Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn

Have you ever thought or been told you should write a book? Well, Jesse Tevelow, author of Authorpreneur, has self-published three and it’s helped him generate $30,000 per year in passive income, and he seen other part-time authors who are doing even better, earning up to seven figures per year by leveraging their books for their business. In this episode, Jesse will show you how to become a successful authorpreneur. So if you feel ready to write your book, but you’ve held back because you’ve thought, “How am I going to turn this into a business or even a lifestyle,” This episode is for you. Get Jesse’s new book Authorpreneur on Amazon. Find out more at Launch Team.   Jesse Tevelow: My first book, I was reinventing myself. I was leaving my startup that I’d worked at for a long time, and I was figuring out what I was going to do next, what I was going to do with my life. So I’m sure, for anyone listening, you’ve probably been there. You’ve probably been in that situation where you’re at a crossroads, you’re not sure what you’re doing, it’s not completely clear. What really tipped me off was a conversation I had with one of my advisors and mentors who had been helping me with the company that I was working on before. I told him, “Hey, I’ve always wanted to write a book.” It was just one of those burning desires, and I know a lot of people have that desire. I think there are some stats on this, like four out of every five people feel like they have a book in them, and I thought I had a story to tell. He said, “Yeah. I love it. You should write this book.” I took the leap, and I did it. That was my first journey into publishing and also into the world of marketing in terms of the publishing space. I made a ton of mistakes and there were lots of problems with what I did. I wasted a ton of money. It went down all the rabbit holes and fell into all the pitfalls and all that good stuff. But I made it to the other side and the book ended up eventually doing well. It eventually hit number one in multiple categories and then I started getting invitations to go onto podcasts, like this one, and all this stuff started happening. I realized there was something really special happening. By the way, I didn’t use a traditional publisher. I didn’t go through the traditional route. I was going to actually go through Brad’s publishing company, which ended up not working. So his publishing company folded. I was like, “Okay. That’s not an option anymore.” There are a lot of twists and turns, but I saw the power of a book. That was like the kernel of what has driven most the majority of the past five years of my life, really. So yeah, that was the beginnings of this whole thing, and I can go deeper if you want. We can go in further to what happened next, but that was really the start of everything that I’ve done for what has become my third book, Authorpreneur. Jesse Tevelow’s The Connection Algorithm Charlie Hoehn: What was The Connection Algorithm about — what was the story that you really wanted to tell?

Why do some people succeed in corporate careers while others crash and burn? What if you had a guide book for navigating corporate life? Vishal Agarwal (@vishalsvoice), author of Give to Get, knows the ropes for business leaders who are faced with the high stakes complexities of corporate culture. Over the course of his 24-year career, he navigated all facets of corporate life. Vishal worked his way up from an intern to a senior deals partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Then he was a Global Top 500 Senior Leader for General Electric before he became Chairman and CEO of his own private investment firm Full Circle Africa. In this episode, we talk about the challenges that business leaders face from overcoming new guy’s syndrome to finding your why and even overcoming burnout.   Get Vishal’s new book Give to Get on Amazon. Find out more at Give to Get. Vishal Agarwal: So I began my career with PwC as I told the tale in my book, and then later on in my career I had this opportunity to move to Africa to take on an interesting role. And what I found in those early days, early months, shook me off a little. While there was a new environment around me, forget what was maybe outside the office building in terms of geography and assimilation and culture and all of that. I think it was not so much that, but it was what was happening inside the office, what was happening with team dynamics. I was being treated as a leader who just came in to a new team. It was how I felt lonely or how I felt confused. How I felt isolated, I felt that I didn’t have support of peers or senior folks like partners in the firm that had actually brought me to the region in to the firm. I felt that some of you didn’t have the trust of the team. Those early weeks and days and months were what I worked so hard to try and navigate beyond. And those memories served me well in late years and as I got a chance to mentor peers and other senior leaders and young managers that came in to our business. Those were the early years that I think are the formative years of this book, if you will. The New Person Syndrome Charlie Hoehn: Does a particular moment or instance stand out to you where you really felt that way? Vishal Agarwal: Yeah, I remember going to work out sessions with teams and not feeling involved enough. I recall not feeling trusted enough. I might have felt isolated, then I might have felt not leveraged sufficiently, then I might have felt not being given enough of attention then. But when I reflected on it, it was declared to me that it was more trust than anything else. It was more relationship than anything else. It was more not having enough of time with each other that drove those moments of not feeling as one with the team. Charlie Hoehn: And, you call this new guy’s syndrome, right? Vishal Agarwal: Yes, new person syndrome. Leaders come in to businesses all the time, a CEO and a great role gets lateral opportunity and moves from Coca-Cola to Hewlett-Packard or from General Electric to Siemens and feels that with all these years of experience I can do bigger and brighter things. In my book I give the example of my friend Denny who went from a US investment bank to a ...

