61: Virtual Freedom: Overcome Superhero Syndrome and Start Outsourcing with Chris Ducker

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For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Before we jump into today's episode, I am so excited to share with you my upcoming course, Delegation Ninja. This is one of the most fun things I have ever created, partly because I know how incredibly helpful it is going to be for so many of you who want to stress less and free up more of your time. This is the thing that I am always, always giving an infomercial about to friends and family and colleagues about the benefits of delegating. Whether it's who to hire, how to delegate effectively, what tools and apps and systems you can use, common mistakes that people make, the barriers that get in the way. I am so stoked. This is an eight week course. It's kicking off June 3rd and I would love for you to be part of it. So if you want to learn how to clone yourself or pretty close, head on over to pivotmethod.com delegate and learn all about it. Hope to see you in the course and now on to today's show.

Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast everybody. I am absolutely thrilled to have a long time good friend Chris Ducker here with us today. Chris is a serial entrepreneur who owns several international businesses, employs a team of 400 staff and is known as the virtual CEO. He's also the author of the best selling book Virtual how to work with Virtual Staff to buy more Time, Become more productive and build your dream business, which is the topic of today's podcast. He's also a keynote speaker podcaster since 2010. I just learned that's a grandpa in podcasting years practically. Blogger and the founder of YouPreneur.com, the private online mastermind community. Chris is originally from London and now he spends his time between his Home base in the Philippines and traveling internationally. Chris, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. You make me sound so awesome. I don't want to let you down now.

Well, yeah, pressure is on, I have to say. You interviewed me about Pivot when it was coming out on your podcast, and that was one of the most fun conversations I've ever had for a podcast. So thank you. You actually set the bar high for me now at this point.

All right, let's see what you got.

Okay. Game on. I want to start with Superhero Syndrome, which cracked me up when I was reading it in Virtual Freedom and think so many of us fall into, especially someone who listens to podcasts like ours in their free time. So explain, what is Superhero Syndrome?

Yeah, Superhero syndrome is. It's a term that I came up with quite a long time ago. Actually. It was way before Virtual Freedom came out, which is now, what, in its third year since publishing?

And it's basically a term that describes almost every entrepreneur that I've come into contact with through the years. And it's basically when, you know, you decide that no one else in the world can do anything better than you. It's when the word recharge only applies to your mobile phone. It's when you decide that if there's a way to save a little bit of money and learn how to do something yourself, even if you're not very good at it, you're going to go ahead and do that instead of actually hiring and delegating and, you know, palming things off to other people to help you. And so that's what Superhero Syndrome is ultimately believing, that you're not going to be able to find anyone that's going to be able to do something as well as you. Therefore, you carry on struggling to do everything yourself.

I love how you say in the book, the way I see it, you have a choice to make, break down, or build your team, and that you had to fire yourself. Like step number one was firing yourself from specific roles where you were taking on too much.

Yeah, because I did break down. You know, I burned out in late 2009. I'd been building my business for a period of about three years at that point, maybe a little longer than that. We were actually, for all intents and purposes, on the outside looking in. We were kicking butt. I mean, we were a seven figure business already. I had about 130 or so employees at the time, but I personally was an utter wreck. I was working 15, 16 hours a day, seven days a week, living on caffeine obviously, the diet was terrible. You know, the exercise had gone out the window. I was sitting down in a chair for probably 12, 13 hours a day, which ended up with me having to have back surgery in 2012 as a direct result of that. And so, you know, I did. I burnt out. I broke down myself fundamentally by not litigating, by not building my team. And so, you know, the one big takeaway here and the one thing that I talk to all of my clients about, all of my coaching students about, is the fact that eventually overwhelm will hit. I appreciate that at first, you are, you know, you're building your business on your own at the end of the day, bootstrapping at the end of the day, you know, not everybody's a startup in Silicon valley that gets $5 million sent their way on, you know, the idea of an app, Right? So the vast majority of entrepreneurs will ultimately have to bootstrap their way to success. But when that level of success comes along where you're kind of working yourself to the bone every single day and you're not yourself, overwhelmed kicks in, and at that point, you are no more than a hop and a skip away from burnout, and it will come your way. And therefore, what I try and do is I try and talk about the importance of building a team and being more of a smart, savvy entrepreneur rather than a worn out, stressed out one.

