How To Run Your Business and Still Make It Home For Dinner
16 Sept 2022 · 40 min
In this Magnetic Marketing Podcast episode, host Dan Kennedy interviews two high‑performing entrepreneurs—personal injury attorney Ben Glass and retail chain owner Steve Adams—about how they successfully run multiple businesses while preserving family time. The conversation covers a mindset shift toward selective client engagement, rigorous time‑blocking, building distributed leadership, and establishing clear metrics (leading and trailing indicators) to monitor performance. Both guests share concrete quality‑control systems such as recorded call reviews, mystery‑shopping, and weekly team debriefs. They discuss incentive compensation models, hiring practices that prioritize cultural fit, and the use of technology (email, social media, phone) within a disciplined schedule. Planning processes are detailed, including annual business‑plan creation, personal business‑plan time‑blocking, and one‑page store plans. The episode concludes with reflections on leveraging others, protecting “thinking days,” and the importance of time integrity for sustained work‑life balance.
Chapters
Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Now, if you're like most entrepreneurs, you recognize the balance between work and life is not the easiest to plan. So in this episode, Dan Kennedy welcomes two unbelievably busy and wildly successful guests to discuss how they're able to oversee their growth in multiple businesses while at the same time balancing quality time with their families. Listen to their frameworks on how they do this without taking a dip in quality. The leading and trailing indicators that are going to help guide you, and how to handle the connectivity with those people that you rely on. This is how to run your business and still make it home for dinner.
I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.
The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.
They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.
Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.
The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.
Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Good afternoon, everybody.
Dan Kennedy here.
I have with me today 2 of my great titanium members, Ben Glass and Steve Adams. And in the unlikely event that there are people on the call who are not familiar with them, I'm going to let them each do their own little thumbnail introduction of who they are, what they came— where they came from and what they do. And then, because these are 2 of the busiest guys I know, basically running multiple businesses, one in the professional service category, one in the retail category, as well of course as infomarketing. We will have our conversation about how they keep all of those balls in the air and maintain their sanity and as Ben says in his book title, still manage to get home at night for dinner on time. So Ben, why don't you go first?
Well, thanks, Dan, and hi, Steve. I'm a full-time practicing personal injury and medical malpractice attorney. I've been doing that about 30 years. I employ a bunch of people including 2 other lawyers. It's a very busy practice as you can imagine. As we were discussing in Cleveland recently, Dan, it was about 15 or 16 years ago that I discovered you, switched all of our marketing to Dan Kennedy style marketing and really not only grew the practice but then out of that grew an information marketing business that we call called Great Legal Marketing that will have its 8th birthday coming up in February where we really have lawyers across the United States and Canada and now some members internationally who listen to us and pretty much GKIC-style information marketing business. And so, you know, my little joke is as an entrepreneur I get to work whatever 80 hours a week I feel like working. And then employ a bunch of people in that business. And most importantly, I'm the father to 9. 3 are up and out in the world. 1 is in college. 5 are still at home. 4 of those are adopted from China. 2 have pretty significant— we call them psychological needs related to being born and living their whole lives in an orphanage. That requires a lot of, you know, very focused parenting. It requires relearning parenting. A lot of time, energy, resources devoted to counselors and stuff like that. So I feel it's a very blessed, rich life. I have a lot of opportunities. But I do have a lot of strategies for, as you say, getting it all done.
You know, I've never asked you, do you have a hobby?
You know, I probably read about I was thinking about this, 4 or 5 books a month. I run marathons. I referee soccer games. I don't play golf. I don't watch much TV at all. My hobby is to always be learning this stuff because this is the stuff, the marketing, the thrill of the kill is what gets me up at 4:30 in the morning and turns me on. That's kind of weird. But, you know, the people I've met in GKIC and in the titanium group, I don't know, that's kind of how they are.
All right, Steve?
