The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Fire Yourself First: Unchain Yourself from the Daily Grind, Create an Autonomous Business, and Do What You Love Next by Jeff Russell

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Fire Yourself First: Unchain Yourself from the Daily Grind, Create an Autonomous Business, and Do What You Love Next by Jeff Russell https://amzn.to/432QCA5 https://iapam.com/ Want Your Life Back? Seventy percent of all doctor’s visits are linked to workplace stress. Too many people are overworked and overstressed. They want something more from life, but they’re not sure how to stop working long enough to make it a reality. Entrepreneurs want answers to their questions. How do they step back from a business they created? How can they enjoy all that life offers when work consumes their days? Author Jeff Russell, a successful and serial entrepreneur, teaches entrepreneurs how to unchain themselves from the daily grind by creating a business that runs without them. Fire Yourself First provides the four-step plan to free up your time. Get ready to discover how to: Clarify your why to infuse more direction to your life and business Hire an autonomous team who can run your business for you Create dashboards and scorecards to help you and your team identify what winning looks like Plan your exit to ensure your departure is strategic and successful Gain the confidence you need to create a life you love. Begin the journey of Firing Yourself First, starting today.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys having us in your ear. That's where we're at right now.

We're probably in your ear. So thanks for having us in your ear. We really appreciate it. You could clean up a little bit of the hair in there, and there's some wax you might want to take care of. But thanks for having us in your life. We really appreciate you, as always. Prefer the show to your family friends

and relatives share the wealth share the knowledge you know we have some of the most smartest people on this show i mean billionaires uh let's see white house advisors we have people that have advised multiple presidents from both sides of the aisle uh you know we have so many smart people on the show none of them are me of course but we have smart people on the show. None of them are me, of course, but we have smart people on this show. And why wouldn't you want to make your friends, family, and things more intelligent? Anyway, enough with the shaming. Goodreads.com, 4Chance Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, 4Chance Chris Voss.

Subscribe to that newsletter on LinkedIn. And we're starting to tear it up over there on TikTok. So there's two accounts over there on TikTok for Chris Voss, the Chris Voss Show. Check that out as well. And then also, what was there? YouTubecom fortune's christmas uh the next amazing brilliant mind that we have on the show which isn't me uh is an author who just put out his book april 28th 2023 so you can get it still hot off the presses still has that new ink smell you know there you go unless you buy the kingdom kindle version you can smell what you want,

but you're just going to smell your computer. But I don't know why you'd want to do that, but that's part of the ramble today when we do our randoms. Anyway, guys, the new book is called Fire Yourself First. Did you give yourself a pink slip? Anyway, we'll get into it. Fire yourself first. Unchain yourself from the daily grind.

Create an autonomous business and do what you love next. Jeff Russell is on the show with us today. He'll be talking to us about his amazing book and all the insights that he used to change his life. He is a best-selling author, speaker, and business owner. He is the founder of the Oak Ridge Financial Group, Oak Ridge Financial Investments, IAPAM, International Associations for Physicians in Aesthetic Medicine, Glenmore Healthcare, Oak Ridge Leasing, and Clean Start Weight Loss. He's the founder of the Oak Ridge Group, his private family office, and his goal is to make a positive impact in the lives of entrepreneurs by helping them see a better way in both life and business. Through his book, Fire Yourself First, he shares his ability to quickly analyze, systemize, and scale businesses.

Welcome to the show, Jeff. How are you? I'm doing fantastic, Chris. I'm doing fantastic as well. It's an honor to have you, Jeff. How are you? I'm doing fantastic, Chris. I'm doing fantastic as well. It's an honor to have you, sir. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, nice and easy. FireYourselfFirst.com. There you go. There you go. And so what was the reason you decided to write this book, from your words? Well, I always had the book in my mind, right? And I guess what I found easy to do, I didn't realize a lot of people found difficult to do. And that is basically taking

a business and getting and basically firing myself as fast as I could. So I like starting the business, getting it going, and then I bring in operators to operate the business. And that was just kind of what I wanted to do for my lifestyle. And as I did that, I'm like, okay, I kind of looked back and saw there was like, kind of four steps that I would do. And my purpose was really to move on to other things that I wanted to do. And so that's, it's really where it came from. And I'll tell you, the unfortunate story of actually what triggered this book is an event that happened last August at one of my live events. So as you mentioned, I founded the IAPAM, which is an association for aesthetic physicians. So these are doctors that may be an emergency room doctor, family practice doctor,

you know, really high stress. We've all heard the stress that these physicians are going through, you know, for the last few years. And one of the sad things is, you know, the suicide rates for physicians, as well as small business owners and business owners is relatively higher than other parts of the of the population. And I never really looked at teaching doctors how to do Botox and these aesthetic procedures. So non surgical stuff that actually put some joy into their life. So after spending eight to 12 hours in an emergency room dealing with gunshots and crazy people trying to bite them, you know, it was kind of nice for them to see happy patients that actually want to do that.

