is the case, reply to this email with the word London and I’ll see you there in November. Out of 1200 or so names, we had about 300 people reply back saying London.

And I was like, this is awesome. People still want the event. This is great. We we’ve been missing a year, but they haven’t forgotten us. This is great. The waitlist still has done its job. We’re going to do the event. And then I let the weekend go by and let things marinate a little bit. And I thought, I got to go one step further with the validation because it’s one thing to step into the nightclub, but it’s a whole different ball game entirely to get on the dance floor.

Right? So I emailed those 300 odd people back and I said, I’m pumped that you want to come to London. Thank you for getting back to me. In this email, there is a link. We need you to pay a 50 percent deposit on your ticket. And you’ve got 72 hours to do it. If we get enough people to do it, then we’ll go ahead and we’ll move forward with putting the event on.

If we don’t, then we’ll give everybody their deposit back and we’ll call it a day. Have a guess out of 320 odd people, how many people actually spent money, actually invested for the deposit? Have a quick guess.

Pat Flynn: 10%.

Chris Ducker: We had about 26 people. Yeah. Something like that. So yeah, just, just under 10%.

Pat Flynn: That’s so smart, dude.

I mean, that’s the kind of stuff I talk about in Wil it Fly, because you don’t really know until you have to have people, you know, vote with their dollars.

Chris Ducker: You know, do you have skin in the game is the big question because I sure as hell had skin in the game. I knew I was going to have skin in the game. I had speakers I needed to corral together. I needed you know, to put down extra deposits on a V’s and F and B and all the rest of it as an event organizer, let alone actually market and promote the event to sell the tickets. I had a lot of skin in the game. These guys couldn’t even put 200 pounds. In the game or 250 odd bucks us in the game, where if you’re not in, I’m not in and I’m out.

I realized that right there was the end of that event. We stuck it up on the shelf. It’s there right now gathering dust and it won’t be brought back down. That ship is very much sailed. So it’s a shame, but it is what it is, but yeah.

Pat Flynn: We know some. Friends of ours who’ve also been hit really hard with the pandemic, they had event companies.

We spoke with a couple of them recently, actually, and some haven’t been able to recover. What was your pivot after that? I know the event was going to be very much the center of the business. It was doing very well. It was profitable at the time. How do you pivot from something like that? When you know that after validation that this is probably not what we’re going to do, where do you shift your focus then from there?

Chris Ducker: Well, there was a couple of things. So the business model of the event was that we would work hard to get the right people to the event. And by the way, the event was not the cheapest event on the event roster period in the industry, not just in the UK. It was quite an expensive event in that regards, you know, between anything in between.

350 pounds for super early bird right up to like 650 if you bought the ticket a week before the event. Whereas particularly here in the UK, there are a lot of events here within the online kind of entrepreneurship space where it’s like, hey, get your ticket to three day event for 49 pounds or 29 pounds or 99 pounds.

But those events are just pitch fests, right? You’ll have. All these people come up on stage and it’s like 15 minutes of content, 45 minutes of a pitch, you know, six times a day. So we never wanted to do that kind of event. We got true industry leaders on stage to speak. We charged a good rate because of that, we had a very, very high turn up rate.

We had hardly any people not show at all, which is pretty, usually you’re looking about a 5 percent no show rate on live events and the business model was all. We would make one offer, one offer on the second day of the event, two day event, and that offer was for the Youpreneur Incubator, which was our 12 month incubator program, where we would teach you how How to ultimately build a business based around your expertise and your passion, the people you want to serve and go to, you know, from zero to six figures, you’d learn everything you need in a year.

And maybe it might take another six months to get that six figure business out. And that worked really, really well. We didn’t pitch it on the first year. But the second or third year we did, and it always went very, very well indeed. And then when we would have another kind of mini launch, internal launch to our email list and our social followers and things like that, no affiliates or anything.