Thank you, Dan, and good to hear from you, Ben. I've only been in the GKIC world now for about 2.5 years. Somehow I managed to not find Dan for the first 16 years of my business. But I've been in the Pet Supplies Plus business. We have 21 stores in 4 states. About 400 employees. And prior to that, I was a corporate lender and had worked my way up to president of a bank in my mid-30s. And I did that side by side with my retail business for a while and then just finally realized that I was way too much of an entrepreneur to work in the regulated world of commercial banking. I'm also working on an information business on top of our retail business. I've really enjoyed learning the direct response GKIC style marketing that Dan teaches in our retail setting and have been able to apply that pretty effectively. We've enjoyed double-digit same-store sales growth rates each of the last 3 years in an industry where 5% is considered really good. And so I'm excited about that. And I published a book this year called The Passionate Entrepreneur. 2014, I'm going to be trying to launch an information business off that as well. So happy to be here.
I just want to ask you a curiosity question before we— and a big broad general question. How crazy is it to be trying to run 21 stores spread out over 4 states?
It would be crazy if I tried to do it all myself. And I'd be lying if I didn't say that there was a time when I was. Before we had enough scale. But it can be challenging, you know, because there's— I don't know what the number is. It's something on the order of 4,000 customer visits a day. So there's a lot of opportunity to screw up and have problems. But, you know, I'll get into it more later. It's really about distributed leadership and sharing the— empowering people and holding them accountable.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
All right, so I'm just going to throw broad ones and let you guys kind of go where you want.
Sure.
But I can assure you what people want to know is how you are able to manage these multiple functions and far-flung enterprises and people effectively without either the quality of what you do going to hell in a handbasket. And I know both of you to be, you know, quality-concerned people. Steve, you're doing more in your stores than probably anybody else is with pet stores, with nutritional counseling and concierge service and, you know, all of that. And Ben, your information business is one of the best run, delivers the best quality, has the highest satisfaction levels and all of that. So when you keep sort of piling on as we entrepreneurs do and here's all we're doing and oh boy, now we're going to do this next thing and now we're going to do this next thing and you add people What are like the top 1 or 2 or 3 things you've learned kind of over time that you didn't know early about keeping a grip on it all?
And I don't know if you want to—
Yeah, I'm happy to take a shot at that first. I mean, the biggest thing that I didn't know is the whole mindset thing. It is realizing, particularly say the law practice, realizing that it's okay to not be everything for everybody. And so being very selective in who we're going to work with in the law practice and what the terms of engagement are. We can talk about that a little bit, but because when you grow up in the law, It's like you are to be of service to everyone. So it was giving myself permission to recognize, look, this is my life. I have two main responsibilities. One is to secure the financial security of my family. The other is to secure the emotional security of my family. If heaven forbid something happens to me tonight, I don't want my family to be the one that says, oh, we never saw him. So those are my two top priorities. Focuses and then kind of realizing that if you set the terms of engagement, people will honor that. They just, you know, and Dan, you know, everything I know about this I learned from you, but, you know, our mantra here is in either of, in both of the businesses is this is how it works here. This is how you interact with Ben. This is how you get an appointment or get a phone call with him. Nothing is ad hoc. Nothing is at random. This is how it is. Now, you can engineer your businesses that way if everything is fueled by, of course, great marketing. So there's always a line in both businesses, a line of people waiting to get in. So they have to do it under our terms. That was big, and the little subset of that is the whole managing the phone thing.
Can you recall when you first started sort of to make this transition from fear of loss of a client by not being immediately accessible, peer pressure about how a practice is supposed to function, to these decisions?
Well, I said I found you 15 years ago and not long into reading your philosophy, I said that makes a lot of sense. Let's do it. So for example, we have no unplanned inbound phone calls and when I said that to my staff, they said that's crazy, that'll never work. What if so-and-so calls, or what if, you know, a claims adjuster or a judge calls? And I said, well, you know, if they called and I wasn't here, they wouldn't be able to get me, would they? Okay, so I'm not here. So during certain times, they're just off limits. And so, you know, I do think that has to be fueled by a confidence that you've got a line of people waiting to see you. But even before I was all the way there on the marketing side, I just started to take that position. Robert Ringer's book and your philosophies emboldened me to do that.