Most of these docs don't want to exit out of medicine, but they just kind of want to have some balance in it. And I always knew that. And last August at one of our events in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a doctor from Flagstaff, emergency room physician, and he was going to be coming to the event. And, you know, I saw on Friday, he didn't show up. And that was a bit of a concern, but not unusual things happen, right? Saturday, he didn't come come in either. So, you know, I had my team follow up with him, make sure he wasn't in a crash or anything like that. And then, yeah, we hadn't heard anything back. He wasn't

there the weekend. And then following up, maybe a couple of weeks later, his wife called us up going through his voice messages, and he had actually committed suicide a week before he attended. And he was coming to our training because he was so stressed with the current situation in medicine that this was his exit. This was his out. And so I really, at that point, I'm like, you know what? I have to, I've been teaching doctors this four step process to get out of your practice as fast as you can and have other people run it. But I didn't realize the mental health catastrophe that the, you know, the country's going through right now. And so that is when I want it easy to consume this book, you know, the audibles three hours long. So

it's a very easy to consume plain English for physicians who've taken no business courses. So and when I look at it, not only does it work for physicians, but it also works for any business. Right. Because I have other businesses that aren't in medicine as well. There you go. I didn't I never studied the suicide rate of entrepreneurs. I as an entrepreneur since 18, I know that we you you know, we have issues, we can, we can have issues. I don't think everyone does, but we can have issues with depression. It's lonely.

It's lonely running a business because the buck stops with you. There's not anybody you can go, well, is it someone else that can deal with this issue? It's like, it stops with you. And we've had a lot of actually physicians on the show that have written written books or or come on the show to promote their services and they're they're really having a hard time right now i mean covet alone uh the insurance companies are driving a lot of uh doctors out of the business because they you know they i i we just had somebody on i think a week or two ago that was a doctor and they were saying that, uh, you know, they have to hire three to four people just to try and get paid by the insurance companies.

And, um, and so, yeah, it's high stress. I know dentists always have a high, uh, suicide rate, uh, psychologists as well. Um, but yeah, there's, there's, there's a loneliness to this job. And I remember we had a gal who talks about building businesses to turn them over, sell them, or like you were talking about, to get somebody else to run them. And I never thought about that. You know, being raised, you know, I always thought about building empires and businesses, and that's how we raised all of our companies. But there's a burnout to it. And you can fry and, and the better move is like you say, get people in to take it over and run it. And I never really thought about having an exit strategy per se until I'd, I'd had another author on who talked

about that stuff. So I'm, I'm glad you're talking to people about it because there is a point that you need to, you need to move on or do other stuff. You know, mental health is so serious. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from it, right? That type A, OCD, the drive. Like in order to start something from scratch, you had to make a lot of sacrifices. And you do take it all on you, right? Like you personally take it.

So absolutely, right? That's so important. And one of the things that I do, and this is kind of a crude metaphor, but I say, you want to turn your business into an ATM, right? So you can work, whether you want to work two, four hours a month or 40 hours a month or whatever you want, at least you have the choice to do that. And so in order to do that, you have to have people there running it for you. But that's scary for an entrepreneur, because you're the one who started it from scratch. You you're the only one you trust, right? So to bring in somebody else, if there's not a process to follow is very difficult.

And most of my book is about hiring people. Like I have an 11-step hiring guide because that's the most difficult part. That is the part that crashes and burns the most. It's, you know, I was lucky in my businesses that became successful. You know, my first few iterations were short-term successes and got me hooked on the drug of entrepreneurism. But I found a business partner who I've been best friends with for about 10, 12 years prior. But we had a great dynamic where I could be the visionary.

