From Prison to CEO: How Fleet Maull Built a Scalable Business Through Radical Responsibility

What if the biggest breakthrough in your business had nothing to do with strategy… and everything to do with YOU?

In this episode of Small Business Pivots, Michael sits down with Fleet Maull — founder of HeartMind Institute, Inc. 5000 entrepreneur, and former federal inmate turned business leader — to unpack one of the most powerful transformations you’ll hear.

From spending 14.5 years in prison to building a high-growth company, Fleet shares how radical ownership, nervous system regulation, and CEO thinking changed everything.

We dive deep into:

•  Why most business owners stay stuck as operators 
•  How to shift from working IN your business → working ON it
•  The real reason you feel overwhelmed (and how to fix it) 
•  Why AI is forcing every business owner to pivot right now 
•  How to build systems that increase business value and scalability 
•  The power of daily routines and “habit stacking” for peak performance 
•  Why regulating your nervous system may be your biggest competitive advantage 

If you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure what the next move is… this episode will challenge how you think about business and leadership.

Key Takeaways:

•  The difference between operator vs CEO mindset
•  Why systems (SOPs) are critical for scaling 
•  How to “buy back your time” as a business owner 
•  The hidden cost of doing everything yourself 
•  Why personal growth = business growth 
•  How AI is reshaping business models across industries

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:02

If you're a business owner feeling stuck, overwhelmed, and ready to grow, you're in the right place. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, where founders share insights, stories, and pivots that lead to sustainable growth. I'm your host, Michael D. Morrison, a business coach helping business owners get unstuck and grow. All right, welcome to Small Business Pivots, where we have special guests from around the world. And if you've listened to the show before, you know that no one, no one can introduce themselves like the business owner. So I let you, Fleet, my friend, introduce yourself, share us a story of how you got into the adulting world so we can kind of catch up on where you are today.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Great. Well,

Building HeartMind During Lockdowns

SPEAKER_00 0:49

thanks for having me, Michael. Uh so my name is Fleet Mall, and uh I'm the founder and CEO of HeartMind, HeartMind Institute, which is an online transformational education platform. And uh it really grew out of my consulting work. I had been a business consultant, management consultant for about 20 years before the pandemic. And uh I had been wanting to uh move some of my work online. I developed some online courses and was trying to figure out the world of digital marketing uh a bit back then. Uh and um uh uh then launched our first online summit uh with the beginning of the lockdowns. I was sitting here and the lockdowns were emerging in the spring of 2020, this time of the year in 2020, and um I felt like we really need to catalyze a conversation about resilience, both individual and collective resilience, uh given what we're facing. And I'd been involved in other people's summits as a guest. I'd helped other people organize summits, I'd helped them recruit speakers for summits because I have a pretty large network, but I had never done one myself. So I said to my wife, I think we should do a summit on resilience. She goes, You're crazy, you're already too busy. And uh, but then she came back in about 10 minutes later. I was sitting in my living room chair and uh she walked back in and said, No, I think you're right. I think we should do it. And so I contacted my uh business partner and said, uh, we're doing our summit on resilience. She goes, Okay. So the three of us put together the summit in five weeks, and it was successful. We enrolled about I don't know, 35,000 people in it. It's a free summit, and then you you market the lifetime access package, so it's a kind of free what they call a freemium model. And um uh and I had uh been trying to launch this online business, sort of online courses and so forth for the previous year, and it you know, probably lost 20,000, but it was just I just considered it an investment to get things going. Um was working with my business partner, a minority partner in the business who was a lot techier than I was, and so we were trying to figure out how to do it together. And but then with this summer, we were out of debt and off and running. We went from having a an email list of about 4,000 to having a an email list of I guess closer to 40,000. So maybe I think that summit had around 35,000, 36,000 registrants. And uh we're kind of off and running. So that was in the spring of 2020, and uh we grew very quickly through the pandemic. It was a very good time for us. People had time on their hands, and uh online summits were not new, but but a little bit new. And the idea you could see all these incredible thought leaders and in one space, and uh um so we did very well for a number of years, and uh, but AI has changed all that. I think there's been a bit of fatigue in the summit model. It's a little bit have been there, done that now. There's been so many summits. Um, and then AI has really commodified information and knowledge. So, like a lot of people, I'm facing a lot of business challenges right now. We we hit the Inc. 5000 list two years in a row uh in 2024 and 2025 as the the five the list of the 5,000 uh fastest growing companies in the U.S. And they base that on three years revenue growth. So I made it for our revenue growth from 21, 22, and 23, and then again our revenue growth 22, 23, and 24. And we'll actually be named again this August, uh uh although our business has shrunk uh due to due to the changes in the industry with AI. But we still had enough over three years, enough growth that we'll make it for the third time.