I thought it was fascinating that so often I talk about this with pivot, too, that pivots are often a product of our. And for you too, that the burnout did not come from doing things wrong or. Well, other than thinking you had to do everything yourself, but that it's because your business was working, it was taking off. And I was kind of blown away to read that you had already started creating a virtual staff in the Philippines and you were working on this company before Four Hour Workweek came out. So I can only imagine, and I know you kind of describe it in the book, like readying yourself for a tsunami once that started, hit number one bestseller, that there must have been a huge influx of interest coming your way where you had to do things differently.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I remember when Tim's book came out, I think it was sort of the middle of. It might have been the middle or the end of 2008, but it really gained traction in 2009. And I remember, I think it must have got a feature somewhere, because in the space of about a week or so, we must have had 100 inquiries for virtual assistants and I mean, you know, we were getting good inquiries on a regular basis, but not that kind of volume. And I just saw that there was this kind of, this revolving, you know, mentioning of this book, the Four Hour Work Week in these emails that came in. And I was like, what the hell is this book? Where can I get a copy? I must find out what this guy Tim Ferriss is talking about. So I got my assistant to run down to the bookstore and grab a copy of the book, brought it back to me. I devoured the book in one evening and I realized just then just how important this book was going to be for entrepreneurs, for, you know, I mean, literally what the Four Hour Workweek did is it created a generation of entrepreneurs is basically what it did. However, what it did also is really put outsourcing specifically on the map. What Tim didn't do, however, and this is what I set out to do in the pages of Virtual Freedom, was to complete that outsourcing circle that he kicked off. He showed everybody what was possible, but he didn't tell you how to actually do it. And I remember, actually, as a fellow author, you'll get this completely. When we shopped the book around, we actually sent the proposal off to 16 publishers. We had four offers, which was an incredible buy in. I didn't see that coming at all. But then the reason why I ended up going with the publisher that I did go with, which was, by the way, not the biggest advance. The reason why I went with this particular publisher was because when I spoke to the owner of the company, he said to me that he thought that Virtual Freedom was going to become the outsourcing section of the Four Hour Workweek on steroids. And that's a quote. And so I knew right then that the publisher got what the book was all about, what it was trying to do. And so we decided to go ahead and go with those guys and the rest is history. I mean, we've sold I don't know how many tens of thousands of, I mean, 60, 70,000 copies of the book. Now we're at 800 five star reviews on Amazon and every single month there's hundreds and hundreds of more copies sold in the book, even now, after all these years. So it's, you know, it's just proof that people need this stuff, you know what I mean? Like, I think we've got to the point where, you know, we want, we actually do want to do more than just work ourselves into an early grave. And I think although society has led us to believe that Hustle and Grind and all the rest of it. And you probably see this every day in New York City. I would have thought, you know, you don't need to do that to become successful, to make a lot of money to affect change and provide for your family. You don't need to work these ridiculously long hours.

To be very successful. You can do it in a much smarter, more savvier manner.

It's so true. And I think you captured the Four Hour Workweek really well in that it did inspire a generation and really put outsourcing on the map, specifically overse. And yet I think also another trend we're seeing now is just with social media and the Internet, the amount of information and pings for attention that any one person is having to deal with is, ooh, we just jumped the shark. Like, it's too much now. Even the normal person kind of can't juggle everything. At least I'll speak for myself. Like, even just getting the basics can feel overwhelming. I'm curious what you think the difference? Because a lot of people did read Four Hour Work Week, let's say, yeah, the big wave of it hit 2009, 2010, but then there was a big gap. So many people thought about outsourcing and delegating and kind of hit the wall. And I know your book really addressed that. It's so incredible to hear how successful it's been. I'm curious what you think. Where was the gap of. I know, even for me, I think I tried delegating one thing to India, someone in India, and it didn't really go well. And I kind of dropped the ball on it for many years until, just like you, I was kind of hitting burnout in my business in 2013. Bank account dwindling, couldn't do it all myself. Had to delegate as a means of survival. And now it's become the best tool that I have for scaling and growing my business, just like yours. But it took a while. There seems to be a gap between people recognizing, oh, hey, cool, I can delegate and outsource and then actually doing it.