I could design things and create, you know, workflows and processes and businesses. And, you know, I could do the whole visionary stuff. And I really get off on that being a visionary and innovating and creating stuff and and and making things better and and you know making them more efficient i love that but if you give me the day-to-day process of the mundaneness of say accounting i mean accounting is a brilliant business but you know just doing the same thing over and over again i I don't perform well in that sort of thing. And I think most people that are entrepreneurs are kind of geared toward that. And so the beauty of my relationship with my business partnership was my business partner

could take whatever model I created and he could do the mundane and he loved the mundane. But if you went to him and asked him to envision anything innovate anything you know i sometimes i would send him home with a yellow patent i'd be like just come up with some ideas this weekend he'd come back with nothing 100 of the time and that's just how he worked but he he was great because he could do what you're talking about take over basically the function of the business i could could trust him explicitly. And I knew that he was going to take care of things. And, uh, and so for 13 years, we had a great run and built a lot of companies. Uh, tell us about your origin story. Cause you've done a lot of that in your past, you've built several different companies, you've turned them over and, and now you've, you've learned to manage, you know, spin these different plates of businesses and do it. Well,

tell us a little bit about your origin story, how you walked into that and how you built it. Yeah, no, it started 20 years ago. And so, yeah, after college, actually, I did the thing you're supposed to do, get a job in a big company, right? So many, many years ago, over 30 years ago, I got hired for a corporation that's maybe not, maybe your millennials and Gen Z's don't know it, but it was Xerox, right? So that was one of the top two employers, right? It was IBM or Xerox. And so I did that, maybe 10 years into it and evolving, I discovered I was really unhirable. And that's where the entrepreneur when you said you get a pink slip, I pretty much did, right? I was a good employee, I was smart, but I always seem to get laid off. And then they would

give me a huge check because I did nothing wrong. So they had to pay me a lot of money. I'm like, I could continue doing this. But and one of those big checks I got was from another big company, Fairmont Hotels. Right. So they were like, you know, Jeff, yeah, time for you to move along. And I'm laughing because I'm laughing because entrepreneurs like that. We don't play well. I mean, it's not that we don't play with others, but we want to innovate and create and make things better. And, you know, a lot of companies like, hey, man, that's not your job. You're just somewhere in the middle of whatever. Yeah.

And we lack filters, right? We kind of say what we think. Because we want to fix. We see shit broken and we go, hey, this is better. And they're like, hey, man, you got to just not do that. Yeah. Yeah. So that was stressful.

So anyways, they gave me some psychological tasks and stuff as my rehiring program. So I'm like, I'll do it because I'm all into the Myers-Briggs and all the other stuff. But one of those tests, they said, the counselor goes, you know what, Jeff, you actually shouldn't be working for anyone. You need to start your own company. You actually have all the traits. And so at that point i really realized i am unhirable so i just have to uh start from scratch right and you know i didn't really know much so i you know i bought into um uh equipment leasing company and so uh training

so i got trained because i didn't know anything about that industry. And then what I learned very quickly is doctors got money really easily. So when I was financing different types of equipment, if I finance a doctor, he had a one page signature, got a quarter of a million dollars instantly. If it was an entrepreneur who was grinding it for 20 years, they would ask for 30 pages of financials you know all this ridiculous like hoops it would be so much more work to do a non-physician than a physician and then what i started financing were cosmetic lasers aesthetic equipment i you know this is 16 years ago i financed the first medical spa in Manhattan,

right? So so like, I was in it. And it was funny, I worked for Fairmont, and we developed the Willow Stream spa. And so I kind of knew about spas. And then they're like, Oh, we're doing this medical spa. So I actually took my background from Fairmont model, you know, combined it with my financing background and specialize in medical spas, cosmetic surgical centers, and that. And then I was getting a lot of ER doctors. And they're like, Well, how do you start this? Because we never took one business course in medical school. I'm like, Okay, well, you know, go talk to this doctor over here that I helped. He's doing really well. See, ask him. And then after a few

years of that, the doctors are like, Jeff, don't send me any more people. We do not need any more. And so that's when the light bulb went on. And I'm like, okay, let's go talk to them, interview them, and we'll do the training for them. And this was right around 2006, right? So things were going well. And then what happened happened in 2008 slight blur in the economy that caused a lot of problems so my financing business almost dissolved overnight so ge healthcare all the big banks everybody stopped lending to everyone and so luckily i had this training on the side so i just kind of pivoted and shifted over here, had the financing on the background. And that's really where it started. And from the beginning, I really I love

doing that I still do it, even if I won the Powerball, I would still do that, right? Not as much, but it was something I really like. And that's how it started. Then I invested in the clinic. And then I created a weight loss program that developed with that. So then I started going in these businesses, very busy. So I knew I didn't have the time to do them. So I kind of set up systems and processes so that they run themselves. And I'll tell you, I had disasters. I hired one guy, he threatened to sue me for $10,000. You know, like, I hired all the wrong people. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not saying, you know, I'm doing 20 years of hiring winners and hiring losers. But for the last five years, I have a solid winning track record