Cool. Steve, you want to take a whack at it?
Yeah, sure. I have a little bit different situation than Ben in that my clients really don't have easy access to me. I don't have that problem because we have hundreds of thousands of them. But what I do have that some other people may be able to relate is it's more of a, if you have multiple locations of anything or you have distance, I had to attack it from two levels. And I knew none of this 15 years ago. On a personal level, I had to get myself very organized, otherwise the rest of my organization would be chaotic. Things like, the things that I do, first of all, I have a very extreme sense of time's value and I have a lot of urgency around time. That one movie, I can't remember the name of it, where everybody had a certain amount of time to live and they had to fight for more time. Can't think of the name of it, but that comes to mind. I'm really clear about the outcomes I want. And then every year about this time of the year, I write a personal business plan for myself. I'll go into later how I drive that down in my organization. And then I plan my whole year out. And from there, I try to write a whole week to 2 weeks worth of days time blocked, looking at my broader goals and making sure they're showing up in the stuff that I'm doing each week. And when I did all that, that's when I started to get personally very effective. From an organizational standpoint though, I had to also develop a lot of really strong leaders in our company who could also think like this so that I could distribute the thinking and the decision-making. And then we put a pretty robust process behind that where I know the execution is happening. So every leader in our company, every store manager, every regional manager has a business plan for their unit and they have quarterly goals. I have dashboards for all the stores and the regions and I'm able to look at their leading indicators and that's how I ensure the quality, going back to your question Dan, stays there is, you know, we've learned to measure what are the key indicators of the quality we want and then we have a process to keep that going. So that would be my answer to that. And for me it really is a challenge because one of the things I didn't say in my intro is I'm, leading a nonprofit where we do microenterprise lending, and we're in 2 countries now, and we're going to open 5 more next year. So I'm doing that in addition to this, and everything is far away, and so I have to think like this all the time.
Tell me just a little bit, because it's my experience a lot of people don't understand it at all, and an example or 2 if you can, the difference between a leading indicator and a trailing indicator?
Sure. I have to think about the trailing ones, but the leading indicator for us in terms of— are you relating this, Dan, back to the issue of how do you maintain the quality by being crazy busy?
Oh, quality or revenue or profit or whatever.
Yeah. Well, you know, for us in our business, the key number is same-store sales growth. And our customer churn percentage and our client satisfaction scores. Those are the top 3 things that I look at because if a store has got a low churn rate and high scores on satisfaction and good same year-over-year sales growth, that tells me that the overall culture is healthy in the store. We do a couple other things. We actually grade our employees A, B, and C and do a grade point average like your grades in school. And that gets updated every month. And if a store's GPA falls below 3.0, we know that our manager there has got turnover problems. And because a lot of new employees grade out low and then they grade higher as we go. And it's interesting you ask that question because we're actually really enhancing our dashboard to find cultural leading indicators and put it on there. But those would be some examples.
So when you start to now plan for 2014, I'll come back to Ben first. And I assume you are planning for 2014.
—what is that? Just say yes, Ben.
What does that look like for you? What's your approach?
For us, well, and in— so the two different businesses, they're—
I mean, they're different, but they're the same. They really are about, for us, creating new ways for people to notice us and start to pay attention to us and come into a funnel. So what I think we're really good at, what I'm really good at, now my two businesses, you know, total number of people under me is probably 20. But Steve said that he needs to have people think like he does. And so that's been a real key for us as we sit down to think what does the end of 2014 look like? What will, when we look back, What will we have accomplished? I can only do that if I'm growing. I like to say I'm growing entrepreneurs in both businesses who can think like me. So we have such a high focus on not only, gee, what do we do, but why do we do things this way? What would Ben say? And what's the way that we can deliver the greatest client experience. And so one part of that whole process is, for example, in the law practice, all the calls here are recorded. So any inbound call is recorded. And I have someone whose sole— one of her primary responsibilities, not her sole— one of her primary responsibilities is to go back every week and listen to those calls. Think about that. To listen to the inbound calls. To make sure that what I think is happening is actually happening. And I empower her. I mean, she's trained, she understands how I think, and she takes care of this for me. So that's what we do. We're in a constant state of training people who don't need to come to Ben to ask the answers to questions, and then we're in a constant state of quality control.