Yeah, I think what happened was, like yourself, a lot of people tried it once and it didn't work, and therefore they didn't bother trying it again. And that was the reason why I wrote the book, quite frankly, was because I was getting emails and tweets and messages just like that every single day. Whereas, you know, I want to do this, I need to do this. I'm ready to do this. But I'm like, I failed. Like, it didn't work. I don't know why, but it didn't work out, you know, teach me Obi Wan kind of thing, you know what I mean? And so that's why the book was, you know, that was why I wrote the book. That's why we launched it. And I think what it is is that although it's not necessarily a step by step process within the book, I think what it does do in very clear English for everybody to understand is it takes people on the journey from stressed out, overworked entrepreneur to smarter entrepreneur, who's now built a team, who is now really, truly running, supporting and growing their business with a team around them and not having the business rely wholeheartedly on them for every single little thing that they need to do. And there are certain tasks, quite frankly, that our business demands upon us every single day. But the difference is, are you going to do all those yourself or are you going to delegate them off to somebody else? That's truly the essence of what Virtual Freedom as a book was and is all about. It's about hiring a bunch of people to build out a team in the right way so you can run, support and grow your business in a smarter way. There are certain things that as a business owner, you should not be doing. Messing around on Facebook, updating your Facebook page is one of them. Like you can get people to do that for you. You know what I mean?

Embedding a load of tweets into your favorite social media automation tool so that you can promote your blog archive in an automatic way is not what the owner of the business should be doing. That can be delegated off as well. So, you know, looking for six hotels in six cities for an upcoming speaking tour that you're doing to promote your new book is not something you should be doing. Right? These things can be delegated. You should and can delegate these types of tasks out to people. The fact is that as entrepreneurs, we're weirdos. We're bloody weirdos.

Our DNA is not the same as all the other people in the world, right? I joke about this a little bit, right? But it's so true. It's our type A personality that we have as entrepreneurs that we think that we are the superhero in our own universe and that nobody can do anything better than us. It's wrong. It's absolutely wrong. And here's the harsh reality, and it's a tough reality to admit, but we have to.

Unless we start doing these things, not only will we burn out, but we're actually stunting our growth is what we're doing. We're stunting our growth as individuals, as leaders, as employers, as authors and speakers and everything else that we might be doing. We're stunting our growth. And as a direct result of that, we're also stunting the change that we can affect upon the lives of people that we end up meeting. And I always remember the quote from Zig Ziglar that you can have anything you want in life as long as you help enough people get what they want first. And that quote is probably the one quote that I take away. And it pops into my head almost on a daily basis because Zig is 100% right. If you help enough people get what they want as a direct result, you'll have what you want. But we can't do that unless we're smarter with our time and we focus on productivity and delegation, all the rest of it as well.

Yes. So, so well said. And it's true that in doing this and stretching ourselves to release our perfectionist grip on things, that it does free us up for our best, most strategic work. And I love the way you say the book too, that so many entrepreneurs will come to you saying like, something's wrong with their va or something's wrong with the person they hired or they just nobody's good enough. And really all that is is a giant red flag saying, you, you, entrepreneur, are the one that needs to be trained because you're clearly not assigning tasks in a way that gets you the results that you want. And that's such a great flip to realize that it's not enough to decide to delegate and outsource, but it's going to take time to train ourselves to both let things go in the first place. Remember to delegate and do that clearly, so that we don't. Just because it's kind of, I guess, like relationships and dating. If you keep thinking everyone else is the problem, at some point, it's you.

Right, Exactly. But that's the thing. You see, our issue here is we don't want to admit it a lot of the time, but something incredible happens when we do admit it. And it's that freedom that we ultimately open up the floodgates to. And boy, oh boy, I mean, you know, just to put it into real simple context here, I've gone from working in 2009, 16 hour days, six days a week, to now working six hour days four days a week. I don't work a Friday and I haven't done for three and a half years. So, you know, there's a hashtag Nowork Friday.

Look at it, you'll find it.