of looking up because the most difficult people to hire or get rid of are the are the manipulators the psychopaths those are the people that manipulate the hiring system they know how to answer the questions they know how to you know say the right things and sometimes those people are authentic but it's the unauthentic ones. You have to capture them quickly or they'll drag you down. The most important thing I learned, uh, and I learned it the hard way, like you said, cause I, you know, I tried to be egalitarian and, and let's just all be huggy. Uh, Tom Peters, I love Tom Peters, an author, but about 50% of his stuff made me rich and the other 50% about bankrupt to me uh and we know one

of his things was if you put people in response is responsible positions and you trust them they will you know do good things and you know unfortunately a lot of business books uh and writers like him they're reverse engineering a lot of like why was disney a success and they're reverse injuring it uh reverse engineering it. And the problem is, is that you can't really reverse engineer business. You can analyze it, but, but you can't say that this is maybe the best plan because, you know, there's so many different turns and everything that went on. And so we switched from, you know, going to a one interview hiring process to a three to four interview hiring process with different people.

And then I trained my interviewers to shut up and quit selling the job and just shut up and listen to people. And it was amazing how, like by the third interview, people would start telling you everything. You know, the time they were in prison, the time they stole from their previous employer, you know, the time, you know, they, they would just start unpacking everything because they felt so comfortable that I'm in the third interview, I got this job. Right. And they were talking to different people and it was, it was just amazing to me if you just shut up what people would tell you. And so many interviews, I, you know, I walk past my interview people and, and I'd be like, you need to shut up.

You talk like 75% of that conversation and you don't sell them. You know, the job sells itself. We're paying really good money. And, uh, that eliminated like all of the problems we were having with, with hiring. If you, if you just do that work up front, so a little PSA up there for things, but you're right. I mean, um, it makes a whole difference when you're not playing huggy bear with your business and you're just going, hey, what is this?

Let's segue into what IAPAM is about, International Association for Physicians in Aesthetic Medicine. Tell us what aesthetic medicine is and how you help doctors. Yeah, the difference, that's a great question. So we have aesthetic medicine, we have cosmetic medicine. Generally speaking, aesthetic is non-invasive where there's no surgery. Cosmetic medicine would be more of a plastic surgeon, somebody who's doing surgery. So examples of aesthetic, most popular procedure number one are botox type treatments right getting rid of those wrinkles and things and dermal

fillers uh a very popular upcoming one is uh uh tattoo removal right so many people have multiple tattoos and you know jane is now sarah so we have to kind of erase Jane out of that heart on the shoulder. And so you can do that quite easily with tattoo laser removal. And, of course, you've probably heard of the big ones like cool sculpting, right? So body zapping fat. And now a lot of the equipment not only zaps fat, but it builds muscle. And so a lot of times the doctors just want to diversify we we say it's kind of like your ira you know you don't invest everything in the real

estate or bonds or stocks you kind of have a little bit of everything and like you mentioned insurance companies don't like to pay so you know doctors may wait do a procedure wait six months and get paid half because they didn't dot all the I's and cross the T's. They did the procedure successfully, but it doesn't matter. And so they kind of like to get paid, right? So yes, doctors get paid well, but they don't get paid for everything they do. And so a lot of them, they want to kind of learn this. Often they start as a side hustle or they'll incorporate it.

Maybe they have a family office practice and their patients are getting older and they're asking for these procedures. They trust their doctor. They're going to go right to that doctor to do that. And so we've been doing the hands-on training as well as now we do live as well as online training as well. So we've been doing that as online training as well. So we've been doing that for 16 years and trained over 10,000 physicians on how to do that.

So it's very exciting. There you go. And on the website, it's billed as recession-proofing their income, making a switch, make more, work less, create dependence, reoccurring revenue and and training and stuff uh so you you can go to the website and you can do several things here it looks like pick your training start when you're ready get more freedom and you basically train doctors on how to make this adjustment or or focus on this sort of industry yeah and often what we're seeing now is a big expansion we're seeing nurse practitioners we're seeing physicians assistants a big expansion. We're seeing nurse practitioners, we're seeing physicians assistants and nurses. Now, of course, there's legal, you know, a nurse or a PA would require medical supervision, right? But we're seeing a lot of them taking our online

training, kind of getting up to speed, and then kind of jumping to, you know, more advanced hands on training, where the doctors already have that base training, right? So they'll often come right to the live training. And this is a thing that we discovered what's different for doctors. So if you're a family doctor, you only get paid when you see the patient, right? But if you have an aesthetic practice, and I own an aesthetic practice as well, is you don't have to see the patient, you can have extenders or nurses seeing the patients for you. So literally, right now, my clinics open, I have three nurses treating patients, I'm making money, like I'm, but I'm here with talking to you, Chris, right? So I don't even need to be in the building, I don't need to be anything. So isn't that like a normal business

where you're maybe you're a Subway sandwich shop? You hire people to work so that you don't have to be there. And that's another group that actually is really jumping on the fire yourself bandwagon is franchises. So the most successful franchise is if you have one franchise, you have a job, even though you're the owner, but you have a job. But if you get three or more, then you have a business, right? That can run without you. So we're using, we're telling doctors when they never saw this, they thought they have to trade an hour for a dollar.