If you are a woman who has ever struggled with gaining or losing weight or you’re just someone who’s felt trapped by food then you’ve probably heard of Geneen’s work (@GeneenRoth). She’s written several books on this topic, including the number one New York Times bestseller, Women, Food, and God. Geneen’s work has been endorsed by Oprah, Eckart Tolle, and her book was on the bestseller list for several months and sold more than a million copies. We talk about her newest book, This Messy Magnificent Life, and what it’s like to achieve success as an author, but this conversation is really about freeing ourselves from our own personal prisons. Geneen and I explore some of our deepest and most painful beliefs, the effects of hidden traumas and the social pressures that shape our confidence and our relationships. This episode is your spiritual dose of self-love for this week so get ready to be more in touch with your life. Get Geneen’s new book This Messy Magnificent Life on Amazon. Learn more at GeneenRoth.com.   Geneen Roth: It was an evening in my late 20s, I was sitting on the floor of the book depot bookstore in Mill Valley. This is before the internet. I was looking for books that gave you the easiest way to kill yourself. There was no book called “How to Kill Yourself in Five Easy Lessons.” I was desperate and suicidal and filled with self-loathing, disgust. I don’t know if I can use any stronger word to describe how I felt about myself and the despair of continuing to live the way I had been living which was in such acrimonious, warring relationship with my body, the size of my thighs, my appetite, the feeling of being utterly out of control with food. I’d tried for the past 17 years at that moment to get it under control. Since I had been 11 and started my first diet. Every single one of those years, every single day of every single week and month and year, I believed that if I could only fix this thing with food then everything else that was wrong in my life would be right. Equal and Opposite Geneen Roth: I tried every diet there was. I did have some favorites, and my most favorite diet was the All Brown Diet. It was of my own making. For three weeks, I ate nothing but diet cream soda, drank coffee. You can’t really call this eating, of course. Coffee, diet cream soda, and cigarettes. That was my diet for three weeks. There was a one hot fudge sundae a day diet. In those days, it was calories, thinking if I just ate the calories in a hot fudge sundae but didn’t eat breakfast and didn’t eat dinner, I’d be fine. I’d been addicted to diet pills, amphetamines, for four years. I had pretty much stopped sleeping. With every single pound lost, I gained twice as much in poundage on my body. I used to say there was an equal and opposite binge. That was the law of the universe. I never went on a diet after which I didn’t binge. Never. Of course, I got better and better at restricting myself. I was anorexic for a while, I limited myself to 150 calories a day for a year and a half. I jogged four miles a day. It was sheer willpower. I weighed 82 pounds, and then after that, I couldn’t stand it one more second. Not one more second. I went on a binge to end all binges. By that I mean,

Today’s episode is with Tofe Evans, author of Everyone Has a Plan Until Shit Hits the Fan. Shit can happen to anyone, whether it’s a life-threatening situation, a death in the family or a business gone bust. In this episode, Tofe will give you the tools to mentally prepare yourself to weather any storm. And Tofe should know: the endurance career he embarked on literally saved his life. He believes in rising above your personal turmoil by conquering your own mind. By the end of this episode, you’ll be better prepared for whatever life throws at you. Get Tofe’s new book Everyone Has a Plan Until Shit Hits the Fan on Amazon. Find out more at Tofe-Evans.com. Tofe Evans: This started about four years ago. I was struggling really badly with like depression and anxiety. The thing was, I was never that kind of person. Throughout 2014, I came throughout a bunch of setbacks with relationships, with friendships, with business stuff going on, with finances. It was just a conglomerate of things. It ended up becoming too much for me. I wasn’t diagnosed with depression or anxiety or anything like that. It became like a tidal wave and it just kind of took over me. When I look at it now, the incidents, everything that led up to that really heavy point, they’re not even that bad. It’s just what I did with my thinking. It just felt like I just didn’t see the point in it. There’s 7.6 billion people, however many people there were at the time, and I realized I probably don’t even need to be here. It really did just become too much and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was coping with it with hard drugs and alcohol and self-harm and prescribed medication. I was seeing different doctors around the world, and I didn’t know how to fix it. Discovering Mental Health Tofe Evans: As a male, I was essentially masking. I didn’t like who I was as a person anymore, so I thought, I would just write myself off. Looking at it now, it was probably like when you put Mentos in a coke bottle. That was me. A volcano, it’s going to erupt any second. It’s very chaotic for everyone around you. I was living in an egocentric paradigm, thinking I had it worse than everyone else. Depression is kind of like you’re living too far in the past and anxiety’s being too far in the future. When they’re working together, it’s a pretty terrible feeling. I remember Googling ways to kill myself and like I can attest to this, I don’t know of the exact same sites are up. Some of the sites are like big, bold letters going, “PLEASE DO NOT GO THROUGH WITH THIS.” I can’t even touch the screen anyway because it’s just saturated with tears. I thought these moments only ever happened to rock stars, but it’s actually very prevalent in the world. There is so much stigma attached to it that, at the time, I had no idea what mental health was. Shifting Focus Charlie Hoehn: What is the stigma like in Australia? Tofe Evans: Yeah, it’s actually just as strong. For me, it’s slowly becoming a bit of a household name, trying to make more awareness. In the mining industry, it is Insane. I think the stats are like 20 men commit suicide a week. With mental illness in men, they don’t want to open up. It’s like it’s been passed down like folklore. Don’t do it, don’t cry, all this kind of stuff.