And we would do that around kind of like June, July, each year as well. And that was the business model pre pandemic when, when the event was shelved, we just assumed, Hey, you know what, we’ll just pivot like everybody else. We’ll go pure online. And we did. And it worked brilliantly until it stopped working brilliantly, which was around the middle of last year.

And so I think it was just one of those situations where it was a little bit of a churn and burn moment where we had kind of talked about the same thing so much, like so many people do with their annual launches and things like that. But because of the very nature of that business model. We needed to pitch it twice a year because we were no longer getting 350 odd people in a room live where the excitement and the fever for entrepreneurship is so much higher.

You know, we were converting a third of the room every year.

Pat Flynn: Which is nuts. Those numbers are crazy. And you have the right people in the room who also have already put skin in the game, who are invested into their future. That’s the perfect crowd to sell to. So was it just, you were. Pitching the same thing again and again, and just your list got tired or.

Chris Ducker: Yeah, because we had to go twice a year virtually instead of once a year in person, we had to do two of these launches each year. And so they were hearing the same message. The same promises, same solutions, et cetera, et cetera, same price points, even the same price hike, you know, when, when you get in before this date and you’ll get these bonuses and same thing, and it worked really well for two and a half years.

But after that, I mean, it fell off a cliff, bro. I mean, you and I have talked about this privately, like it fell off a cliff. We went from averaging 130, 150 students a year to, you know, beginning of 2023, we did a launch. We had like 20 people sign up. I was like, holy moly, we’ve reached the end of the line with this product.

So it’s, we stand right now and hey, we’re keeping it real for people, right? Because I think it’s important for folks to know that just because you’ve been running a business and an asset under a group of businesses for 10 years, it doesn’t mean it’s all going to be rosy all the time because it sure as heck isn’t that’s entrepreneurship as we sit right now.

Youpreneur is gearing up for what I call 3.0. So if 1.0 was 2015 and it was a membership community, 2.0 was 2018 and the Youpreneur Incubator coaching program, 3.0 is coming in January next year. We know what it’s going to be we’re now working on getting it ready to be what it’s going to become in its next kind of era.

And yes, we will continue to help the same type of people with the same type of problems, but it will be in a very, very different way, very unique way, a way that I feel I haven’t personally seen online before. And I think that’s going to be hopefully what sets us apart from the crowd.

Pat Flynn: Every once in a while as an entrepreneur, we do have to make major shifts. And recently SPI’s done the same thing. I mean, between the pandemic and our online course sales and repeated pitches, very similar to an experience that you had and you know, the less customers coming in because they’ve heard it already.

We made a shift in 2021 to community and really focusing around that. And that was a big, huge sort of turning of the lever and into the next phase of SPi. And we’re also in the middle of some bigger changes and the audience knows already a little bit. And I’ve talked to you about this. You know, we have Caleb coming on.

As CEO to mix things up, we need to mix things up and bring fresh eyes and, you know, create something that’s going to bring a new sort of energy and Matt’s moving up into something else. He’s still with us and I’m still here, but these radical changes have to happen every once in a while. If they happen all the time, then it’s just chaos.

But if you stay stagnant for too long in the online business space and you don’t innovate and you don’t change, things eventually start to feel old or stagnant. And I think it was Einstein, right, who said, if you just are expecting different results, but you’re doing the same things, you’re going to go insane.

And so I, I think this is a great thing. And so tell me what’s going through your head as you go into Youpreneur 3.0. It’s new. It’s different. It’s, it’s risky. It’s a bet, but it’s a bet. I’m sure that you are excited and willing to take because what was working.

Chris Ducker: I’m super excited. I’m super excited about it, but I’m also cautious about it as well. Not scared, just cautious. I’ve been an entrepreneur for actually 21 years now. And so I know when to go fast and I know when to go slow and we’re going to go slow. We’re going to go slow with it out of the gate in every sense of the word with staff, with costs, with offers, promotion, everything.