I'm like, no, now you train your knowledge for hundreds of dollars, right? You don't have to do the procedures. And so that's why a lot of the wording is like, when you're ready to get out of medicine, make some money, and then you get this extra time to move on. And that was one of the things is when you have a team in there running it for you,

you're more saleable, right? Because now you have a business that isn't dependent on you. So you've just increased your valuation. Where before, if you're a family practice, well, if you buy that practice, you're just buying those patients. You're not making any more, right? So you can really leverage an aesthetic practice on the key because you don't have to work it. There you go. You you know what you're saying is true i mean this is the biggest thing that businesses need to do and i see a lot of these

plastic surgeons in fact they've really popped up doing their work on well they don't do their work i think there's one gal got in trouble for that um but they they talk about what they're doing we've had them on the show on uh on instagram they've been openly talking about stuff uh there's a few we've had on the show that have talked about you know uh educating people on uh who the good license providers are i think florida has a real problem with unlicensed people you know i think there's a story of some putting concrete and whatever but uh uh there's a real proliferation of them too on t. And I see these guys. They own multiple different offices. They're running all over wherever they're at.

And they're hugely successful, making lots of money. And Botox and the school sculpting, I mean, it's become huge for women. I just saw, it was kind of funny to see on TikTok, one of those island boys. I don't know if you've ever heard the Island boys, but, uh, they, they, uh, just one of the girlfriends of them broke up and she put a giant face tattoo of her boyfriend, the Island boy on her neck. Like, I'm not even kidding you. It's like, and, and so now she's getting removed.

So, you know, and, and, uh, I've, I've known a lot of models over the years that, you know, they get a bad tattoo and then they want it laser removed. And with the proliferation of tattoos, and there's a lot of regrets, you know, I know people, like you said, the Jane and whatever, they get a tattoo of the name of their whomever and then they go and change it. And, you know, so it's a huge business that people have been uh focusing on and so it's great and so you you basically help them make the transition from one end to the other and and get into these programs and then you do business training as well yeah so i always i always drop these little nuggets throughout the training for the physicians and that's when i look back and i'm like, wow, let's just package it up nicely. Right. So I actually wrote another book called Secrets of a Successful Practice. And that's a practice management book. It's a very

clinical technical book on how to run a practice from hiring onwards. So that is very specific. But this message and the basics are the same in any business. And when you think of about a medical practice or an aesthetic practice, it's typically the doctor, which is the CEO owner, and then they may have four to eight people. So they're small businesses, these are not the four, you know, there's exceptions, but there's very rarely do you have 2030 people working for you. So that model is very easy. And a lot of them start as a side gig too, right? I have other ones that they do we are during the day, then they have their doctor bag, and they have their injectables and away they go. But I always tell them, anytime you do anything, it's who is going to do this, it's not going to be you. So my little like saying is who not you.

Okay. So make sure whatever you learn it, understand how to do it inside and out, and then delegate it as quickly as possible. And that's the same thing for any business. It's not specific to a medical business, but often doctors don't see that. They think that it is, oh yeah, you couldn't do that. Well, in this case, you can. Not in all parts of medicine, but you certainly can. There you go. And there you go. Fire yourself first. So that's the whole spin of it.

And it's true. I mean, like I said, I grew up from this thing that you had to always be involved in your businesses. You know, I tried to build empires and was doing quite well at it until 2008. You know, one of our crown jewels was a mortgage company. So I never thought that building a business for 20 years would get wiped out overnight. And pretty much the whole industry at the time. But it did. And, you know industry at the time, but it did. And, you know, you can't, you can't, it's hard to see where things are going and what things are going. But I imagine this field of aesthetic medicine, I mean, give us some stats on this.