So will you lay out goals and targets and benchmarks for each person, for the group, for little groups by segment? How do you get a year's targets and progress put into effect?
It's more as— because each of my groups is relatively small, so I don't have subsets of groups. It's more like let's identify the key things. So the metrics in a law practice are, you know, how many leads are we getting? How many convert to information requesters? How many convert to clients? And then how long does it take them to wind their way through the process. So we're— there's a lot of data within there that we can measure. We can say this needs to be improved and here's the 18 steps that need to go to improve, let's say, the web experience. And so that's a great place because there's so much data available from people who come to our website. There's all sorts of metrics there. So that's the way we do it because I can meet with the whole group in either of the businesses at the same time. It's not really divided into subgroups and it's not, you know, that we're bringing on because of the titanium meeting, we're bringing on more in the info marketing business folks who can like devote themselves totally to sales. I mean, that's your job, sales. And so we'll need to develop the exact metrics there. To date, it's been more global, group global, than very specific.
So Steve, same question for you. As you go to lay out 2014, what does that look like for you?
Well, first of all, we define what the outcome is we want. You know, and our goal every year is double-digit growth. And so we do— we define our top line, what our budget's going to look like. For the year and as I said, I do my own personal business plan but we have each one of the store directors write a one-page business plan. That's all they get is one page because we've learned in the past that if it's short and very concise, they'll execute on it. And so it's a one-page business plan built around our playbook. We have 6 things and 6 things only that our store managers focus on. And they have to build it within that. They also create an update with their regional manager, a scorecard that has the key drivers that they control in their store. And so the regional manager and the store manager meet every October, November and work through a business plan and update the scorecard. And the business plan is prioritized by quarter. And then every month one of their playbooks, one of the 6 items in there is that they have a monthly action plan for their staff and goal plan for the store. And then backing that up further, on a quarterly basis myself and the regional manager meet with each store manager separately and go through how they did, you know, in April how'd they do in the first quarter. It's a coaching session toward the second quarter. But that's how we do the year is the scorecards, the business plans, the budgets. And by the end of that process, everybody is very aligned around what our big goals are as a company are for the following year. And then what I do is personally is in December is I get everything I think I'm going to do and I put it on my calendar for the whole year and see what it looks like. To see if I've overcommitted myself. And if I have, I start pulling things out of it so that I've got adequate time balance between traveling and being in my office and doing what I do best. So really beginning with the end in mind, as Covey taught, and then working back from there.
I have a micro question. Ben really raised the issue of the part of management I always say people like the least, which is the police, the police job, uh, you know, the, the enforcement job. Um, so are you mystery shopping your stores and your phones?
Yes. Yeah. Uh, no, we don't do phone, and that's probably a weakness we need to address, but we have a company, uh, that, uh, secret shops every single store in our company at different rates depending on how well that staff is performing. And it's a pretty exhaustive list of things that are going in evaluating. And then we also have this— the client satisfaction survey scores that we're looking at. And so that's how we enforce it. We also enforce it just with a lot of visibility in the stores by our regional guys. And then myself and one of my partners, we travel and see stores ourselves. But it also has a lot to do with, though, how we hire. We have a very good assessment tool that measures how people work naturally. And if they do not fit within what we've deemed is the ideal profile, we will not hire them. And so we end up only interviewing 2 out of 20 people that apply for jobs. And we went to that about 4 years ago, and that really helped simplify the enforcement because when we hire people on profile, they don't need to be motivated. There's a certain DNA in them that just they have to achieve and that makes the enforcement job a lot easier.