We’re going to go slow out of the gate with it because there’s been a lot of changes in the online business world over the last four or five years or so, a lot of things that used to work no longer work. I mean, dude, remember when, do you remember when we could write a blog post, like a really good, like two and a half thousand word blog post, put an affiliate link at the end and make like 50 grand. Yeah. Remember that? Those were the days. That was good times. Wasn’t it?

Pat Flynn: My hosting revenue is just so high at one point. Things like that.

Chris Ducker: Blue host. What was the other one? There was two big ones you used to do. Blue host. And what was the other one?

Pat Flynn: Market Samurai. And then Longtail Pro.

These were, these are keyword research tools back when niche websites and stuff. Yeah.

Chris Ducker: But Bluehost was the big one. And I’m sure your audience will get a giggle out of the story I’ll tell where Pat and I used to be hanging out with each other and his phone would get a PayPal notification or something.

And I’d be like, what’s that? And he would say, Oh, that’s lunch on Bluehost kind of thing. And I used to love those moments of those little, and the same thing, you know, we would get notifications pop up for certain things and it’d be like, Oh my God, that’s so good. You know, but things change. That’s life.

Things evolve. It is what it is. And the other reason why I’m going slowly. With 3.0 with Youpreneur, is actually I’m going slowly period with everything in my entrepreneurial life, as well as my personal life now moving forward. And that’s where the concept of the long haul leader came about. And that was something I was sitting on for about a year before I had a proper conversation about it with anybody, quite frankly, that led to a book deal with Hachet Publishers in New York, which the book comes out around end of summer, early fall next year. And that’s why I’m putting on the Long Haul Leader Summit in November. So by the time we record and this goes live, it’s happening literally like the same week this goes live. So everything is about going slower for a longer period of time, enjoying the journey, understanding that yes, you’ve got to be adaptable. Yes, you’ve got to stay grounded, but ultimately. You’ve got to be very healthy while you do it and you’ve got to do everything. Everything I do moving forward is with legacy in mind now, but business and personal. And so, you know, these are the concepts of that long haul leadership kind of framework.

Pat Flynn: The long haul leader. That’s the name of the book coming out summer 2025, hopefully. And my book’s coming out around the same time too, which is, which is great. So we can sort of support each other.

Chris Ducker: Wouldn’t it be cool

if they come out at the same time and we do like a joint book launch party?

Pat Flynn: Get two for one. That’d be fun.

Yeah. Buy one, get one free. Love it. Both of our books have a lot of L’s. Long Haul Leader and Lean Learning. That’s, that’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We had the pleasure of going to Nashville recently, and I have to thank you for the invite to go because being in that room with all those authors in Nashville, Donald Miller’s estate was just incredible. We’ll get into that and talk about what that’s like and how important that was. But I do want to talk about the Long Haul Leader. What are some of the principles of a long haul leader? You had mentioned health and, you know, obviously taking things a little bit slower, I think that’s much needed.

Now we’ve been forever in hustle culture and, you know, sacrificing our own health and sleep and. you know, just eating fast food so we can do more work. And I think people are now starting to feel the consequences of, of that kind of behavior. And it’s still important to have seasons of hustle, I think, but tell me a little bit more about the long haul leader, the goals behind it, and some of the principles, if you can reveal some of that before the book comes out.

Chris Ducker: Yeah. So, so obviously when the book comes out, I’ll come back on, we’ll go deep on it, but this all came about because, and it was absolutely no lack of coincidence here at all. While I was dealing with all of that Youpreneur Summit nightmare during 2021, I started to feel very tired a lot, like to the point where I’d get up full of beans, no problem.

But by 11 o’clock, 11:30 in the morning, I was toast. I was done. All the energy I had for the work day, quote unquote, had disappeared within the first few hours. I was like, man, what’s going on? So I went to my doctor and we ran some blood tests and all those tests came back pretty much okay. But my blood sugar was slightly spiked and I was like, Oh, okay.