How much has this grown in recent years? I know it's got to be huge because, you know, I see everybody doing it. Yeah, no, and a lot of it's diverse right like so if you look at the statistics they come from the american society of plastic surgeons but the fact is most people getting botox or laser procedures are not going to plastic surgeons they're going to medical spas they're going to a family doctor ob-gyn is perfect fit for aesthetics because you have the population right females so out of aesthetics 95 right that's that's the aesthetic side right our women and five percent are men we also do medical weight loss and that started you know we've probably been doing that for 12

years and i'll tell you that is freaking exploded in the last year with Ozempic, Wagovi. Ozempic, yeah. I was going to bring that up. That stuff is like we used to have Fetramine and Saxenda and, you know, the real, they worked, but they had a 5% weight loss success rate. Not really to get excited about. If you're 200 pounds, you lose 5% of your weight and you risk death, right? Like it's not exactly the a good return um now we have ozempic wagovi the semiglutides coming out and uh we're seeing huge and that well you saw you've heard jenny craig right wiped off the map right and now

weight watchers right is buying into another one they are on life support right where are people going now they're going to their family doctors and they're asking them i need to lose weight i've seen the ads on tv does it work and uh we've trained on we've trained on wago v semi-glutide since last year like last And absolutely, we have people that lose 30 pounds in 30 days, but it doesn't work for everyone. I have people who've been on it for six months and have lost three pounds. And when you're spending $1,200 a month on this drug, spending $7,000 to lose three pounds. So is it a silver bullet for everyone? No, but it does work for the majority. And there's new drugs that are going to be FDA approved

probably in the next 90 days that are even better than Ozempic and Wago. So that's pretty exciting. And I imagine that, you know, it's all about what you're putting in your mouth too. So maybe those people who are only losing three pounds or, you know, they're out of McDonald's every day. I don't know.

You know, I'm a big intermittent faster. And the one thing I've learned is if you don't put it in this hole, in your face hole, you're probably going to, you know, do better. Put less in there. And a higher quality of content. You know, I eat salads every day and intermittent fast. But yeah, my friend, I was just talking to a friend the other day and he's diabetic. I think he has type two diabetes. So he's on Ozempic just because I think his doctor put them on to, to regulate his insulin

and sugar. But I, I know the insulin response is like a huge thing, cortisol for losing weight. And, uh, so there you go. Uh, but yeah, it's, that seems to explode it. I mean, I was shocked the, was it last week that Jenny Craig announced they were folding? Yeah. I was like, are you serious? Like the whole thing?

And yeah, and they cited it as a Zen pick. But yeah, it's a burgeoning industry. You know, people want to, people, I think nowadays they want to stay younger looking as they get older. You know, we haven't, you know, people are the millennials, the boomers, you know, everyone's getting older and everyone wants to say, you know we haven't you know people are the millennials the boomers you know everyone's getting older and everyone wants to say you know the fountain of youth and stay youthful forever and so but it's great you have these business models and i think your book you know like we've talked about can apply to entrepreneurs as well uh one thing you talk about in the book is creating dashboards and scorecards to help you and your team identify

what winning looks like. Tease us on a little bit of that, if you would, and how you make that work. Yeah, there's two. So dashboards are for the owner, for you guys. The scorecards are for all your employees. So when they show up for work, they know what's expected of them and what winning looks like. And so when, you know, say for your business, maybe you have accounts receivable person, do they know when they show up that they're expected to close 20 files today?

Right. Like it's very specific. This is what's expected of you. Right. And so if you're a receptionist, you have to answer the phone within three rings. Like this is very clear. So many people, they hire for the role and they say, just go do it. And it's like, okay, I know my job, but you know what? People are inherently lazy. They will do the least amount of work for the most amount of money. So if you don't tell them what's expected of them, then they will do the least. It'll start high and then it'll

slowly go down. So get right off the bat, it's important to have those key numbers. And for the owner, you have your dashboard. So the scorecard numbers are what each department has, and then they kind of feed up into your dashboard. And I know when I turned 50, I can't handle more than three to four things on a list. Otherwise, it's gone. So I have three to five numbers that are key numbers that show the pulse of the future and current status of my business. And every business is a little bit different. And in the book, I go in and how you can identify those for your business as well.

But the first thing is when I put in key numbers for one of my businesses, I saw revenues go up 30% like this because the now the employees knew what was expected. Oh, we need to do this, this and this. It's like, okay, and nobody like it wasn't unattainable. It was just very clear. Now they have a number that they're going to reach. And subconsciously, they just reach that number. So that's a very critical part. And if you want to step away, many times you get back in, right? Like, is it really going? And sometimes people just walk away, I hired a president, and he's going to run everything, and I'm on the golf course, right? I'm up. That never works. Never works, right? Because you all of a sudden, how many companies like