Prison Years And A New Path

SPEAKER_00 4:42

And um prior to uh that 20 years of management and business consulting, I spent uh 14 and a half years uh in a federal prison. Uh my I'm a baby boomer, you can tell uh by the age, and uh, although I you don't see the hair anymore, but um uh at any rate, um uh I had kind of a mixed life. I was always a seeker, always interested in the mind. I majored in psychology, um uh got a master's degree, did a very intensive three-year clinical training program. Um, but I was also very involved in the counterculture, the whole drug section, rock and roll, and all the rest of it. And before I could untangle all that, I earned my way into uh a federal prison sentence for uh for drug trafficking. And um something I deeply regret the impact my involvement had had on anybody that that that impacted, and uh certainly a lot of regrets over the fact that I went to uh prison when my son was nine years old. So I have a lot of regrets about it, and uh at the same time I do feel good about what I did while I was there. I, you know, that was a huge wake-up call for me, and I finally got rid of all the negativity and craziness out of my life and focused on how I could serve that community where I was for those 14 and a half years and uh and also leave a better legacy for my son than this his dad went to prison or even died in a prison because I had no surety that I would survive my time. And um, so uh that became my my, you know, I'm uh I've been involved in uh meditation for over 50 years now. And so that became kind of my monastery time ashram time, very concentrated. Not that a prison is anything like a monastery ashram, other than the fact that you get three huts and a cot, you know, and you all wear kind of the same clothes. But it's a very corrosive, negative, violent environment. And um I feel fortunate to have survived it. But I really focused on transformation there, and so I was able to uh it was a very powerful time in my life, and uh taking all the good I'd received and doing something good with it, really transforming myself in the process, and uh created two national organizations while I was in prison and uh created all kinds of innovative programming there in that in that Maxim Security Federal Prison, which was in southwest Missouri. And uh out of the coming out of there, I uh have had nothing but opportunity ever since I got out. I got out in 1999 and have traveled the world teaching and consulting and doing all kinds of things. And uh I needed a job when I got out, so I kind of hung out my shingle as a as a management business consultant. How being in prison for 14 years qualifies for that, I don't know, but but I managed to do it. Took me about six months to get my first paying client, but I negotiated a $5,000 a month retainer with that first client. I kept that client for about two and a half years, so I was kind of off and running. And um and uh I I generally did long-term engagement with small family-owned businesses, anywhere from uh anywhere from 25 to uh 300 employees, anywhere from a couple of million to 25 million a year. That was kind of my niche doing long-term turnarounds and businesses that were, you know, up against real challenges of no longer being scalable or they hadn't innovated, the business had changed, the market had changed, and they were still being run the way they've been run for quite a while. And and so coming in and just completely re-engineering the business for so they could have another couple of decades of profitable growth and scalability, right? So that was that was kind of the niche I was in. And uh, but I was kind of realizing I didn't want to keep trading hours for dollars forever. I wanted to be able to scale up a business more, so that's why I got interested in the online education space and uh made that uh pivot right at the beginning of the pandemic. And uh and so bit in that space now. And now, of course, we're facing the challenges of we know that the need we address is still very much there. Um people, if anything more, people are experiencing, you know, our we're in a wellness, personal evolution, healing trauma. Our work integrates current science, neuroscience, and trauma healing science with ancestral wisdom, contemplative wisdom, the meditation traditions, east and west. So we're pretty evidence-based, and um and we're meeting uh a need that's not going away anytime soon. People have a lot of trauma in their backgrounds, people experience a lot of anxiety and overwhelm. Uh, the pace of change today is exacerbating that anxiety and overwhelm people are experiencing. Uh, the uncertainty around AI and climate change and the ongoing conflict in the world, and the the cultural polarization and divisiveness that we're experiencing. So, so people definitely need what we're offering, but how they're gonna want to uh access that is the big question now because um online summits is not what people are doing. Um pre-recorded content is not so much what they're doing. So um finding the next scalable business model for us is the big challenge right now, which we're working really hard at. And uh I have no doubt we're gonna succeed sooner or later. But uh, and you know, we've still got a fair amount of momentum. It's not like our business disappeared, but it certainly uh top of tunnel is down considerably in the last year and a half. So uh so we're having to pivot and facing the the challenges that all uh business owners in your audience face. You know, I uh in the first year of the pandemic, maybe the first two years, I practically uh like I had an ATM in my living room. I mean, it was very summits were pretty profitable and and there was a lot of interest, people had time to spend on online education. I knew it wouldn't last forever, though. I knew and I was always trying to think about what the next thing was, but AI has changed things so quickly and so dramatically that trying to figure out what that next thing is is pretty tough for all of us right now, regardless of what industry we're in. I mean, some industries are less impacted, but many industries are impacted by AI. And all business owners, I don't care what industry you're in, you you need to implement AI operationally to become more efficient and more profitable. Whether you know AI is gonna be part of your product or whether you can use AI to enhance your products is another question. That depends on the industry you're in. But but almost anybody is gonna have to uh bring AI into their marketing to remain competitive and profitable. So we're in a very interesting time to be in business and uh a lot of challenges, but there's always a lot of opportunities. So that's kind of my backstory, and that's where I am today.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Fantastic.