I’ve never had that before. What’s that all about? And then I realized, actually, I was starting to go for those sugary snacks a little bit more than I used to. So I hired a naturopathic doctor to work with them on my diet. Initially I went to them. I said to them, feeling tired all the time, getting a certain amount of brain fog.

I had some blood work done with my doctor and everything’s cool. Cholesterol’s fine. Everything’s great. But my. Blood sugar levels are quite high and on retrospect, it’s probably because I know I’ve been reaching for the cookies, man. You know, I’ve been reaching for the sugary snacks to try and kind of get a little extra energy and things like that.

And she said to me, and I’m, and by the way, I’m still working with her now. That’s how important she’s become in my life. She said to me, huh, interesting. Okay. Let’s run a couple of extra tests. And one of the tests that we ran was a cortisol test. And not a lot of people know, but cortisol is a chemical that our body produces very naturally.

And it’s our fight or flight hormone or chemistry or whatever label you want to give it. So when we’re stressed, our body instantly goes into overdrive and pumps out more cortisol, which come from our adrenal glands. And if we’re super stressed for a prolonged period of time, you will eventually, your adrenals will stop that fight or flight mode and they’ll just deplete and they won’t produce enough cortisol, period.

Now, family doctors, general practitioners, et cetera, et cetera, they don’t see adrenal failure as a genuine medical problem because you can still quote unquote exist with failed adrenal glands, but ultimately, you’re not going to be living the best version of your life if you’re always tired, if you’re already fatigued, you’ve got brain fog, if you’re relying too much on caffeine, and you know, the real kind of kicker here is that caffeine also strangles your adrenal glands as well, right?

So, you drink more coffee because you feel tired, which you don’t realize at the time is actually making things a lot worse. So long story short, we ended up running a whole bunch of extra tests and looking at all this stuff. And ultimately I was in phase three adrenal failure, which is about as close to burnout as you can get.

And then I realized, you know, retrospectively, you look back and think, Oh yeah, this all started even a couple of years before when we were moving, you know, from the Philippines back to the UK in late 2018, then I’ve got a one year old daughter, so I’m not sleeping properly, then I’m renovating the home and, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all piles up.

And ultimately I was putting myself into this deficit of cortisol production. Your cortisol should be very, very high when you wake up in the morning. And naturally decreases over the course of the day so that when it’s nighttime, you don’t have a lot of corosol in your system, AKA energy really. And you start producing melatonin, which is your sleep hormone, right?

But my cortisol levels were flatlined 24 seven. So I was waking up exhausted chemically. And so that’s when I started working with this doctor and all these things led me to look at everything. It wasn’t just about stress. It wasn’t just about diet. It wasn’t just about sleep. It wasn’t just about exercise or anything like that.

It was all of these things combined that led me to the state of burnout. And so I went about slowly, but surely took in all these boxes, trying to fix everything sleep became my number one, most important priority, even to the point where I would get selfish about it. So if my wife wanted to read her Kindle in bed in the evening, which she does almost every evening by 10 PM, I would say to her, it lights out, turn the thing off.

If you want to carry on reading, go downstairs. Cause you ain’t doing it in this bedroom. Like it got really serious. And so I went from doing five and a half, six hours a night to like seven and a half, eight hours a night, pretty regularly now, every now and then I’ll have an off night, but generally it’s much, much better.

Then the supplementation comes into play. Then the exercise has to change. I haven’t lifted a weight for two years. I’m not allowed to do any resistance training because it puts too much pressure on my adrenals. I can do a certain amount of yoga, which is kind of body work, body resistance and stuff like that.

But other than yoga, other than walking, no real massive amounts of exercise or anything like that. But I do enough to obviously stay fit and healthy. But all of this leads me to the concept of if my health isn’t right as a leader, I can’t lead. I can’t. Plain and simple. I can’t lead my business and I can’t lead my family.