Starbucks, for example, like big organizations have gone to shit once the big guy leaves, right? And they think they're running everything fine, but are they? So you have to have numbers. So even for my companies, I invest in, but I don't operate or I'm not involved in, they have to send me my numbers every Monday morning. And I just scan them, So even for my companies, I invest in, but I don't operate or I'm not involved in. They have to send me numbers every Monday morning. And I just scan them. It takes me five minutes, and I can tell what the pulse is happening. So you just can't abdicate. So it's almost people are back in all the time, and they micromanage,

or they just exit like totally. And I'm like, yeah, you've got to be a bit. So for all my businesses, I work 10 days a month. That's where I'm happy. And I have 20 days that I do whatever I'm doing. I like doing charity work. I volunteer at schools. And I volunteer at the golf course by losing quite a bit. So, you know, I've got that choice to do that. And so for me, that keeps me because I enjoy speaking live. So this is a time you need to do what you enjoy. I don't enjoy setting up the hotel BOS and doing all the detail stuff. So I have a team that does that. And so now's the time for

you to only do what you truly enjoy. And it's almost like you're on vacation. You know, every time you're going on family vacation, you work hard. That is last two days. So I'm like that every week. Like, so when I work for four hours, it's like working for eight or 12 hours. I'm getting, I am so dead laser focused because I know at 3 p.m. I'm done for the rest of the week so i have to get all this week's uh work done in three four hours yeah this is the way to live but like you said you can hire a bad president you can see people but those numbers are everything i mean the numbers are a report that tell you what's going on and and you can see if you know things start dipping off, there's times where Disney just had to bring back their old CEO who said he would never return. And he's got a great pedigree and an amazing book I read. But they had to bring him back in because the CEO wasn't cutting it.

Starbucks as well had to bring in their guy. And there are times we have to return that, you know, one of the mistakes, the biggest mistakes I made in my business was as we got all these different companies, I, I just let my business partner run, uh, one of the companies. And, you know, I was just like, I just kind of went hands off and I figured he saw what I was doing with the other companies. He would do well with it. And he didn't. And, uh, and, uh, that eventually, uh, created a problem and I should have been hands-on going

in there and saying, okay, how are we doing? What are we doing? Uh, you know, and, and mistakes are made. So yeah, you've got to, you got to at least keep your toe in the business, I guess, or your eye on the business as it were. Absolutely. Yeah.

But this is great. You know, uh, it, it's sad that we have so many doctors, you know, leaving the field, but you know, I'm one of those bit so many doctors you know leaving the field but you know i'm one of those biters in the er room that you mentioned before in fact i have to present using my rabies slip when i go into er i'm kidding i don't bite your doctors they're wonderful people no that's never good but uh i'm not a i'm not a fan of going into the doctor's office but uh it's definitely hard it's definitely a hard business and i imagine you know we're dealing with trauma and you know people with colds and covid and and

you know there's a lot of suffering in people and i think doctors are empathetic to that and so they internalize a lot of it you know it's so true right like when you see them out of the practice out of the office like yeah you've got some of the stories you i've heard right and and things that happen like um here's like a psa for your people out your listeners out there do not smoke crack in a porta potty all right because it will blow up um yeah i i chris i just wanted me to make sure so because there's methane gas in those porta potties and if you have a live flame you kind of blow up so you know you've got the guy with 90 burns on his body and you're dealing with that like and then then he smells bad too it smells really bad and then the next person's a three-year-old who was on a bike who was hit by a

automobile right like come on like you please like when you're visiting your and you're waiting in that waiting room we all have our phones like distract yourself because trust me you know they're they have to see so many people and they prefer to have more time with you absolutely right but that's just not how the system's set up you know it's it's unfortunately so yeah give them a break if they want to offer botox in their saturdays let them do it yeah there you go i like that idea and uh it's great that you have the training there anything more we need to talk about what you're doing with uh with uh iapam uh and uh growing uh profitable business over there.

I see a lot of training on here. There's Botox, aesthetic medicine, medical weight management, and then training guides. And what's nice is you not only do that, but you help them run the business and teach them business school stuff. Yeah, no, absolutely. Our newest program is actually the Certified Aesthetic Practitioner Program or Certified Aesthetic Provider Program, CAP. And so here we're looking again, there's

the system, the industry is so kind of everywhere. So we're looking for the doctor when they're not there and they have their team working that they know that their team members have been certified by an international association. So they've done the test, they've gotten their CME education credits, and that they're updating themselves every year. So we're looking at that annual certification. And to be honest, you know, the Botox has been approved for almost 30 years. But in the last two years, there's two competitors, and there's going to be more competitors or even working on a topical Botox that doesn't need a needle, you just put it on your face. So there's going to be there's always so much changes. So there's so much change

in aesthetic medicine and medicine in general, that it really requires an annual checkup. And, you know, we know physicians are not business people. And so when I wrote Fire Yourself First, the book, right, it was really not directed to physicians per se, but anyone who is starting a side gig, you know what, I wish my biggest regret was when I didn't start my business that I didn't start with the object that I was going to get out of the business, right? Because you make different decisions and you make different hires and you may do different activities that you wouldn't have done if that was kind of your end goal, right?