And so, I mean, you know what, it's because I made the decision to live life on my own terms. And I know that phrase has been kind of, you know, ripped to shreds and used by 100 million marketers and all the rest of it out there, but the fact is that that's exactly what I did. I said, enough of this crap. I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to live life on my. I mean, what's the point of being your own boss if you're a slave to your own work? You might as well go and get another job and not have to worry about, you know, filing taxes at the end of each year, you know what I mean? So I truly, truly believe that it's up to us and we've only got ourselves to blame at the end of the day if we burn out and don't touch the amount of people that we want to touch.

Yeah, I usually I say to myself, remind myself, stress is a systems problem. So especially in business, that if I'm stressed there's likely a system or something. I use rescue time. And for the first time this year, after six years of building an online business, 10 or 11 years of blogging finally was hitting four hour work weeks. You know, this like elusive unicorn that Ferris wrote about. And it was amazing to see. And the only reason that was possible is of having a small team. And no one on my team works full, but it allows me to know that even when I'm on the road and doing things, the work still gets done. And it feels so good not to be the bottleneck anymore because similar to what you said, I realized that there was no margin for error. If I got sick or needed a break or just wanted some creative space to think and come up with my next project, my business would grind to a halt. And as I look to the future, that just was not going to be sustainable. It's not smart business because it makes it very fragile. So delegation for me has been critical and as you said, just the freedom of now I'm finally like taking weekends off again. I don't remember the last time I did that, even when I worked at Google because I was working on my side hustle every weekend. So it's been 10 years of not having weekends and finally getting them back.

Well, and it feels great. I'm sure not. Well, there you go. No, I was about to say to you is what you're doing is you made the decision. You haven't gotten them back. You made the decision to clearly take them back because you had lost them fundamentally to everything else that you had been doing. And. And that, you know, that's a very, very solid realization right there to take on board. I didn't get these back. I bloody well took them back is what I did, because I. I lost them. I gave them away, ultimately, my weekends. Right. And I'm so pumped to hear that. I'm happy to hear that. Because you know what I've seen, You know, we've known each other now, what, six, seven years or something. I've seen, you know, your career ever since, you know, the first book and then pivot coming out as well. I've seen how you have. You've, you know, you've. You've gone through this journey, I think, of being very stressed out to. Maybe not so stressed out and very stressed out again. But I've seen it and I've noticed it for the last. Probably the last couple of years. You seem to be a lot more chilled and a lot more kind of settled and happier and all that sort of stuff. And I, you know, I want my friends to be happy at the end. End of the day.

Well, thank you for saying that and writing a book like this to make it so. I'm curious because I. I'm even teaching a course called Delegation Ninja, and yet still, I admit openly in the course that I still can always. I always have room for improvement. So I am curious from you, Chris Ducker, man, who has 400 employees and who wrote the book on virtual freedom, what do you still either struggle with or what's the next level for you in terms of team building, delegation, or outsourcing?

Yeah, I think probably the next. Okay, let me answer both those questions because they're good ones. So what I still struggle with. I still struggle with prioritization of projects. That's my big issue again, as an entrepreneur. Squirrel syndrome kicks in every now and then, and it's like, oh, this is a great idea. I'm working on this. Oh, look, Squirrel. And then you have another idea and you want to start on that again. Right? So I've trained myself to only work on one project at a time to completion every single time. So it's not as much of a struggle as it used to be, but it is still a struggle because, like everyone preneur. I get a lot of what I think a great idea is. The difference between now and what things were like four or five years ago is that I now validate those ideas properly before I go 150% all in on them. Right. So that's kind of how I handle things. But it's still a struggle. It's still a struggle. I have a shoebox with index cards in them, and I call it my idea house. And whenever I get a call idea, I write it on an index card and I slam it into the box. And then probably once or so a month, I'll go into the box and I'll dig through them to see what's cooking. Sometimes I'll take stuff out and slam it straight into the bin. Sometimes I might take a card out and start making more notes on it, or I'll put a post it note on there or whatever it is. And that might be the next project or the next blog post or the next podcast series or whatever. Whatever it is, the idea house is kind of where or how I get those things out of my head so that it's not clouded in my judgment in terms of the project that I'm working on. So that's what I still struggle with, I think next level for me, and this is a little hard because of the fact that I'm a big proponent of the power of a personal brand in business, as, you know, through YouPreneur and what I do there. And this will be a little bit harder. And truly, I think probably this is a good five to seven years down the line now, where ultimately I'm not the be all and end all of my business. I mean, I've ultimately removed myself from my businesses, but particularly with Uponur, I'm still kind of the driving face and force of that. That doesn't mean I do all the work. I want to clarify that. But it's still quite solidly based around me, my experience, my personality, and the people that I want to serve. What I need to do over the next five, maybe seven years or so is slowly but surely go from the CEO to the owner. And there's a big difference between those two positions. Because a CEO works for a living, an owner doesn't. He gets other people to do stuff for him. So I think, whereas I've become the owner in all my other businesses, businesses accept the YouPreneur network. That's kind of the next focus. But my issue with YouPreneur and anybody that knows me knows how passionate I am about it. This is what I actually want my life's work to be.