And they’re the two most important things in my life. Right? So slowly, but surely we had to start making changes as well to the work schedule and to what we were doing and who we were doing it with, who was doing what for clients and all these other little changes came into play. I’m now at the point where I believe I am getting closer and closer and closer to being hopefully the poster child for Long Haul Leadership to a certain degree. I mean, I’m writing a book on it, right? So I should be, but my kind of concept of what a long haul leader is, and I’m still playing with these words a little bit, but ultimately, a long haul leader, is a visionary, purposeful entrepreneur who strategically focuses on long term growth, having meaningful impact and creating a lasting legacy.

And that’s the definition that I put together at this point, but we also break it down when you look at the acronym of LONG and HALL, we break it down into eight categories. individual aspects as well. And that builds up the framework, really. Wow, that was a long answer. Sorry.

Pat Flynn: That was a long haul answer right there.

We’ll obviously dive deeper into that when the book comes out and love to help promote it and share it. And I think it’s so important, especially with my age and where I’m at now and I’m, you know, you’ve got a few years on me, so I’m, I’m, you know, I look up to you and I look to you for what might be coming next in my life and how to handle it and, you know, to see what you’ve gone through health wise has been very hard and to use your own example as a way to share with others what to avoid or what not to do. I mean, this isn’t a health book per se, even though health is a big part of it.

Chris Ducker: No, no, no, it’s definitely not.

No, no, no. This is not a health book or, you know, I’m not, I’m not a bio hacker or anything like that. I’m a father and a husband that wants to be around for his family for as absolutely long as I possibly can be, first and foremost. Secondly I’m a business owner and an entrepreneur that absolutely loves serving people that have common ground and that I know after 20 plus years of entrepreneurship I can help them go from where they are to where they want to be, and there’s always something, there’s always a catalyst to get from where you are to where you want to be. Something has to happen in the middle. It doesn’t happen by just rolling up your sleeves. It’s got to be a catalyst. And my, I guess my mission, my goal is to try and be the catalyst for those folks to get them from where they are to where they want to be. And so, yeah, I mean, it’s by, by all means, it’s, it’s a work in progress still, I think, to a certain degree. And as I start the, the, the book is written and it is submitted and has been accepted by the publisher, which is great. But as I go between now and when the book comes out and I start doing a lot of speaking on it and things like that chances are obviously that, you know, things will come out and I’ll have to talk about those as well, but ultimately I’m pretty set on it.

I just want to say something very quickly. This, you are right. I do have a few years on you, nine to be precise, which you often remind me of, which is very nice of you.

But. Pat is one of the most, probably actually, let me rephrase that, Pat is the most competitive dude I’ve had in my life ever. I’m 51. No one has been more competitive in my life than Pat Flynn. And we’re talking everything from arcade basketball hoops to water balloon fights in the backyard to then meeting up in Nashville, hanging out, him seeing my whoop on my wrist for the first time and saying, what’s all that about me explaining what it is, how it’s working, how it’s helping me. So then going out and buying a whoop for himself. And now we’ve got a little group inside of our whoop app where we’re looking at each other’s scores. And I love the way that you gamify life and you come to it with a joyful vision, I think, right. If you can have fun doing all these things, then that’s just a bonus, right? Yeah. You’re a competitive dude.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, man. And I am very competitive, but I try to use it for good, right? Cause you could be competitive and cocky and you know, for you, I’m very cocky because we’re, we’re best friends, but I also am very competitive with myself, I want to be better every day and improve on who I am and the example I can be for others.

In my family and other families out there, too. So I, I have a lot of fun with it. That’s what drives me. And I think it’s important to know what drives you, the listener. You might not be somebody who’s so motivated by numbers and things like that. Like I am with things.

Chris Ducker: Well, the numbers never lie, you know, the numbers never lie.

Pat Flynn: The numbers never lie. I did beat you in basketball.

