If I’m at the dry cleaners, if I’m getting my car washed, if I’m at the grocery store, then I’m making small moves and small moves produce small outcomes.
Even though I franchised in 2012, 2013 and 2014 were the worst years of my life. I had a massive anxiety attack in 2013, I had franchisees leaving faster than they were coming on board because I had promised a unicorn, but I was selling a donkey. I had no personal discipline, so I thought I could just still sleep in every morning and not have to wake up early and work off a list that I had made the night before. And basically everything crumbled on me to the point where the state of California said, “Hey, look, you can’t sell any more franchises until you fix these problems.”
And so I had to suffer because it’s almost like someone who goes, “Hey, even though I’m really good at high school football, I’m going to go into the NFL, but still maintain my bad habits as a high school student.” Now you might be a talented person as a high school athlete, but on that NFL football field, you’re going to get crushed if you go in there with bad habits, bad work ethic, bad discipline.
It was out of that that I decided I got to do something about that. I had massive anxiety attacks and stuff. We were $600,000 in debt in 2013 so really it wasn’t an uphill swing until right around late 2014 when I started to what I call man up and started building discipline. I got clear on my vision for Fit Body Bootcamp. I became a better communicator, I became more decisive and made faster and better decisions.
Some things in my life became non-negotiable. Like I’ll never go to the dry cleaner, the grocery store, I’ll never stay awake past 10:30 at night, and when I started to dial in my life, then my business took off, which is no surprise that we hit the Inc 5000 list in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Literally when I manned up and fixed my leadership problems, my business took off and actually it was on the heels of that, that I wrote this book, Man Up, and I outlined all six pillars of my success in there.
We have a full time house manager, her name is Marlin. Marlin goes to the grocery store. I don’t change the light bulb if there’s a burnt out light bulb, Marlin changes the light bulb and if something hardcore needs to be worked on in the house, just because I’m handy I don’t go working on the plumbing or the garbage disposal. Marlin will call in someone. Marlin makes sure that our life is maintained so that I could be the fighter jet. You don’t see the fighter jet pilot picking up a pistol and going door to door clearing houses. He’s up there in his fighter jet dropping bombs and doing the big destruction, the big moves.
I look at myself that way and that’s what I do. And so if I’m at the dry cleaners, if I’m getting my car washed, if I’m at the grocery store then I’m making small moves and small moves produce small outcomes.
Actually having kids made me even more disciplined because as you may know, I mean you were a kid, right? I mean you have a mom, you have a dad, you probably want them to be around as much as possible, if you like them at least. And so for me, I realized my kids are either going to end up going to therapy when they’re older because dad’s poorly disciplined, which means I have to do a lot more work to keep the wheels on the bus or I’ve got to get even more structured, more disciplined, and so I did.
And so believe it or not, the more disciplined you get, the more time you have in your life. Like people go, “What does your morning routine look like?” And I always tell them my morning routine starts the night before when I take my iPhone here and I write down the three to five things I’m going to do that’s going to move my business forward. I do the brain dump the night before, that way in the morning when I wake up I’ve got a very structured morning routine and that morning routine is always leading to a predictable outcome for me.
So I literally work in surf time. When I’m going surfing with my son, we’ve got that scheduled on the calendar. It’s not a, “Hey, the waves are good today. Do you want to go?” If the waves are big, we try not to drown. If there’s no waves, then were just paddling around in the water having a good time, because we schedule everything in our life, and that’s how it works for me.