Today’s episode is with Joseph Kopser and Bret Boyd, co-authors of Catalyst. Change is happening faster and bigger than ever before. How can your organization adapt to these forces when the environment is evolving so rapidly? Joseph and Bret have a framework to guide leaders into the future. They are co-founders of the Grayline Group, a firm dedicated to disruptive change management. Bret is a strategy and corporate development executive with a ton of experience in defense, energy, technology and the finance sectors. Joseph graduated from West Point and served in the US army and is also the former CEO and co-founder of RideScout, which was acquired by Car2Go. In this episode, they explain how change works, why disruption is happening so quickly, how to adapt, and what is required of our leaders to succeed in the future. Get Joseph and Bret’s new book Catalyst on Amazon. Find out more at Grayline Group. The Beginnings of Catalyst Charlie Hoehn: How did it begin for you? Joseph Kopser: It really began when I was a captain in the United States Army. As the company commander, I thought everything that we were doing and working on in the Army had to do with tanks and guns and blowing stuff up. I got a visit one day in the motor pool from three different black tinted window, fifteen-passenger vans, and then out pops a group of people. This young woman, probably in her thirties, about my age, was in the lead of this V-shaped formation, and on the wings of this V were all of these generals and colonels. That’s when I realized that she was from the Senate Armed Service Committee. She was the staff that was coming to visit Fort Hood to see what was going on. It really made me understand that the world is so big in terms of the intersection between the big decisions and the big budgets in Congress and the big decisions made in the military. Despite all of them, it came down to people and how she was being treated on her trip. If she walked away with a favorable impression of Fort Hood, that would probably be good for Fort Hood’s future. But if for some reason she had a bad trip, it would be bad. No matter how well-intended everybody is in terms of the making sure that they have the right strategy, it’s the human side of the execution that’s hard to replace. Charlie Hoehn: When did it start for you Bret? Bret Boyd: One of the things that I find is very interesting here is you know, I don’t care who you are, a student, business professional, soldier, sailor, airman, et cetera. It’s impossible to watch the news right now and not really seize the idea that things are happening. There is just so much change that’s going on in the world right now, it’s really a remarkable time to be alive. I guess the epiphany for me here was to take that realization or that constant awareness that we see in the media. If you extrapolate this forward here, there is a lot of fundamental conditions that we’ve built businesses and social structures and government institutions on top of, and it seems like they’re changing. That realization led to a little bit deeper discovery to say, “Well, you can’t just generally look at these things and get enough comfort with what to do about it. You really have to dive in and identify what’s important.

Do you suffer from painful digestion issues such as Crohn’s disease? A while back, Unique Hammond, author of Your Taste Buds Are A**holes thought she was healthy until Crohn’s disease left her struggling to sleep, eat, or even drink water. In this episode, you’ll hear Unique’s journey from a 90 pound patient to successfully overcoming Crohn’s. You will learn: * Why gut issues and Crohn’s disease are increasingly common in Western diets * Unique’s journey with Crohn’s, the diets she tested, and the one that worked * Basic changes you can make to improve your own gut health [Just a quick note, we use “adult” language throughout the conversation. Yes, the word shit comes up a lot.] Get Unique’s new book Your Tastebuds Are A**holes on Amazon. Find out more at You’re Great.   Crohn’s was an interesting journey because the diagnosis didn’t happen for a while. I just had transient stomach problems that I would blame on a bad meal or just having too much alcohol or whatever it was. I didn’t really own that these transient stomach issues were part of potentially a bigger story. I just kept ignoring them because they weren’t big enough to take me down. They were just big enough to annoy me and make me feel just not great. I saw a lot of natural doctors if you will, homeopaths and a Chinese medicine doctor who is also a really dear friend of mine. He treated me for a while. He was like, “You’re not getting better, and you need to give a name to this thing.” I really didn’t want to. I was kind of scared of what it was becoming. But slowly, surely, I couldn’t smell food cooking, I couldn’t smell people’s cologne, I couldn’t smell a car passing by, the gas. Slowly, the pleasure in life started to just fade away. Everything was revolving around my stomach, which was really annoying. I ultimately took his advice. I saw a gastroenterologist, and that was horrible. We started running tests. Blood came back healthy. I wasn’t in any great need to get a colonoscopy or an endoscopy, so we ran a bunch of other tests, and everything kept coming back negative. I needed to have them look inside me, and I was really scared of that and against it. Just on principle, I don’t want cameras inside of me. Down my throat and other places. So I fought it. I kept trying to do it naturally, but ultimately, the idea of giving it a name and trying to find out what it was, was the route I had to take. It was scary. I canceled that appointment probably three times. The GI was like “So, are we actually going to do this?” Chasing a Diagnosis Charlie Hoehn: Were you scared of getting really bad news, or something else? Unique Hammond: I was scared of getting news of something that I couldn’t reverse or heal. I was scared of living on medication my entire life. I was scared of having to have an operation. I was scared, yeah. I was really scared. I didn’t want to live an altered life, I wanted the life I always knew—carefree and living on my own whim. I probably put too much into it now looking back, but at the time I was really sick. I was losing weight, I was nauseous all the time, I was in pain 24 hours a day at that point. All of the diets that I was trying for stomach issues, none of them were really working.