Operator To CEO Mindset Shift

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Well, I know I often say that until I change, nothing around me changes. So I know with a lot of business owners kind of referencing some of your points that there's got to be a transformation. So the things that we were doing yesterday we can't keep doing today. But I know with business owners that we work with, it's not just a flip of the switch. So can you share with us some insights on on your experience of how to encourage or get that transformation going? Because me just saying I want to be this or do that, it didn't happen like that, right? It has to start from within. And I think a lot of people get caught up in where do I even start for that transformation to start, and then we can talk business.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Yeah, so uh I grew up in a family that had a family business. So I've I've got a little bit of that in my genes. It wasn't the industry or the business I wanted to go into, but good, solid family-owned business in the Midwest in the food manufacturing industry. And um and then uh I've also been directing a nonprofit for some 30 that I started in prison. Um, so I've had managerial responsibility for that oversight, and I do a lot of fundraising and I and I do deliver some training. I don't run it day-to-day. We have an executive director that runs it day-to-day. And it's a small team of uh uh, you know, four, five, six in the core team usually, but uh then we have a lot of facilitators and people that deliver our programs around. So so you know, I've had the experience of having financial oversight and some management responsibility for that for a long time. Uh but when when HeartMind started to take off, and and then, you know, I was as a as a business consultant, I was basically a solopreneur running my business management consulting business. Um, but then when HeartMind started to take off, when our summit started to take off in 2020, uh during the pandemic, you know, uh I was interested in thinking, well, I'm gonna keep this small. I don't want to build some great big company that I gotta manage and have a lot of employees, and you know, I want to keep this small and lean. And and uh uh but it really started to take off. So I thought, well, okay, it seems like this thing wants to grow. So um maybe I should open my mind a bit and see where this wants to go, right? And uh and then I started really thinking about, okay, if this thing is gonna grow, how do I um develop the mindset of a true CEO rather than the mindset of an operator, right? Uh uh because at this point in my life, uh, you know, I don't want to be shackled to something that's just gonna, you know, keep me in overwhelm all the time. So I was really working in that direction to build a good team and build myself out of operations uh as steadily and as quickly as I could. Um and I was on that path very much, and I think that's a critical path for business owners. And there's so many different things you have to get over to be able to do that. Uh you have to learn systems, you have to systematize everything in your business, you need SOP and playbook, everything. But you also have to be willing to turn things over to people. And so many of us suffer from the idea nobody will do it as well as I do. It's easier to just get in my and do it myself than to teach somebody to do it. And those things will keep us stuck forever. And I think even I used to say, even in the nonprofit I was directing, I used to be stuck in this model of being the expert with many helpers. And I think I had some inbuilt fears even in terms of hiring and working with people as smart as I am or smarter than I am, because then, you know, I'm gonna have to share power. They're gonna compete with me. I'm gonna, you know, so I think I had some inbuilt fears around that of giving up a certain level of control. I knew I had to get over that, so I worked very hard to get over that. And so I was really clearly on that path. We have great team members and we have some very smart people on our team. And I was, you know, gradually uh getting more and more out of operations and more and more into a true CEO role, which could eventually, you know, eventually if the business continue to grow, you hire a CEO and become a board chair or just an owner investor and enjoy the freedom that uh the financial success that business would create. However, the change I was describing with AI has caused me to jump back in. Now, I'm not jumping back in and running everything. We have a team, right? Um, but I am having to be very involved in uh uh strategically, tactically, you know, managing and trying to help figure out how we're gonna move this forward. So I'm very much the driver in doing that. But I I think um there are there are so many things uh, you know, we're in the personal evolution space, and we're both B2C, and we've been venturing into B2B and B2B to C, and we have an entrepreneurship training now, and uh we have an entrepreneurship summit coming up in July. Um and so a lot of what we've been teaching for years in the world of wellness and personal evolution and so forth really boils down to being able to regulate our own nervous system.