I want to help a million personal brand entrepreneurs become raving successes. And so it's a mission man, it's a 10 year long mission, this thing. And so we're only a couple of years in, so give me some time. I'm okay.

Jen, I love it, I love it.

Give me a little bit of time.

Well, it's so interesting because first of all, what a beautiful mission and so clear. And I love that you're playing the long game with it. And Seth Godin did a really interesting podcast series. It's called Startup School. If anyone listening, you can search in your podcast app. And one of the lessons, maybe even the first one, is on Freelancer vs Entrepreneur. And Seth Godin even says, I'm a freelancer. My business revolves around me and my ideas, my ability to communicate those ideas. And of course Seth has his hand in many different business pots as well. But I always found it so interesting. And I think that's where youpreneur, or as I refer to myself as a solopreneur, comes in, which is that even if you don't want to build a huge team, even if you still want to kind of be the face of the brand, there is still a way to create scale so you're not the one bottlenecking the entire business. So for me, just like you, I have a private community momentum. I trained six pivot coaches this year. Finally, I was not the only person who could deliver when interest came in from the market.

It's going to be those coaches now that allow you to step back a little bit and get that bigger picture of the overall business and how you want to develop it now going forward, that's the exact same format that I want to take the YouPreneur community as well, where we actually have certified YouPreneur coaches helping people worldwide. But again, it's. And the term long game, that's exactly.

The right way to look at business, period. Because if you get involved in a business based purely on passion and you don't think about profits and you don't think about the long game, you're going to lose, I can tell you right now, you're not going to do well. Don't get into a business just based on solely passion, but also understand that you're not going to become a multi gazillionaire overnight either. You're going to. It is a long game. You do need to take your time to build things up. And I mean, you're the perfect example of that because here you are making the right moves and the changes that you want to make and need to make to be able to take everything you're doing to the next level.

Well, and the crazy thing is I've had my eye on this since before Life After College came out in 2011. So let's say I read 4 Hour Workweek in 2009 or 10, I can't remember which. It's not for lack of trying, but it's not easy. Like if everyone could just build a passive income business overnight and you know, not be the bottleneck, they would. But it's taken me six years to get to this business structure where now I freed up myself, now I can have a four hour work week. Now I do have a team that can. I'm not the bottleneck. And so it's kind of crazy that. Thank you for saying that and for the kind words. And it's. And it's like I worked long and hard, you know, it's just like a long, long time to actually get to this point. So my hope too, similar to your work, Chris, is like whatever shortcuts I can give people, I want to because I don't think that everyone has to do this. If you and I can be in the trenches and share what we've learned and shortcut the process somehow for the next group. That's amazing.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

One thing that but you do really well. And I read this, noticed this in the book and I just, I mean, come on, you have a team of 400 people. It's so crazy. I mean, it's amazing, but not crazy. You have this concept of a gva, a general virtual assistant, then managing the team. So you actually put a layer of management, at least one layer. I don't know how many in the bigger business that you run, but I find that so fascinating because up till now I'm still managing. I have a VA team and then my right hand woman, Marisol, who's my director of communications, but I don't have a VA managing VAs, that kind of management structure that you set up. So I'm curious.

Maybe just give us the biggest tip to help make that work and maybe a pitfall that you see or just why even build that layer into the equation and what makes it work for you?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, look, the fact is that you might not need it if you don't have it right now. You might not need it, particularly if you don't have several staff working full time. For example, if you're working with freelancers, if you're working with people in a retainer or part time basis, you might not need someone if it comes down to the point where you can manage the people that are helping you out with just.