What percentage of your entire workforce has some incentive compensation? It's either as primary pay or over and above base?
It's primarily our top 2 people in each store. We have an uncapped— what we call it is our entrepreneurial pay program, and it's uncapped. And as they drive top-line growth in their store and maintain their controllables, they get fairly large increases in their salary. It's basically a gain-sharing program, and it's at risk, so if they let their store fall apart, they lose it. And so we've had 3 or 4 managers increase their pay by $30,000 to $40,000 within the span of 12 to 15 months in the last 3 years. And I think this year will be the first year we have one that's 6 figures. And for our size of a store, typically it's a $40,000 to $45,000 a year job, and we're going to have somebody making 6 figures this year. What we found though with the hourly staff is it's just very difficult for them to relate their part-time job with the drivers that we could pay them with. So there what we do is we just pay a little— we pay on the generous side of the market and create a nice environment for them. And we found that's worked best.
Cool. So I want to go back to this for a second with you, Ben, and the recorded phone calls. And the person whose job it is to check them. A, do you have any other kind of monitoring going on besides that? And B, what do you do when you find the phone is not being handled as you intended?
Yeah, so there's no other monitoring besides me occasionally hearing what's going on, but I'm only hearing one side of the conversation. If we're talking about phone calls specifically. Well, but anything but phone?
Not in—
I mean, the law practice is small and I see everything that comes through here. I'm in many, if not most, of the client meetings. Got it. There aren't as many moving parts as you might have in a retail store, I believe. But I think it's important. The second part of the question is very important. And I learned a lot actually from Keith Lee in the titanium and his personal development interview system. And so what we do is, this is kind of cool, is every week in the law practice we'll have one or two team meetings. So, Dan, any of the correspondence that's come in, emails that they need my advice on, those all get clumped together and now we're discussing them as a group at the meeting. So again, main purpose, everyone understands what we do and why we're doing it this way. And so it really is a teaching opportunity. And that's the same thing. So if I get a report, here's 2 calls that weren't handled right, I'll say, you know, Susie, here, we got 2 calls. You remember the guy that called I called about such and such, and here's what he said, here's what you said, here's the way I think that we ought to do it. What does everybody think about this? And of course, a lot of times, you know, they'll have better ideas than I do. But that's what we do. We're always trying to build people up. And my folks are good because they've gone through a vetting process to even get here, like, you know, like Steve described. We use Jay Henderson, we rely on him a lot. To vet people, to help us vet people, but I view my role, see my role is to teach. My role is because the better they are, the least time, the less time I'm in here actually working on legal stuff. I'm doing the stuff that's more fun for me, which is creating marketing, creating follow-up sequences, you know, making that stuff as complicated and sophisticated as I possibly can.
Are you hearing the same background stuff. I am good.
Yeah, it's not— is that— my apologies. All of a sudden people working in our new office showed up and I'm— that's okay, I just went to a different room.
I just wondered where it was more than— yeah, you know, whether I could do anything about it or not.
Yeah, I went to a different room. If you keep hearing it, I'll go out in my vehicle.
Um, okay. Um, so, um, So before that, to right where we ended with, you know, how much of your time you're able to spend doing X versus Y, I'll stay with Ben and then I'll come to you, Steve. People are going to be very curious about what your schedule looks like, how you are allocating your time, and how you are managing to be at home for the orphanage or dinner or whatever it is that you are doing. So like Ben, kind of take us through a week.