Michele Hart is a licensed clinical social worker and the co-author of Mental Health Emergencies. More people are suffering from mental health illnesses than ever before and with so much stigmatization surrounding mental health – many of us find it difficult to speak out. Today we talk about how to help the people that you love and that you work when they’re facing mental health emergencies like depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders and suicide. We discuss the importance of self-care, listening and how to be an acute listener for those in need. Get Michele Hart’s new book Mental Health Emergencies on Amazon. Find out more at Penguin Random House. Charlie Hoehn: How did you get started? Michele Hart: My journey started about 25 years ago. I’ve always worked with youth, and my sister in law had a traumatic experience happen in her life at the time. She was kidnapped, and we went through FBI and many agencies. This was a year-long process. As I was moving through the process, I realized that the only person really that helped was a social worker. That’s when I made the determination that I wanted to be a social worker. I wanted to be that person that could break through all of the red tape. Break down all of the barriers and give people access, get information, while helping them and supporting them emotionally. She did that for me and my family, and it turned out okay and everything worked out. But the only thing that stuck with me was the social worker that helped me through this. From that point on, I started college and a bachelor’s degree and couldn’t get enough of social work. That led me to my career for the last 25 years. Charlie: What is your specialization? Michele: I’m a licensed clinical social worker and I have been an LCSW for the past 18 years. I am employed as a middle school social worker doing therapy in groups in the school. We’ve expanded this mental health framework into the schools have decided this is needed within their own buildings. I have the opportunity and the privilege to be that person. Writing Mental Health Emergencies Charlie Hoehn: How did you come up with the book’s idea? Michele Hart: The beginning of the Mental Health Emergencies is an amazing story that brought Nick to the place where he felt this book was needed. Nick is not a clinician by trade. He was a QMHA and working as a business director at the agency I worked at. QMHA is a qualified mental health associate, which is somebody who is not really licensed to do therapy. However, he found himself time and time again being in the first responder position because clinicians are busy in a small world community. That’s where I met Nick, and through his experience (which is the opening story in the book), he decided that this is something everybody needs to know. When he approached me about the book, I agreed wholeheartedly. This is the question that’s always brought to me and I find myself answering it over and over again, so why not put this in written form and let people have it. The idea was Nick’s, and I jumped right on board and offered the clinical perspective. I helped with firming up from a clinician’s point of view, how can we help people.