A handful of emails each week and maybe one team Skype conversation every couple of weeks or something. Then you just carry on doing what you're doing. Because if something ain't broken, you don't want to try and tinker around, fix it, right? But the fact is that as and when you grow the business out a little bit more, particularly if you have full time people on board and those roles are being filled, you know, you might have a, you know, I don't know, for example, a web developer on board, you might have a graphic designer on board, you might have a, you know, a social media manager, you might have a, you know, video editor or podcast editor or whatever the case may be. If you've got that team building up, eventually what will happen is you will become the manager, manager of people and not the owner of the business. So it's important then at that point for you to bring on board somebody or to just promote somebody that's been with you for a while as a project manager type of VA to get to the point where you're no longer having to manage everybody on a daily basis and you can go back to doing what you should be doing and that's strategizing for growth and coming up with more ideas for products and services or spending more time with your top 20% clientele, et cetera, et cetera. That's what a business owner, that's what a CEO should be doing. Even if you're not the business owner yet, that's what a CEO should be doing. A CEO should not be managing reports and, you know, conversing with people about a social media, you know, promotion cycle or, you know, when, when is the blog being updated and all that sort of type of thing. That's a project manager type role and that's when you know, ultimately you need to have somebody like that in place once you get several people on the team so that you're not just a manager of people.

That makes a lot of sense. I love it. What about for you? I know that of course Virtual Staff Finder is your company and it's based in the Philippines. You live in the Philippines. A lot of people are curious about outsourcing overseas. Let's say if they live in the States or even the uk, wherever they are in the world, somewhere other than where they are. Why? What do you see as the benefits of outsourcing overseas? And specifically how did you end up in the Philippines and starting Your business there, moreover?

Well, I mean, I came to the Philippines for work, so I was on a two year contract and came over here and ended up just staying, setting up a consulting company and then it went from consulting to helping people build large office facilities here in the call center and the BPO sector, which kind of opened up the doors in what, 2005, six into the outsourcing world. And so the rest of it is history, as they say. But I mean one of the reasons why you could potentially look at delegating overseas is because of the cost saving benefits, quite frankly. And I don't take anything away from any American workers or UK workers or Australian workers or European workers or whatever the case may be. My, my team is spread out all around the world. Literally, literally all around the world. Right. So I got a graphic designer in Australia who works with a web developer in Slovenia, for Christ's sake.

It's all about really, at the end of the day, it's not necessarily about where's the best place.

Where'S the best place.

It's about where's the best place to find the best person that you need for this particular role. It's called the global economy for a reason. I mean, you know, geo arbitrage the way it is. If, if, however, when you're, when you're starting out and you want to start moving and maybe finances are not as strong as you want them to or need them to be, but you still need to delegate this work. Going overseas gives you the opportunity to do that at roughly a third of the price.

Right. But for example, but for example, there are limitations. Right. So although particularly Filipinos speak amazing English and they can write in great English, they have a great command of the Eng language. I wouldn't work with a Filipino worker to create blog content. For me, for example, that goes to my writer who's based in Nashville. Alright, so you know, my show notes for my podcast are created by a content writer, a content writer rather out of Cambridge in the uk. So you know, it's about, for me now, it's about finding the right person for the job no matter where they, they are. But at first you can definitely look at overseas because of the cost saving benefits. Obviously that's the number one reason why the majority of people end up delegating to people overseas is because it's cheaper, quite frankly.

Yeah, makes sense. And as you said, it's nice to start bringing people onto the team with not as much pressure. So if you can start for lower costs, it gives people a chance to pilot and start getting their systems down and experimenting, which I'm a big fan of, of. Last question before we wrap up. What has been the biggest surprise that you've noticed or people have come to you with since you launched the book a few years ago and kind of any trends that you're seeing as we move forward?

Well, I don't know whether it's a surprise per se, but it was actually at the book launch party in New York that you attended.

When I was there last in New York. So it was that the evening was wrapping. Wrapping down. It was wrapping down. It was what it was, it was doing. It wasn't wrapping down, it was ramping down towards the end. Okay.