Nervous System Regulation For Leaders

SPEAKER_00 16:08

If we can regulate our own nervous system, we can regulate our own emotions, which means we can regulate our decisions, our choices, our behaviors, and we can really be in the driver's seat of our own life. So I think that's one of the key transformational shifts for people who want to become really effective leaders, really effective founder CEOs, uh, is to be able to manage themselves to begin with. And anybody's successful is able to do it to a degree, but there is such a span of how sophisticated that can become. Because we all have this nervous system and a core part of it called the autonomic nervous system that has these two branches, one up regulates. We need that for alertness, but then it goes beyond that into stress and overwhelm and panic and acting out, frustration, all kinds of issues. And then we have the other parasympathetic branch, which down regulates the rest and digest relaxation response. They're both going all the time. There's an optimal balance of the two for anything we're doing. But if we don't take ownership for regulating that ourselves, well, guess who's regulating it? Everybody but us, right? We all live at the interface between our childhood conditioning, whatever that was, and for most of us it was a mixed bag, and then the world around us. Now, if our childhood conditioning was absolutely benevolent and ideal, and we lived in a bubble of benevolence currently, then maybe we could be in there just kind of mechanically and mindlessly, habitually, not really taking ownership or regulating ourselves, and maybe it would work out. But that's not the situation. For the vast majority of us, our childhood is a mixed bag. The world around us is certainly not benevolent, getting more challenging all the time. So we're in there kind of just getting shoved around in this reactive way, and we may or may not be even all that aware of that. And we may think I'm a free-thinking adult making free-thinking adult decisions all day long, but actually I'm really habitual. We're very mechanical. Stimulus A1 comes in, I respond with response B2 just about every time. So, how do we take ownership of that, really start living at choice and develop what I call self-leadership? It starts with being able to manage our own nervous system. And we can do that through very simple breathwork techniques, uh, through posture, through presence, through voice. And we can we can really learn, we can develop awareness of the internal landscape of the body so we sense just subtle shifts. So before we kind of get hijacked emotionally or get all stressed out or start making poor choices or interact with an employee, a team member, or a vendor or a customer in a way that doesn't lead to good results, before those kind of things happen, we're going to pick up on subtle shifts, subtle tensions, subtle fears, subtle frustrations, and be able to make the adjustment before it ever gets into any kind of acting out that would lead to uh less than ideal results for us. So that's that's really part of the core work, I think, for really effective leaders. And if you look at some of the, you know, the some of the really well-known billionaires out there in the world that have been incredibly successful, the majority of them have some kind of inner practice. They have some kind of body-mind inner practice to keep their mindset healthy, to keep their body healthy, to keep themselves with optimal energy. So there's all kinds of things we can do to learn self-regulation, to learn how to take care of ourselves so we can, you know, with diet and exercise and our mindset and relationships so that we can have the optimal energy for leading our companies. Um, and so there's all that work, which is really what we've been teaching anyway on the personal evolution side. And then more on the purely business side, it's really learning how do you move from that role of being an operator wearing a lot of hats to gradually becoming a true CEO and then moving towards having real options for exiting. Where if you want to just exit your board or you want to