Yeah, so, and maybe I have no hobbies and I'm a boring guy because I'm usually asleep by 9:30 at night, but I'm a 4:30 to quarter to 5 guy in the morning. My first kids who are coming down to eat breakfast are coming down at 5:30. Typically, I will have preplanned what I'm going to do in that hour or 45 minutes. So there's no decision-making. It might be running in appropriate weather, but usually it's writing something or reading something. People say all the time, you know, how do you split your time? Well, with these two businesses, there's such a blend. In a week, I'm typically working directly on client stuff. No more than 3 to 5 hours. I mean, I really have honed that down to where I'm applying my expertise at the right place in a case, and that's the sale of the firm to a client, and that's thinking about the strategy that others in my office are going to in large part execute. We'll have 1 or 2 of these team meetings in the law practice, and that really is all hands on deck. That's the marketing people are there. The people doing the quality control, the paralegals, they're all there because we all want to be on the same page. In fact, I have a separate physical office in another building in my complex that's totally devoted to marketing. So mainly the Great Legal Marketing stuff goes on there, but also all of the marketing for Ben Glass Law. So we have video studios. But that team probably 3 times a week where we're just— we had a meeting this morning with graphic designer and my team and we just went through about 10 projects in both businesses of what's launching and it's all marketing-wise. I honestly, you know, I don't go out for lunch much. I'm typically eating at my desk and then typically at the end of the day There's some kid that needs to be picked up from a soccer field at 6:00 or 6:30 or something like that. And it's true that in my family most every night we're eating dinner at home together. And that's critically important for us. I really don't do work after dinner. I try to be present. I really don't work on weekends except for I'll still get up early. I'm getting up at the same time Saturday and Sunday, typically writing or reading something that has to do, let's be honest, with marketing because that's the thing that turns me on the most. That's what it looks like. The one other thing I would add which people may find helpful is the way the whole calendar is, how Ben's calendar is managed is it's my responsibility to get into the calendar and to grab all those slots that I want for myself.. So if I'm going to be in Cleveland, I'm going to be on this call, I'm going to be exercising, I'm going to be writing a brief or whatever, those come off the table. And now my staff has authority to schedule around my huge time blocks. And that's the only time. So they don't schedule things for me at night or after dinner. They don't schedule things for me super early. They don't schedule anything for me on Tuesdays because Tuesday is my day where they just, it's inviolate. They can't have Tuesday for anything. So really we're talking about a 4-day kind of work week. And my marketing team will say, hey, we've scheduled you a block to come into the video studio and these are the videos we're going to do and here's the script we're going to do because they think like me already and I just show up and go do it. So that's kind of what it looks like. I'm exhausted at 9:30, I go to sleep. But it's a rich life. Steve?
Well, I was looking forward to that answer with 9 kids. That's a lot. I do some of the same things Ben does.
Of course, what he's not telling us is he's got 5 wives.
Oh, OK. Well, for me, I have organized my business so that I've got 3 teams that implement everything. I'm out of the implementation business, if you will, now. Now, I realize everybody on the call may not have that luxury, but there was a day when I was. I really hate meetings, and so Monday is the day, since it, even though I love what I do, Mondays are Monday, so I put meetings on Monday. And that's the only time that people internally can meet with me unless it's something very specific on a project. So we get those out of the way that day. Then on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm able to spend all of my time focused in the areas that I can have a big impact. And those areas in our company are the marketing. I do a lot of leadership development and training of our team. And then also communicating what our culture is so that our— the experience that our clients have in the store is consistent all the time. And that's something that you— I've learned you can never let up on. But like Ben, I'm up early. I'm up, I'm not as, I can't do 4:30, but I'm up usually at 5:30. And I'm done working every day by 6:00 and home for dinner. I don't work the weekends. When I do work on weekends, it's mainly just reading, just things, catching up on reading. So my schedule's pretty standard, 7:00 to 5:30. I'm up early at home doing some reading. I do a lot of travel because of my international work in addition to seeing the stores. But it's funny, a lot of people that I talk to, they just automatically project onto me that you must just be crazy busy, you must never see your wife. They have all these illusions in their head and I say, no, I'm home for dinner every day and I don't work weekends. And I'm pretty balanced. I only have 2 kids, but they're both in college and have a lot of needs still. My son's a college baseball player, so there's a lot of places I have to go and travel and watch him play. So nothing magical. It's pretty boring, actually. I tend to theme my days and work on similar things each day and week after week after week, so I get into a rhythm.
