Episode #567 - Make Yourself Replaceable with Ari Meisel

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm pretty good at delegating, training, reproducing myself, but there still are things where it's hard for me to let. And I've gone through the process where you evaluate yourself. At some point you got to get to where you do this for yourself. I know people are talking to you, but the idea is to get them up to where they can kind of evaluate this situation on themselves. But the thing is, if all your time is taken up doing what you're doing now, you're not going to have time to do other things that maybe you need to do just to relax and recover and refresh. Maybe it's not more work work you need to, you need no more recovery time. And so for that time to be created out of your 24 hours, it's jam packed now. You need to offload. And what I found, Ari from this is the most difficult thing I had to do was my Monday morning conference call where I would get the speakers, I would get, I would schedule them, then I would do it, I would ask the questions and I would do the announcements. I did that for like nine years. And I was like, then friends said to me, you know, and this is total voluntary thing. I've got a whole, we got 130, I'm one of the founders. We got 135,000 people in the company. And many of the elites, you know, we got 1000, 1500 of the elites listen into this call and it's all voluntary, but I like to talk to the top people. So I'm going to keep doing it. And that's, we talked to the most currently hot people. And so when he, I had people come up to me say, you need to find a way to keep this going because if you croak, you know, we still want the call to go on. So I figured, how, how can I figure this thing out? So what I did was I got my son involved. And what I, I said, well, at least he can do the, he can read the intro and he could read the announcements. And then he, you know, and then step by step, overall, it got to where, well, he can ask, you know, he can ask questions, like I can ask questions and then he could set up speaker. So pretty soon I found out people actually like him better than me. And the thing is, set up to where, you know, people were doing the call. People will actually, around the country, text him questions to ask while the call's going on, and they won't text me. So what I found is that this was something I thought I have to do, but I broke myself from it by offloading the simplest piece of it. And basically I was putting a crack in my mind to where I had such a rigid thing where I looked at it as one whole piece, but really it's never one whole piece. It's a lot of little pieces. And a lot of those little pieces you can give away to someone else. Now, as you went in your world, how did you go through that experience?

So I eventually built up a team around what I was doing. And, well, so, okay, so I was. I was doing less doing. I was speaking and I was consulting, and I was doing coaching. And then somebody approached me who actually was. Well, it was a client approached me and said, you know, I really think I could help you manage the business and turn this into a group coaching thing and really scale it. And he helped me do that. I did my first event, I think it was 2015. And then later that year, a friend of mine and I were having dinner and we had. We were discussing a virtual assistant company that had recently gone out of business. And we thought about the idea of starting our own, which we launched the next day. And that was called leverage. And that grew to. We did a million dollars the first year. We never put a penny to the business. We had 183 people working for us in 17 time zones. It exploded. It was great. In the second year, we were on track to pretty much double. And then there were some philosophical issues between me and my founding partner, and I left the company. He bought me out, and I went back to doing less doing stuff. And several of the people that were at the company left of their own accord to join me. And so then at that point, what the focus really became. Cause at that point, I was a father. I had three kids at that point, or no, four kids at that point. We wanted to turn less doing into a business and a methodology all of its own, not, you know, Ari's productivity system. And so we really did a lot of effort, made a lot of effort on branding and creating almost a movement around what I had built and really backed me out of most of the business to the point that the group coaching wasn't even run by me anymore.

And that's kind of amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, well, you know, because there's certainly that thing where it's like, people want art, people want art. Or, you know, they want the founder, the guy or the lady who's running. But again, we really tried to make it something that sort of stood on its head because you have too many coaches or too many people where the value is in their answer to the question, right, Rather than like an actual established framework. And so, again, we really, really worked on that, started doing events again. And then basically what happened was the pandemic happened and the business was operating fine. But really, the pandemic had no effect on. On the business. But as I mentioned, I've been. I've been an EMT for. Well, now for 12 years. And during the pandemic, I got very, very heavily involved. And we were living in upstate New York. Well, we were. We were temporarily in upstate New York. And I was one of three EMTs for the entire town that we were living in. This is, again, this during COVID times. So I was working in New York City with the FDNY and in this rural area. And in a rural area, as an emt, you kind of get to know patients a lot more. And there was one particular patient that I got very close with, and at one point, I got some misinformation, and I thought I wasn't there, and I thought that she had died. And about 10 minutes later, I got a message from my COO about something, and I just had this sort of moment where I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. And I told him we were going to shut the business down, which was not very well received by anybody. And I realized that I had become a victim of my own success in terms of being replaceable. So I had made myself completely replaceable. The business was operating completely without me. What I really loved, which is dealing with people, working with people, coaching. And to some extent, that's what the EMT stuff really fulfills as well, is I get to see people in these really distressed situations and help them. And so, on a whim, I sent a message to a client who was in our Mastermind program, group coaching program. I was like, hey, I think you're getting back into private coaching yet, but I'm just going to do it over Voxer. So sidestep for a moment here. Voxer. Are you familiar with Voxer?