exit and just be an investor, where you're actually going to sell your company someday, but how do you get your company where you're maximizing value and it's not dependent on you as a founder operator? So those are kind of the two realms of the mindset shifts, I think, of the mindset of taking ownership for managing ourselves and not blaming, shifting away from the blame game where we've all been enculturated to continually blame everything we're experiencing on someone or something out there. And of course, we can find things to blame, but in doing so, we just give away all our power because we can't control any of that. The only thing we have any real influence over is this, and that's can be challenging enough, right? So learning to make that shift from blame to ownership, and then learning skills for self-management and keeping ourselves in the optimal health and mindset, optimal energy, and then learning the the frameworks and the skills of how to actually move myself from being a founder operator to being a true founder CEO and beyond.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

You're listening to Small Business Pivots with Michael

Daily Routine And Habit Stacking

SPEAKER_01 20:49

D. Morrison. If you're ready to get your business unstuck and grow, let's chat. Schedule your free session at michaeldmorrison.com. Now back to the show. How often, or what is the frequency, or maybe it's just a lifetime of learning, do you work on these skills? So is it like a daily 30-minute practice?

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Daily practice. So I spend the first two hours of every day uh working on myself and very self-care. So I I wake up the minute I wake up, my my wife usually gets up and heads for the shower. I um make my bed and then lay back down on the bed and start doing some yoga stretching to keep my back in good shape. So I do a whole lot of intensive breath work and yoga stretching. Then I sit on the side of my bed and do more breath work and do a lot of visualization and affirmation practices and um and and and then uh eventually I'm down on the floor, do some more yoga stretching, 50 push ups, and so it's a whole routine. It's a I'm stacking up different body mind practices that are designed to get me into really a completely optimal state. There's a gratitude practice. Built in so that I'm in an optimal physiological and mindset state of incredible, incredibly positive, uh, grateful, and eager to take on the day and well energized. So I spend an hour doing that. Uh, and uh while my wife's out walking a dog and making tea, and then I meet my wife in our meditation room for an hour to an hour and a half of meditation. So I spend anywhere from two to two and a half hours all about fine-tuning my body-mind system for optimal performance for the day. So I do that every day. Um, and it's a daily practice. Now, you don't necessarily have to do two and a half hours, but most successful people have some kind of morning routine. Um, you know, Tony Robbins calls it his hour of power. Um, you know, you have Robin Sharmer with the 5 a.m. club. Uh you I have my rise methodology. You have uh Hell Elrod has his miracle morning, right? Most most successful people uh have something where they're doing some kind of body-mind things, they're getting them into an optimal state, probably doing a little reading, a little learning, you know, feeding their mind with some creative ideas and new ideas to get yourself in the optimal state uh to then go into your day. So I I think having some kind of morning routine is really essential. And then you need an evening routine as well to where you begin to wind down so you can get a good night's sleep and set yourself up to make sure you get up in the morning and do your morning routine, right? So I think having a clear uh morning and evening routine is what's going to allow you to be in the optimal state on a daily basis to lead your company and grow your business.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Do you keep the same routine or do you freshen it up from time to time so it doesn't get redundant?