I was like, wrapping down could work. I mean, you know.

Well, we are in New York City. It's quite an eclectic city. I know. No, the evening was kind of, you know, we were wrapping up the evening. It was slowly kind of starting to dwindle down a little bit. People were starting to leave. It was a great night. I'd been on a high, signing lots of books. I mean, you know the deal, you've done it yourself. And this gentleman came up to me and he said to me, I picked up your book a couple of months ago and I want you to know that it's changed my life. And I said, okay, now, I mean, as an author, that's great to hear. However, with a book like this, in fact, actually with any good book, you want to hear those words anyway. And I had already heard those words a ton of people because it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a normal kind of go to sentence when you meet somebody, oh, you've changed my life. Oh, you've helped so much, you know, whatever it is, right. So I'd heard it quite a few times and the first few times I was like, well, thank you very much, I appreciate it. But there was something about this guy. I could see it in his eyes. There was more to it. So I said to him, how, I'm curious to know, how has it changed your life? And he then went on to tell me the story of how seven or eight months prior to that evening he had lost his wife to cancer and he had a little three year old girl that he had been ultimately a stay at home dad for over that period of time since losing his wife and his business was getting neglected because he ultimately was the bottleneck in the business and he was spending more time with his daughter obviously than he was on the business. But he picked up the book two, three months before meeting up with me and started delegating work to people overse to help him keep his business going. And he said, like, you know, this is. I can clearly see after just a couple of months of doing this, I can see this is the way forward for me to be able to not only continue to provide for my daughter from my business perspective, but also to continue to be there for her first and foremost after everything that we've gone through. And I couldn't help it, I started bawling because as a father, I got it completely. I got it completely. And so not necessarily a surprise, but definitely a realization of a. It was right to. I mean, if that was the only reason that I wrote the book, I'm a winner. You know what I mean? But understanding that there are tens of thousands of other people that I know I've helped through the pages of the book as well, that's just, you know, a massive, you know, bucket list ticked off right there. So not really a surprise, but a great story to hear at the end of a book launch party. And, you know, I still remember the guy's name. His name was Roy. I still remember his name because we have a little name tags. And you know, I often think about him actually to see how he's been able to take things up to the next level since that meeting. And I'm sure he's doing well. I mean, he seemed like he was a pretty switched on guy, but for me, that's the reason why we do what we do. And. And what a great realization that what you're doing is worthwhile. You know what I mean?

Absolutely. That is so incredible. And it speaks to how powerful these concepts are. Of all business tips, tools, tactics that you and I geek out on, this stuff really matters and it really makes a huge difference. Wow, what a powerful story. I'm so blown away by that. And that's just one of, like you said, thousands who are benefiting from.

There was another lady that came up to me at an event in San Diego a couple of years ago and she said to me, I picked up your book when it came out. It really helped me streamline my business and my processes. And she said to me, I'm pretty sure that I can equate at least an extra $5,000 a month to this day, every month, month in, month out, because of what I picked up in the book. So that's great. I love that stuff.

That's amazing. Chris, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise not just on this po, but in your book and in life as being such a great friend for all these years. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Well, like I said, I'm a personal branding guy, so if they're curious to know more about me, they can go to chrisducker.com simple as that.

Love it. And you have your community relaunch coming up, right?

Yes, yes. Upon our Academy is opening up again very, very soon and we also have, if anybody's either on that side of the pond in London coming up in November 2017, I say the year just in case someone's listening to this a year and a half from now or something. But we have the first ever upon our summit coming up as well, which is going to be a live two day event taking place at Her Majesty's Convention center in London. It's going to be great. And yeah, people can. I mean you can find links to all that stuff over@chrisducker.com but I'm looking forward to putting all that stuff on and helping people out.

Awesome. I love it. Chris, thank you so much.

Thank you. You rock. Keep doing what you're doing.

You too.

Do you want to stress less and earn more? What is your time worth and are you happy with how you're spending it? Transform Frantic into Freedom with Jenny Blake's new eight week course Delegation Ninja. Learn more and enroll now@pivotmethod.com delegate. Mention this podcast after you enroll and get $25 off the Delegation Ninja course or your first quarter in Momentum. This ad has been delegated by Jenny Blake.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.