How many startups fail? Just take a guess. The answer is 90%. Having a better idea or a bigger market or just working harder isn’t enough. What every entrepreneur needs is a fast track to the wisdom and experience gained from building successful companies and that’s what today’s episode—with Will Herman and Raj Bhargava, coauthors of The Startup Playbook—is all about. Will Herman is an angel investor with more than 60 investments in startup and a five-time founder. Raj Bhargava is the co-founder and CEO of JumpCloud, the first directory as a service. He’s also a 10-time entrepreneur with six exits including two IPO’s in four trade sales. In this episode, Will and Raj share their years of knowledge to help you keep your company out of the startup graveyard.   Get Will & Raj’s new book Startup Playbook on Amazon. Find out more at Startup-Playbook.com.   Will Herman: After a couple of years, I quit college to join a startup. I actually got hired over the summer after my sophomore year and decided to stay there because the startup environment was so cool and way better than college. My parents were frustrated, they were angry, but you know, I just had to do my thing. Well, the culture was a complete meritocracy. I was probably the eighth or ninth employee. It was the wild west. The biggest gunslinger wrote the most code, got the most done, got the biggest reward, got the most visibility. Where school was this incredibly long feedback loop, startups tend to be very short feedback loops—which is good and bad. In this case, all I remember is the good part. Until it became all bad. About 18 months in, the company slammed into a wall and failed. I had no idea why, even though I was one of eight or nine people, it wasn’t even clear that the founders of the company knew why it had crashed and burned. We ran out of money, we didn’t have enough equipment, we couldn’t get customers, we didn’t have a unique enough idea, we weren’t differentiated enough, we didn’t have enough marketing spent…Still to this day, it’s unclear to me what happened. But one day I had a fun, exciting job and the next day I didn’t. Lay off is a very nice term for what happened. They said, “Doors are closing at 1:00, get the crap out of your desk.” Basically all anyone understood was we didn’t have any more money and it was all over and that’s it. That happens to a lot of startups, exactly like that. They’re almost blindsided by their failure. That started my learning process about what was important, what needs to be watched. I can’t say I learned a lot that first time, just that I learned that things going well is not a reason to believe they will continue to go well. Of course, the worst part is I had to go back to my parents who said, “Yeah, we told you this was going to happen.” Charlie Hoehn: It was a small scene, a startup, and you were doing startups way before they were a thing. Raj, did you go through something similar? Raj Bhargava: Yeah, absolutely. I started my first company while I was still in school. Will and I met there actually, when he became one of the first investors. But all the issues that you can think of around building that first company, I experienced. What’s the right idea? How do you build the team?

Do you feel like you have a hundred things you need to get done today? If you’re a business leader, the answer is yes. You have to make decisions, fix problems, manage money. Rob Dube, author of donothing, has found that he’s become a much more effective leader by learning to do nothing. His company has seen the results. Rob is the president and cofounder of image one which was ranked on the 2017 list of Forbes Small Giants, America’s best small companies. In today’s episode, you’ll learn: * How Rob’s instinct for entrepreneurship took him from lollipops to ink cartridges to authorship * How one can go from refusing meditation, to trying it, to embracing silent retreats * The key to enjoying a perfectly imperfect meditation routine   Watch for Rob’s new book Do Nothing on Amazon. Find out more at DoNothingBook.com. . Rob Dube: With a pretty active imagination and being independent, I often had to figure things out on my own. As I got older, I think it was around 14 years old, I moved in with my father. He was in sales, traveled a good deal so my independence was even greater, through my high school years. During that time, my best friend Joe Pearlman and I decided to start a business. We started selling these Blow-pop lollipops out of our locker. We would buy them for a nickel from Joel’s uncle who owned a drug store. Then we’d sell them for a quarter out of our locker. Kids at our high school were literally lined up and down the hallway. Picture that, because this is exactly what it was to buy these Blow-pops. We would skip lunch, go right to our lockers, and be selling these things throughout our lunch period. By the end of the lunch period, we would have baggies full of quarters. We didn’t want to leave them in our locker because it seemed like it was a zillion dollars at the time, so we’d be walking around school with these baggies of quarters bulging out of our pockets. Charlie Hoehn: Were you making like 10, 20 bucks a day? Rob Dube: Probably, I would love to know the actual amount actually. It’s really funny. Upon reflection, an entrepreneurial bug had bit us, so we had all sorts of different businesses through high school and college. Around the time we were getting ready to graduate college, Joel was reading an entrepreneurial magazine, and in the back of it, there was a small classified ad. That ad was for budding entrepreneurs to learn how to take these toner cartridges, which were new at the time and went into these new machines called laser printers, about 26, 27 years ago. It was a very new product, and you would learn how to recycle them or remanufacture them. We went to Austin, Texas, with a loan from each of our parents, and we got trained on how to remanufacture these toner cartridges. Then we came back and started this business out of our basement and grew it into a small office. When our parents kicked us out, we really got going. The challenge that we had early on was Joel and I are not very handy. When we would remanufacture these cartridges, 50% of the time, they would not work. We would get customers, who would be excited that they were saving money, and I’m sure they were equally excited that they were supporting these two young kids out of college. But unfortunately, the products weren’t working. We had to learn very early on that we had to take amazing care of our cus...