SPEAKER_00 23:40

I I tweak it a little bit. I mean, I, you know, you know, there's so much um good literature out there on on how to develop positive habits. Uh so we have B BJ BJ Fogg's uh Tiny Habits, we have uh uh James Clear's book, we have others. And so, you know, you can build little habits, and then once you have one established, you link on another and then another, and it's called habit stacking, right? And pretty soon that that set of little habits is a routine, right? So that hour I talked about that I do uh before I take my shower, before the meditation, that first hour, uh, you know, I've so deeply ingrained that it's almost hard for me to deviate from it. So when I want to make a change in it, it requires a little effort, you know. But I do. I tweak it, I spend a little more time doing this, or I slip in a new practice, I tweak it a little bit here and there uh to keep it fresh, and also because I'm continually experimenting with what is the optimal practice stack, right? Stacking these practices. Um but it does get ingrained and you feel the momentum of it. Like even the last thing I do is I hit the floor and do uh uh some more yoga stretches and then 50 push-ups, and then I do a downward dog, and then I get up and head for my shower. Uh, it's hard for me not to do that 50 push-ups, even though part of my body doesn't want to do it, but my mind, it's hard, you know, it's it's it's so ingrained for me to go do that, right? So the there's real value in getting um habits really deeply ingrained, so it becomes a routine and you really feel compelled to do it. But then yeah, I think it is helpful to tweak it and freshen it up. But you don't want to be all over the place with it because then it never really gets ingrained. And then you're gonna do it sometimes, you won't do it sometimes. You start feeling, well, I don't feel that well today, or I didn't get enough sleep, or oh, I got this business meeting early. You'll start coming up with all those excuses to not do it, right? So that's why it's really helpful to have a really well-developed routine that's based up on all these tiny habits that you really built in over time.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

It really is amazing because I do a similar uh exercise. I I I get up an hour and a half before our family starts rustling around. And the days that for whatever reason, which are very few, but from time to time, I'm just in a rush and I gotta get some other things done. I have the worst day that day.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

And and I'm not even thinking about, oh, I missed my time. It's just like you said, you get into that habit and it gets your mind ready for the day.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Absolutely. And I I've got a uh a book that'll hopefully maybe come out still this year, if not early next year, on radical self-leadership, and which I'll there'll be a lot of material in that book for people, and there'll be a morning routine and an evening routine. But in the meantime, I'm really happy to recommend my friend Hel Elrod's book, Miracle Morning, is a great book to get you going with a morning routine if you don't already have one.