So that'd be pretty much it, Dan. So in just a few minutes, I'm going to go to Q&A. I have two more questions for you guys, both I think relatively short, quick, and dirty. One is, tell me about your handling of connectivity and technology, meaning Email, Twitter, Facebook, cell phone.
Okay, Ben, can I take that one first? Go, Steve, yeah. Yeah, I don't do Twitter. Actually, I do, but it's automated by a software tool. I don't do Facebook at all. I look at it once every 3 weeks. My daughter gets mad at me because I don't respond sometimes. Let's see, email, that one, It's there, I use it, but it's in my time blocking. I check it twice a day. I still find myself, I have to fight it all the time of sliding back to looking at it repeatedly during the day, but for the most part I only deal with it periodically. And then the cell phone, same thing. I only answer the phone and check those things once or twice a day, and it never is something I react to. So that would be true of any of that. I don't react to any of it. It's all scheduled and in its place.
Cool. Ben? Yeah, there's only about 11 people in the world that have my cell phone number. So that's not a problem. Most of them are my kids, I guess. So that's not a problem. We have Twitter accounts, but that is all managed by my folks who are rewriting stuff I've done in the past. I have a personal Facebook page that I attend to a little bit. The email, you know, the important thing about email is slowing down what's going to happen next. So clients by and large do not email me because that's not how it's done here, but even if they did, it gets shuffled off during one of our team meetings to one of my assistants and I'll say, hey, here's the response. You know, you can get back to Dan here, but it's not coming back from me. In the great Google marketing side, I don't think anyone has ever emailed me. I mean, because they just— they know I'm the last guy to know anything like logistics that could actually answer one of their questions. So it's, you know, I think that's how you manage it. I said, you know, I don't watch TV much at all, and I read a ton, but electronics is pretty well controlled.
Okay, last question. What haven't I asked you that you probably maybe presumed I would ask or think I should have asked that you wanted to talk about?
Well, I think that, you know, it's critically important, and I learned this and frankly Lee Miltier when we were in Peak Performers together is that— and what every high performer that I know does is they have time integrity with themselves. So they're blocking out— Lee calls them thinking days, so I'll use that term as well— where I go to a cave. I actually have several offices, Dan, that have no internet, no email, no telephone., but I lease them. Sometimes we meet clients there, but they're my cave. And if I go there, nobody can even reach me if they want to reach me. And so it's important, I think, high performers will block out this time in advance. In other words, you're going right now through your 2014 calendar and saying these are the days when I will be thinking about my business or whatever problem you need to solve totally.. And it's as though I'm on a ship in the Mediterranean. I cease to exist from the world.
And I would— that was the first thing that came to my mind too, was exactly that. But I guess the other thing that came to mind, Dan, is that I think all of us who are entrepreneurs are big thinkers, want to try to do big things. The thing that I wrote down that we didn't talk about or I wasn't asked about was just how do you manage several big visions at once? And the thing that I really work at is I'm always looking for opportunities to leverage me. I'm always, if I have got something new I'm working on, I'm always looking for that person who who needs a win, who's ready to step up and take the next level of responsibility and putting them in that position and then working through that person rather than me doing it so that I can— because at my age and where I've been, the best thing I can always do is guide and direct and lead and let others implement. So that would be the other one, looking for those points of leverage around you.
Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.
More from Adarian
Kaylee Chu’s Bold Experiment That Took Her From Introvert to International Speaker | #Success - Ep. 119
Struggling to Focus While Writing? Adam Leeb’s "Freewrite" is the Solution | #Marketing - Ep. 118
Transmuting Desire Into Drive: Napoleon Hill’s Controversial Claim | #Success - Ep. 117
How I’m Using AI to Outwrite, Outbuild, and Outlaunch My Competition | #Success - Ep. 116
Scaling Online Q&A: Funnels, High Ticket, Ads & More - Part 2 | #Marketing - Ep. 115
Scaling Online Q&A: Funnels, High Ticket, Ads & More - Part 1 | #Marketing - Ep. 114