Are you a small business owner and still deciding whether you’ll sign that new lease or not? By listening to this episode, Tyler Cauble, the author of Open for Business, is an expert in estate market that can help you. Since he was 21 years old, Tyler Cauble has already been an expert on the Nashville commercial real estate market. Currently, he is the Vice President of Commercial Leasing at Vastland Realty Group who is committed to helping out business owners understand the market so that they can grow their business. Whether you’re looking for a new storefront or location for your business or you simply need to get out of your garage, this episode is for you. In this episode, Tyler Cauble provides meaningful insights such as: * Common realty pitfalls of small business owner * Why representation is vital when looking to lease for a business * A quick look at how realty fits into a financial plan Get Tyler’s new book Open for Business on Amazon. Find out more at TylerCauble.com. Tyler Cauble: My parents got divorced when I was in high school. I very quickly learned that if I was going to go out there and make something happen for myself, it wasn’t going to happen. As soon as I graduated, I got a job in direct sales. I did that for about fifteen months and really enjoyed it, then realized from the training and my experience there that I was really good at sales and relating to people. So I decided to continue that. I moved back to Nashville, got involved with my grandfather’s construction company, then got a call one day from my former step-dad asking if I wanted to come do real estate for him. After I thought about it for a bit, I said yes. I really just started working on leasing our in-house properties that he owned. They were always smaller shops, 3,000 square feet and less, which meant that I was really dealing with small business owners. That was when I came to realize that small business owners really have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to leasing commercial real estate. A lot of people don’t even know that commercial brokers exist. I had seen a lot of people get into trouble because they weren’t negotiating their lease, and every lease is negotiable. Every point in every lease is negotiable. Representation Protects Your Business Charlie Hoehn: Is it common for people to be taken advantage of? Tyler Cauble: I saw someone spend $100,000 on her build out for a 2,000 square foot space and the contractor didn’t put electrical outlets in the space. He didn’t put overhead lighting in the space. And she was left with the bill. There was nothing that she could do about it. It’s actually very common. These business owners are starting a business because they understand what that business does. If you don’t have proper representation getting into the space, somebody’s going to take advantage of you. Landlords do this for a living, and they have a team put together. Contractors do this for a living, and they have a team put together to make sure that everything goes smoothly and in their favor. For business owners, there was no singular resource for business owners to learn how to go about the process correctly. Charlie Hoehn: Was that a worst case scenario?

Are you an owner of a start-up company and having troubles deciding on hiring the best of the best? Take your time to listen to Jeff Hyman, the author of Recruit Rockstars, who has an expertise in finding the right person to hire for your company. He launched his recruiting career at Heidrick & Struggles and Spencer Stuart, the preeminent global executive search firms. Along the way, Jeff created four companies, backed by $50 million in venture capital. In this episode, you’ll learn:  * The early stages of Jeff Hyman’s career what he learned about hiring wisely. * The big idea behind Recruit Rock Stars. * Predictive DNA of prospective employees and how itis vital to the employer. Get Jeff’s new book Recruit Rockstars on Amazon. Find out more at Recruit Rockstars.   Jeff Hyman is the author of Recruit Rock Stars, and I want to read to you what Dick Castelo, the former CEO of Twitter said about Jeff’s book: “I read this book in one weekend and I loved it. Everybody claims they want to hire A players, but Jeff and his book helps you understand why B players are more damaging to your company than you expect. You can’t build a world-changing company without world-class talent. Ignore Jeff’s wisdom at your peril.” In our conversation, Jeff and I talk about what every growing company needs to know in order to hire the right people. We talk about the common mistakes that most of us make when we’re hiring people such as hiring applicants who remind us of us. Jeff also breaks down all the critical steps in the hiring process and the things that you have to do before you ever post a job listing. Finally, we talk about where, at least 50% of, your company’s hires should be coming from and if they’re not, well, you’re losing out on the best people and you’re wasting a ton of time and energy in the hiring process. See if you can guess what that is.  How Jeff Hyman Started Recruiting Charlie Hoehn: How did you get started in the field of recruitment? Jeff Hyman: As a candidate coming out of business school many years ago at Kellogg. I was very frustrated because I didn’t really have much of an interest in going to work for a big company. I was always more entrepreneurial. Other than large companies, I just didn’t know how to connect with small to mid-sized companies that might be doing something more interesting, more progressive. This was before the days of online recruiting. After I moved to Silicon Valley, I wound up starting one of the first online job boards called Career Central at the time. Even though we were in the business of recruiting, I had no idea what I was doing when it came to recruiting. We were using software to match candidates with companies. But in terms of building my own internal team, I was a 26-year-old kid who thought he knew everything and didn’t know anything. I made every mistake in the book.