Systems And SOPs To Scale

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Great, great. So moving into the business uh realm here. Business owners just don't seem to have enough time to do the things they need to do. And I think you and I know what we would uh often say, but trying to get them to understand, yes, you must have this and you must have this, but where can they find the time to do that effectively? How much how many systems do you feel like a company needs? Do they just systemize the whole thing? So kind of let's move into the ops of a business and what a business owner really needs to be focusing on so they're not wasting.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Well, the more systematized your business is, the more valuable it is. Because then uh there's a lot more of a plug-and-play quality. Uh you bring a new higher end, you can bring them right into that position. Everything they need to do is all laid out already. And so if somebody is looking to buy your business someday, and the whole business is completely systematized, it's all in playbooks and SOPs, and uh, you know, that just increases the value tremendously, but it also makes the business a lot easier to run. So I I'm very happy that we focused on that very intensely, and we use those playbooks. Now you have to keep updating them and make them living things, not just something that's on a shelf somewhere, right? But it it's really key and really important. And um and so that can really make the whole uh hiring and onboarding process so much easier. Uh and also when you have systems, that's how you discover inefficiencies. Because when you're continually looking at your systems, and when you have your employees working from playbooks, then they may be working with a playbook somebody else developed, and they say, you know, there's an easier way to do this. I can cut a couple steps here, right? And so when you have if you don't have anything documented, you don't have it systemized, uh then you're all you're just re-invetting the wheel all the time. You don't really know where the inefficiencies are, right? So you really you really need to systematize in that way. Also, today in the age of AI, when you get things really um completely documented really clearly with SOPs or playbooks, now you can say, okay, what can we have AI do, right? Because here's this whole set of tasks. We can probably train uh a GBT or a bot or something like that to do this, right? Uh so that that makes that transition into AI-ifying some of your operations uh much easier the more the more systematized it is. In terms of you know, not having enough time in a day, that really is about that uh move from being an operator wearing too many hats into being a true leader, visionary, CEO. And um, there's another great book I'll recommend, Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time. So um, you know, you may think I I need to do this or I can't afford to hire somebody to do it, but you have to really, what's your time worth? And there's a way to calculate that. There's really a way to calculate what your time's worth. Well, a business owner, your your time is, I'm sure it's it's uh it's beyond $100 an hour somewhere. It's $100, $150, $200, $250, it might be $500 an hour, might be $1,000 an hour, right? So if there's something you could do, if let let's just let's just put it to and so let's say you're at $200 an hour. Well, if you can take something you're currently doing and get somebody to do it for $40 or $50 an hour, you saved yourself a lot of time, you saved yourself a lot of money, right? So uh that idea of buying back your time uh is really critical. And there's so many business owners that do stuff that they don't need to do, that they could hire somebody to do who would do it much more cheaply. And maybe maybe at least as well. I mean, Dan Martell talks about, you know, that thing, nobody will do it as well as I do. Well, if you can get people to do it, and we're perfectionists generally as founders, CEOs, right? And we're we're focused on our core skill set. So if you can get somebody to do what you're really good at at least 80% as well, that's golden. But often you can get people to do stuff better than you can do it, right? And uh so uh, you know, even like um there's so many things like people we think we should do, like uh how many business owners out there cut their own grass? Well, my dad cut his grass, my grandfather cut his grass. I mean, a real man or person, whatever cuts their grass or does this or does that. Well, not really. I mean, if you're cutting your grass, you could be spending time on visioning for your business. And I mean, unless you unless you just, it's really your main hobby is sitting on that that riding mower, you got a big place or something. But other than that, you know, there's people out there that need work, they that do that for a living, landscapers and lawn people, and they need that work. You can give them that work, and you can take that time and focus it on uh really high value things that you could be doing to move your business forward. So if if you're in that situation where I never have enough time, probably you're not organizing your time well, and you're doing too many things you could hire someone else to do, probably for a much lower comp rate of compensation.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Absolutely. I heard a business coach tell an entrepreneur that continue to work in the business, you are the most expensive employee in this entire building. You know, because the to your mention and your reference of you know, most business owners pay themselves well, those that are paying themselves, but they pay themselves well. And it's like, would you hire someone for that dollar amount? No, you can go hire 10 people that equals your salary to do these minimal jobs uh that that you're trying to do yourself.

SPEAKER_00 32:15

Well, even so, even some really significant jobs as well. Um it's just it's all a matter of scale, it's all relative. But you know, is that that saying, you know, a distinction between working in your business or working on your business, which maybe sound a little cliche, but it's really a critical distinction. Uh any any time we spend working in the business, we're not working on the business. And working on the business is where you stay ahead of the game and you stay up with or ahead of your competition, and you can look at the changes that are coming down the road. Uh, and that's more important than it's ever been, right? Because if you're just going along working in your business hoping you do the the checks will just keep coming in and the customers will keep buying, uh, and you got blinders on, you're you're headed for failure because everything is changing today. And and even with you know, the the businesses that are the most AI proof, probably, you know, that uh one example is home services industries, right? Where some you can't get AI to come in and fix your plumbing, right? But all your marketing and your building and all that's got to be done by AI, or you're not gonna be competitive and profitable.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Yep. Yeah, I've got a business owner right now that they just kind of refuse to go into this automation AI world, but then they're wondering why their competitors can charge a third less than they are. And I'm like, because they don't have as many employees. You know, they're doing things, they're using systems and automations and things. You mentioned a key point, and I this is asked often from business owners. So I'd like to hear your take on that. What are what are some examples of working in the business versus working on? Because I hear business owners all the time say, I I don't know if there's enough to work on the business. What would I even do? What does that even look like? Can you share some examples?