Chris Ducker: You did beat me in basketball. You know, you did, but. I mean, the numbers don’t lie. And I think that’s something important. Like if you are an analytic dude and you do kind of geek out a little bit on this stuff, then it’s something I think you should lean into as well.

Right. Whereas, you know, one thing that I’ve, gone back into a lot over the last five years or so is all the pastimes and the hobbies in my life where, you know, there’s two, it’s bonsai and it’s watercolors. And when I speak to artists, I go to artists fairs and things like that to kind of learn from other artists and find out, you know, the best techniques and how to mount things and all this sort of stuff. And I talked to artists, you know what, they’re not motivated by numbers at all. They’re motivated by the creativeness that they’re, you know, bringing into the world through their work. They’re not motivated by numbers at all, but then I’m an entrepreneur.

I, I step away from the art table and the paint palette, and I look at my websites and I look inside of my thrive cart and my PayPal accounts, and there’s Now I’m a numbers guy again, you know, so I think it’s important to understand that you can build an incredibly profitable business with balance and not burnout.

If you set out to do exactly that, if all you’re focused on is chasing down the dollar each and every single day, yeah, you’ll probably get the dollar. You’ll catch it. But what else are you going to get? Because you haven’t been balanced, and I think that’s something that a lot of people are now starting to realize and talk about

Pat Flynn: this idea of, of being purposeful, being conscious about the work that you’re doing versus we’ve all been in sort of automatic mode for so long, and that can drive us to insanity and burnout for sure.

But before we finish up here, Chris, we had just recently gone together to Nashville to just be in this room with, you know, dozens of other incredible authors. It’s a Nashville author meetup that happens and it’s run by Donald Miller and Mike Michalowicz and so many amazing authors and some of my, you know, people that I look up to were there.

And I’d love to, as I answer first, ask you what was the biggest takeaway that you had from that two and a half days that we had in Nashville? For me, I think it was, you know, all those big names were in the room. Michael Hyatt, Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, and several others. Yet, there were a few people who I had never seen or even met before, never even heard of.

And there was one in particular, his name was Joseph Nguyen, who had written a book called Don’t Believe Everything You Think. And his name had never come across my desk yet. But he gave a presentation on his work with his book, self published, selling a million copies or hundreds of thousands of copies, mainly through TikTok.

And that’s, it, it just showed me again that it’s so important to put yourself in rooms where you don’t know everything, where you’re not the smartest in the room, and to be invited to that, and again, I have you to thank for that, was so eye opening, and it just was a nice reminder that, you know, you kind of, in the beginning I was like, oh, who is this guy?

Like, I’ve never heard his name before, yet he’s doing some amazing things that some of the people that I look up to were starting to look up to him, and I don’t know what that says about me and maybe the approach or judgments that I had or anything, but I am a big fan of Joseph Nguyen now and his book and his methods.

And I’m definitely exploring TikTok, for example, as a result of a lot of the learnings from him and his young guy, very well spoken. We played Frisbee golf together on Donald Miller’s estate and I learned a lot from him. So that was a big takeaway for me is just try to find even more incredible people who might not necessarily be well known, but have so much to offer and, you know, build relationships with them and, and help them out too.

Chris Ducker: Yeah. That’s great takeaways. The thing for me was that I had not seen pretty much everybody in that room bar maybe you. Who I’d seen in early 2020 for the last time prior to the pandemic, I’d not seen people in that room for, oh, Mike Michalowicz, I’m sorry, I saw last year when he was in England, but other than you two guys, I hadn’t actually seen anybody in that room for probably about six years or so in person.

And seeing everybody collated together like that in that kind of environment, knowing full well, I mean, I knew, I knew about 80 percent of that room personally, the other 20%, the Joseph’s, the Joey’s, the other guys in there I had never met before, I’d never heard of before, and I went out of my way to start building relationships with those guys, because you’re only in person with each other for a couple of days, days every now and then. Right. But also the really, really big thing for me was that good people know good people. And every single person in that room understands one very, very defining quality as an entrepreneur, which I have lived by for two decades after a very successful entrepreneur in the corporate gifts world gave me this over a dinner table piece of advice, he said to me, If you’re going to start a business, there’s one thing you’ve got to understand.