So really, you know, follow those four easy steps, right? So you got to know where you're going, hiring the right people, dashboards and scorecards for everyone as well. So and including you, even if you're the only person. Right. Make sure you have that. But I guarantee you the the hiring guide will help anyone who's, you know, as you hire your first person, your second person or your 40th person, it's going to help you out. Yeah. The more you put into hiring and hiring well, and I recommend multiple interviews. Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting how people get really casual

on the second, third, fourth interview. Like they just, I mean, they're just sitting there in their robes and flip-flops in their underwear by the third or fourth interview, and they'll tell you everything. And like, you're just sitting there going, wow, and flip-flops uh in their underwear by the third or fourth interview and they'll tell you everything and like you're just sitting there going wow this wasn't on your resume you didn't tell us about the prison time and the and the time you smoke a crack in the port-a-potty and and uh you know it's it's just uh it's just amazing to get really relaxed and you really clean out a lot of uh riffraff And I've just, you know, we had so many problems with bad employees.

Stealing, you know, causing problems in the business, being the people who would basically tube everyone out and brain drain everybody. And, you know, they're always the guys who are the negative Nancys who are like, you know, this place sucks, blah, blah, blah. We should all quit, you know. All place sucks, blah, blah, blah, we should all quit, you know. All those people who cause you problems, lawsuits in small claims that, you know, they'll say you did something, you know,

workman's comp claims, you know. Cleaning all that out was just, all we had to do was just extend our hiring practice and go deeper dive, check references, actually. I mean, just do the work and it made all the difference. Anything more you want to tease out in your book before we go? No, I think, you know, I covered a lot of it. So, you know, the book is really to, and even if you've got a job right now and you're looking at moving into a side gig,

you know, it's going to help you if you're been in your business for 20, 30 years, and now you're kind of, it's making money. And you're thinking, what's next, this is going to really help you. You know, one of the other triggers was I was offered 10 million for one of my businesses last summer. And I'm like, you know, if I did that, what would I do? So I was kayaking in the middle of the lake. And I'm like, and I wrote that down. I'm like, I don't know what I would do because I like my business. But everybody's like, you're supposed to sell your business. I'm like, okay, that's the magic multiple. It meets the criteria, but I don't want to. And so that's another reason. That's where I really, you know, I'm just going to

downplay my current role. I'm going to hire some people. And I'm just going to use it kind of like an ATM, right? Because I love it. I don't want to. So obviously, it's worth something. I probably have every month, I have three private equity people asking me, okay, I have somebody to buy your business. I'm like, yeah, it's not for sale.

But now I know my next step when I decide to do the exit, we have got a business that's worth it because I have PE coming to my door asking for it. There you go. And that's part of the title of your book, do what you love. And when you, when you love your business, when you find a business that you love to do, cause I didn't love most of mine. I mean, most of mine, I was an investor and a CEO. And I loved the building and the creativity and all the crack. But I usually didn't like the industry I was in. There was some sort of angle we'd gotten on it. But I don't think I found my first business I loved until I was 52.

And it's the podcast. Because I love talking to intelligent people and and talking about everything um and learning shit uh but you know you do what you love i think that's so important because if you love it and it works and you're not dealing with uh some of the nightmares you can perfect it through the models you've given it makes all the difference in the world thanks jeff for coming on the show we really appreciate it man thank you It was an honor speaking with you as well. Great. And an honor too, to have you on as well. And this is what, you know, I, I had never thought about selling businesses or, or, or building other things. I always thought from this aspect of, of, uh, you know, I just need to run

this thing forever and do all the work. And it was until I got out of that paradigm of mine, I was really locked in and it was, it was sometimes quite miserable. Give us your.com. So people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah. Easiest way.

If you're for the book and my bio and contacting me, fire yourself first.com. So that's fire yourself first.com Books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the usual. It was the number one bestselling book for entrepreneurship on Amazon. So you can pick it up there. And then if you're a physician or healthcare provider, you're looking for aesthetic training, ipam.com, I-A-P-A-M.com and check it out. There you go. There you go. So thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks for tuning in.

Go to goodreads.com for chest, Chris Foss, youtube.com for chest, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com for chest, Chris Foss. And we're on Tik TOK. We're trying to be cool over there.

Not sure if it's working or not, but we're, we're cutting up a piece of the show and trying to put it up. And I don't know, we may be too highbrow for that whole crowd over there, but we're going to figure out a way to be cool somehow. I don't know. There's smart people over there, I'm sure.

Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.