Cindy Lo is the founder, owner, and Chief Event Strategist of Red Velvet Events, an international award-winning full service creative events agency. She’s also the author of Behind the Red Velvet Curtain. In this episode, you’ll learn how event planning can be an exciting, rewarding, and incredibly fun career… But, it takes more than just knowing how to throw a great party if you want to make it work. You’ll be getting: * The best advice for professional event planning greatness. * Some of the most amazing stories about celebrities she’s worked. * High-end events that she’s planned along the road. Get Cindy’s book Behind the Red Velvet Curtain on Amazon. Find out more at Red Velvet Events. How Cindy Lo Got Her Start in Event Planning Cindy Lo: I started in high-tech coming right off college, and I love the job. It treated me well, but something was missing and I didn’t quite know what. Unfortunately, 9/11 happened and that kind of fast-forwarded my job track, because at that time I was working for a client actually in New Jersey and New York. They said, “Don’t come back. We need to take a pause, because we’re trying to rebuild our city.” I faced what you would call furlough, essentially, and I was given an opportunity to take time off. I was like, “Oh my gosh! I’ve never had this. What am I going to do?” My natural tendency was to go and apply for jobs, but no one wanted to touch me because of the fact that I had zero hotel experience, and no planning experience. I even offered to do it for free, because I didn’t need the money and I wanted to show them that I was a fast learner. But no one believed me. With my business degree, I was going to create, basically, the experience that they kept saying I was missing. But I was only going to do it for one year, because after all, I did not want to be my own boss. So I did it for a year, and I was having too much fun. It just was natural. I didn’t dread waking up in the morning. The feeling was like, “Wow! I am at my element.” That’s when I knew that I had to continue on with Red Velvet Events. Charlie Hoehn: When did you first feel that “This is so much fun, it doesn’t even feel like work” feeling? Cindy Lo: About 6 months in. But I was still like, “Oh my gosh! I’ve got to make money. I’ve got to figure this out.” Also, probably even at six months in, I was still telling myself, “I need to make sure my resume looks good so that when I reapply for these jobs, they’ll hire me.” So I wasn’t even thinking about carrying on at that point. Enjoying What You Do Charlie Hoehn: What’s first fun event that you remember? Cindy Lo: The first one that I realized that this was me was actually a corporate event. I got it because they knew me from college. So the people hosting the event knew me from college—and they only knew me from college. They didn’t know me in the professional world. So when they gave me this opportunity, it was almost bigger than life. I probably underestimated how much work it was going to be. I went about the course and just trying to figure everything out, how to negotiate with the hotels, how to do registration, how to do all these things, and I would basically present myself as if I knew more and I had more clients than I ...

Today’s episode is with KP Reddy, author of What You Know About Startups Is Wrong. Being an entrepreneur seems like the ultimate American dream, but the startup mythology is filled with urban legends and false expectations that can cause business owners to lose what’s truly important to them. KP learned this the hard way, through more than 25 years of entrepreneurship experience. He has started, grown and sold multiple successful startups, and he’s even been involved in IPOs and acquisitions. By the end of this episode, you’ll know the behind the scenes reality of building a business, and you’ll have a better idea of what it really means to be a top entrepreneur.   Get KP’s new book What You Know About Startups Is Wrong. Find out more at KPReddy.co. KP Reddy: The big turning point for me was in 2009 after the economy was tanking. My startup had been technically bankrupt for six months, but I was fortunate to sell just enough to keep the lights on. I had been approached by an investor, acquirer that wanted to buy the company. My then wife at home wanted to know why I hadn’t gotten a paycheck in five years. I had employees that hadn’t been paid in two months. Investors had caught wind that there was a transaction coming, so they wanted to make sure they were going to have a payday. And I had an acquirer. They were probably the most amazing people I’ve ever run in to—just great, genuine people. They really wanted me to come work for them, and buying my startup was a path for them to do so. We were in final negotiations, and a bunch of things popped up at the end of the deal that were going to kill the deal. The CEO called me and said, “We’re going to take care of you—we will pay off those debts. We want you to have a clean slate so you can be your best for us.” Of course, it’s not going to help the employees, it’s not going to help the investors, all these other people that I made promises to. I had to start making decisions—is it me versus them? Who is this for? I was probably about forty pounds heavier, diabetic, and pumping as much insulin as my body could take just to be healthy. I jumped on a plane to go out to San Francisco to close the deal, and I woke up at the bottom of the bathroom. They were resuscitating me. Hitting Rock Bottom KP Reddy: The flight attendant, fortunately, her son was a diabetic, and she was able to get me back in order. She got me some orange juice and got me back in a good spot. When I landed, walking to the office, I thought, this might happen again, who can I call? I called my lawyer and I basically said, “Hey dude, I think I almost died, I’m not sure. I’m calling you just in case something happens to me, because I kind of feel like if I call anyone else, I’m going to get yelled at.” If I call my wife, she’s not going to be happy. It will open up all kinds of wounds about all the things that I’ve done wrong in my startup, in my life. So I’m literally left calling my attorney in a life and death situation. He basically said, “Dude, I’ll stay on the phone with you until you get to your hotel to make sure you’re okay.” You sit there and you say, “This is where my life has ended up. The only person I can trust is someone that is professionally bound to keep my secrets. I have no one else.”