No, I've heard of it.

I don't use it. So Voxer is primarily a voice communication app. There are thousands of them on the market. There's signal, telegram, all these things. Voxer has some very Specific, very unique features that make it a better tool in my opinion. But basically the offer was we're never going to have any synchronous calls. We're not going to have live meetings, no workshops, no events, no, no weekly calls, whatever it is. We're just going to do this over Boxer asynchronously. You have unlimited access to me. You can ask me a question whenever you want and I will get back to you whenever I want. And the guy was like, yes, done. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Second client said yes. Third client said yes. So like everybody in the mastermind, except for like two people basically said yes right away. And so I started doing what I had originally done to launch my business, which was one on one private coaching. But now it is 100 asynchronous. I don't do sales calls over Boxer or over actual calls either. It's all through Boxer. So 99 of my communication at this point is done over Boxer. And as I was saying, 20 minutes a day, that's how I do it. I. The clients send me a message whenever they want. Sometimes it's once a day, sometimes once a month. And I can get back to them usually pretty quickly, but it's sort of whenever I want. And this call that you and I are having, this interview, is the only scheduled call that I have on my calendar this week and next week.

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Yeah, that's why I was impressed. I'm taking most of your work week.

Yeah, right. However, but this to me is something.

That is justifiably, in fact between me and you, Ari. I've been worried about you fading after about 30 minutes in energy.

Now when I do EMT work, I work at night, so I try to fit that into the 24 hours.

But. So that's how you get it done in the 20 minutes. So it's like replying to text, except you're replying to voice messages.

Yeah. And also, I mean, somebody might leave me a 15 minute long message, but I can listen to it at 2, 3 or 4 times speed and I can digest it and then I can give them that 90 second answer that they need, you know, a couple hours later. Maybe it is, it has not just been more convenient for me. It's really turned out to be the most effective coaching method I've ever done. It's working in ways I never thought it could for people because now they have this forum, you know, if something annoying or difficult or unfortunate happens at work on a Friday afternoon, they don't have to wait till our Wednesday one o' clock weekly meeting to unload that. They can say it right then and there, Friday night, walk out, leave, and they can rant, they can rave, they can curse at me if they need to and they can go do what they have to do and then I'll probably get back to them within a couple hours and they can go about their day. So we move things along so much more quickly. And you mentioned about writing books in that time. My last book was basically 47 Voxer messages that I sent to my writer Amy, who's been working with me for years. So that's, that's how I do that.

Now the, and these are people that are on like an annual retainer, something like that.

Oh, it's all contract work now. It's just, you know, as needed. I have. Oh, and that's the other thing is I have like no expenses anymore. I don't have a team, I don't have, you know, anything.

And so if they, they're charged based off how much time are they per call or how they charge if it's per contract?

No, the client, I'm sorry, the clients pay for, they pay for a six month period and they get unlimited access. That's a flat rate. I thought you meant the people that are doing work for me, they're on contract. No. So it's $10,000 for the first six months and that gives them unlimited access to me. And then it goes down actually every six months after that if they stick with me.

Yeah. And how did you, how did you come up with that idea? Where'd you even hear a boxer?