Don’t believe your own hype because you ain’t as good as you think you are. And secondly, most importantly, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. And that last sentence has stuck with me and you know, I’ve mentioned it so many times, right? And it was clear when you’re sitting there and you’ve got Hal Elrod and Todd Herman and Donald Miller and Jeff Walker and Amy Porterfield and all these other absolute legends in our world, all sitting around tables, talking with each other with notebooks, hanging out, having fun with each other and all the rest of it.

You realize actually every single one, every person knows that they’re not that good where they don’t need to learn anything from anyone else. And they also appreciate that nobody’s got a monopoly on good ideas, including themselves. I had one conversation actually with Jenna Kutcher, and that was the first time I’d ever met Jenna.

And she, she left a lasting impression on me. And we were talking about Youpreneur 3.0, which I got a few people’s input on. And she said to me, she asked me a question. She said, when you’re doing all of this and you’re setting this all up, Chris, what would it look like if it was fun? And I was like, what, what would all of this look like if it was really fun to do, do that. I was like, holy smokes, that’s good. And it reminds me a little bit of my past. We passed away. Dan Miller, my buddy and my mentor passed away at the beginning of this year. He always used to ask the question, what would this make possible? What would this make possible?

And so these little one liners, man, nobody’s got a monopoly on good ideas. That was very clearly fermented over those couple of days in Nashville. And it was hot. Wasn’t it hot, bro? It was so hot. Hey, did you, did you beat Joseph at Frisbee? I need to know this. No, he was actually really good. So not only was he a sleeper on the author front, but he was also a bit of a ringer.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, Marcus Sheridan was the one who pulled out a bag with his different discs because he actually plays professionally or something. And we were just like.

Chris Ducker: He brought his own discs with him to Nashville.

Pat Flynn: Bro, this has been incredible. What a way to catch up and have you back on the Long Haul Leader. Look out for that. We’ll talk more about that come next year, but just want to wish you all the best of luck on Youpreneur 3.0 and thank you for being open, honest, and, and vulnerable. If there was one place you wanted people to go to check out right now, where, where would you want them to go?

Chris Ducker: Just go to ChrisDucker.com. Follow me on Instagram at @chrisducker. Send me a message. Let me know you listen to the episodes, say SPI and I know where you came from. And if there’s anything I can do to help, I will do that.

Pat Flynn: Thanks brother. I appreciate you man.

Chris Ducker: Thanks.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoy that conversation with Chris Ducker.

You can find Chris at ChrisDucker.Com or Youpreneur.com and he has Youpreneur 3.0 coming out. He has his book coming out. I have my book coming out. I’m just so stoked to continue to have this incredible relationship with him and learn from him. Because I do joke around that he’s a little older than me and whatnot, but I do and have picked up a ton of wisdom from him over the years and I wouldn’t be who I am today without him.

So Chris, I know you’re listening to this. I appreciate you, my man. I love you. I am here for you and I want to support you. So thank you for listening through. I appreciate it. Take care. If you want to get the show notes and the resources and links mentioned in this episode, head on over to smartpassiveincome.com/session837 again, smartpassiveincome.com/session837. And with Thanksgiving coming up, definitely I have a lot to be thankful for this podcast. You the listener, people like Chris who are in my life, and family, obviously, so I’m looking forward to hopefully a nice end of year trip with the family.

I hope you are coming into the end of the year with some excitement and some boldness, perhaps in some of the choices that you’re going to be making to help you grow your business. And we want to help you with that. So come join the community. Come find us at SmartPassiveIncome.com/community so that you’re not going through this alone.

You’re going to do it with other people like you and a team of people who are here to support you. That’s why we’re here. SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. We’ll see you soon. And thank you again.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!