What if you didn’t have to come in to the office anymore? How would that change your company’s culture? Bryan Miles, author of Virtual Culture and co-CEO of BELAY, knows it changes everything for the better. BELAY has more than 600 team members all working from home remotely. Even though they don’t have a central office, BELAY was awarded the number one spot in Entrepreneur Magazine’s rankings for best company culture. In this episode, you’ll learn why the current way of work could put your company out of business, and how to successfully transition to a virtual culture. Get Bryan’s new book Virtual Culture on Amazon. Find out more at VirtualCultureBook.com. 2010 was an interesting year for me. At the time, I was working for a church construction company—a family owned, 40 year old company—and I was actually on their leadership team. I managed a group of 10 guys that worked to sell construction for churches around the United States. My last name wasn’t the last name of the owner, so I knew that I capped out in my role at that time. I was 35, and I also had two young kids with my wife. They were two and five at the time, and I was easily traveling six to eight flights a week. I was exhausted. As much as I loved what I did and the contribution I had made over 17 years working there, I hated it and just felt like I needed to make a change. I started reading a random book, but it really had an impact on me—Made in America. It’s Sam Walton’s story about how he created Walmart. What hit me is that he started Walmart in his late 30s. I thought, man, if I just did something, at least I could say I got it started before Sam Walton. I didn’t have any illusions of having the behemoth that Walmart is, but I just thought, I really want to try being an entrepreneur. It had always been in my belly to do something like that. A Family Endeavor Bryan Miles: That spring, my wife was working for a rather large company—a Fortune 10 called McKesson. She had been there for 10 years as a project manager, and I think she started to see that her next move there as well was going to be lateral. As I shared with her my heart to maybe take a risk, surprisingly, she said, I want to do this with you. At the time, she really valued stability. We had young kids, and the notion of risk connected to starting to something is a big conversation. I thought, “Wow, that type of talent wants to come work with me?” I just didn’t assume that she was going to jump ship with me. And I felt like we also needed her income. By summer time, we had to figure this out. We needed to do some due diligence. We need to ask some really smart people that we know are successful in business, have sold businesses and done well for themselves. Keep in mind, this was 2010, on the end of the great recession. Unemployment’s in the high nines. This is not the time that people naturally would say, “Yeah, go leave your nice job and start something.” But our advisors said it made sense. One in particular, I was in a marina in Seattle and I’d flown to see him. Within 15 minutes of sitting down, he said, “You need to leave your company and start this company right now.”

Today, we have a special conversation with Azul Terronez. Our chat was originally recorded for Azul’s podcast, Born to Write. In our conversation, we talk a lot about the hurdles that aspiring authors face. The biggest of these might just be fear, and we discuss just how debilitating this can be. Azul believes that overcoming these fears is essential in accessing the vulnerable and valuable part of our humanity and sharing our ideas with the world. We hope that through our conversation those wanting to write — but struggling with some of these obstacles — might find solace in solidarity, and see the commonality in our experiences. Key Takeaways From This Episode: * How Charlie and Azul got into writing * The value of writing as a platform for empathy and communion. * Personal perspective and how individual experience is expertise. * Dealing with negative feedback and the fear of rejection. Find Azul’s books on Amazon. Listen to more on Born to Write. Why Charlie Got into Writing Azul Terronez: Did you always have a sense that you wanted to be a writer or that you had it in you? Charlie Hoehn: I never wanted to be a writer. I still don’t necessarily want to be a writer. It’s more of a necessity and the fastest way to create. I think of myself as an ideas person, and it’s the best way to materialize those ideas and give them shape. The fastest, most efficient way to do it is through writing. Whether that’s putting out a thoughtful article or an essay of some sort or a collection of some ideas that I see taking shape in a different industry, or even if it’s just writing a comedy sketch that I end up filming with my friends. Writing clarifies your thinking and allows you to communicate ideas with another individual. I think even faster and more efficiently than when speaking. Azul Terronez: What’s the story underneath? Because that’s the part that interests me the most. Charlie Hoehn: That’s how we’re hardwired. You want to tell a story and you want to hear a story, you don’t want to hear somebody’s advice. Speaking is not as efficient because you have all these obstacles that you’re having to deal with in real time. You’re having to deal with your own internal emotional state while you’re presenting your ideas. You have to be good at judging your audience and making sure that they’re on board with you while you’re communicating. It’s way harder. But when you’re writing, all you have to do is communicate the idea or the story well, and then whoever reads it is listening to you. They’re actually giving more weight to whatever it is that you’re saying. It’s building empathy and compassion for people through writing. Relating to Storytelling Azule Terronez: I think that’s a little bit about what writing does, right? You step through the lens of other people. Charlie Hoehn: I got in a heated argument fairly recently, because someone said fiction books are kind of a waste of time. How could you possibly say that? Fiction is not only exercising the imagination—every movie basically comes from a fiction book first, and all of us love fiction movies. More importantly, you are still gaining compassion, empathy, a new perspective on the world.