Oh, I mean, I, so I, I'm, I'm pretty sure I'm a pioneer in doing this because there's, I've, I've spoken to a lot of other coaches and I looked at the time and really nobody was offering this. So Boxer has been around for quite a while. It was actually created by some Iraqi, sorry, veterans who had been in the Iraqi theater and they were trying to create a more reliable communication method actually. But it, again, it has, it. So it has a very unique feature. As opposed to all the other voice communication apps, it's the only one that allows you to do synchronous communication as well. So what that looks like if you're using WhatsApp or Telegram and somebody has a 15 minute message, they record for 15 messages for 15 minutes, it uploads, the other person downloads it, they listen, which kind of breaks things up a little bit and might be okay. Sometimes in Voxer, within 0.2 seconds of one person starting to talk, the person on the other end can actually start listening. So I have scenarios with clients where we go back and forth, almost like a phone call for 10, 20 minutes, but then somebody goes off and does. Gets busy and does something else, and then we come back to it later. It's like the, it's like how people used to play chess, you know, with somebody in Russia over short wave radio over the course of several weeks, one move at a time.

Yeah. Pretty crazy. How did your, you, you refer over to your books. How did you, how did the evolution of the thought, you know, like the thing in a blog post, an article, a book is always centered around one main thought, you know, because like if we all got one main idea concept out of every book we read, that stuck with us, you know, we, you know, and in fact, I'm, I'm here today because of some of the books that were so well written that I read 40 years ago. I still use that concept, that phrase over and over, over. I don't try and remember it. I remember because I use it. And so when we write books, the big challenge is to come up with something that people will resonate with and they'll use. And if it's just one major thing, it's a touchdown, you know. And so how did you come up with, you know, the first one was probably the Art of Doing Less. Am I right?

Less Doing More Living was the first one. 2014, less doing more Living.

And how did you, how much trouble was it to come up with that title and that, that central idea?

It was, you know, so I'm always, I'm a big fan of sort of the iterative approach to pretty much everything. So what basically happened was I wrote, I don't know, nine or 10 blog posts back in 2012 or 13. And then there was a new platform that had Launched at the time, called skillshare, which is still around. And it was a facilitating tool to teach classes. Anybody could teach anything to anybody, basically was their idea. So I was like, you know, let me just try this. So I put out a class that was basically productivity tools. It was an hour. I had ten people that paid like eight bucks each, and I shared all these tools I was using. And then I asked for feedback, and I got really good feedback. All right, cool. So now I'm gonna copy that feedback. And I did it again. And I did it again and again. And after the third or fourth, maybe fifth class, I started developing actual, like, pillars and fundamentals of what I was doing. And then I would just test those out and see how people respond to them. There were some that were not good, and there's some that were really good and landed really well. And at some point, I was teaching a course, a class of 40 people every week. And it was one of the top classes on skillshare's platform in New York at the time.

What was the platform? What was the platform?

Skillshare.

Skillshare.

And through that iterative process, I developed these sort of nine fundamentals book. And then I recorded one of my classes and gave that recording to a ghostwriter who wrote the first manuscript. Um, so then what happened was, I don't know, two or three classes after that, this guy walked up to me at the end of the class, and I probably taught, like, I don't know, a dozen times at that point. And he comes up to me and he's like, hey, that was really great. He's like, you offer private coaching. And I had never done any coaching before. And without hesitation, I was like, oh, yeah, absolutely. It's 250 bucks a month. And, you know, we'll have one hour meetings once a week, and you have email access to me. I don't know where that came from.

Yeah.

But he said yes. And so I started coaching. And then I started offering that in my classes. And at one of my classes, there was a guy who was a editor for Torture, which is an imprint of Penguin. He was like, yeah, you should turn this into a book. I was like, here it is. And a year and a half later, my book came out with Penguin Random House.

But the title came out of the teaching. And the response you got. Is that what you're saying?

And yeah, I. Basically, one of the classes, I was like, this is about less doing. And they were like, got really good response to that. Okay, that works.

Now, why did you. When you expand on. This is about less doing.

So I think I probably meant to say doing less and I stumbled and said less doing and got like, applause. I was like, so if it's less doing, it's more something. And I was like, less doing, more living. And that worked. It stuck.

Yeah. And so why do you think it resonated so strong? People are just over committed, run ragged.

Well, not only are they over committed and run ragged, but there's a constant pressure in our work culture to do more all the time. Always doing more, being more productive. Even though productivity really shouldn't be the pursuit, we should be trying to be as effective as possible. Just producing more. Right?

Yeah. It's not working harder. It's getting done. You know, what are you getting done?

Yeah. What are you actually accomplishing? Yeah.

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