Buying Back Time With Delegation

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Yeah, well, I spent a couple hours this morning uh in dialogue. I've set up in AI, I've set up a strategic business coach for myself in in AI, and I'm constantly tinkering with that and building more of a knowledge base and comparing different AI models. But basically, I have, you know, I have my own coach set up to AI. So I spent a couple hours working on our business, trying to envision the business model that's going to break through uh to continue to provide um education for people about how to deal with anxiety and overwhelm and how to continue to grow and personal growth, personal evolution, and deal with all the challenges of modern life, right? Uh that's those are the needs we address. But the the old way it was done uh is just fading very quickly. The need hasn't gone away. So, what is the new way that people are gonna that we can deliver that uh in a cost-effective way and people are gonna want to consume the information, right? Or have the experiences, the transformational experiences. So I spent two hours um just just working on that this morning. Uh and I do that on a regular basis. So that was two hours I spent working on the business. And if nobody's if nobody's doing that, our I guarantee our business is gonna go go uh go belly up if somebody's not doing that. Uh I've been doing that very steadily, and we've been making lots of innovations. Some of them are starting to pay off, some of them uh we don't know yet, but a lot of the foundational things we've been doing to have the company become more efficient operationally through AI and to begin to hyper-personalize and curate our vast archive of transformational content uh to deliver it to people in more bite-sized chunks and a more personalized, more curative fashion. Those things we're building, uh and um and I think I think we are starting to see some progress there, but all that's coming out of me working on the business, right? So, where where do I work in my business still? Well, uh because the biggest part of our business was online summits, uh, I did do a lot of the interviews, and I still do a lot of the I couldn't do them all. Uh, we have other co-hosts and and content experts that do interviews with other content experts and thought leaders, but I I get to cherry pick the ones I want to do, and it's been great because I've developed a lot of very high-level relationships through that, raised my own brand and my own credibility and so forth. So it's been pay payoff of that. So, but I don't build the summit. Um, I don't, I don't really, you know, but all I do if we're doing, and of course, we're transitioning away from summits into other models, but but uh since summits have been one of our core offerings, initially, like I would generate an idea for a summit. Now our team also generates ideas for summits that go in the hopper. So we land on a on an idea for a summit. I'll do a little work around the vision, uh uh, and then I turn it over. And we now have playbooks and we use AI tools. I used to come, I used to do all the research to find all the speakers, right? And then I have a team that would reach out to, well, initially I reached out to the speakers, but pretty soon we had a team reaching out to speakers, onboarding speakers, uh scheduling interviews and all that. So now I would just come up with the idea, and um, they have tools to go find all the speakers. And then, you know, so I I hand off all that. I'm just a bit I provide a bit of a vision for the summit, and then everything else gets handed off, except I will do interviews. Now it makes sense for me to do a certain number of interviews because um uh it raises my brand and I continue to build strategic relationships with other thought leaders, right? Um, so uh we also do courses and we're doing courses with various thought leaders, uh, and we're doing my courses with me as well. So I'll record content for a course or I'll show up for a live Q and A and things like that. So I still I'm part of the product and I still show up in that way. But other than that, I don't build anything, I don't, I don't design anything, I don't, I don't build graphics or any of that stuff. I don't do the accounting. I don't, I do large-scale, you know, I do financial oversight. I got my eye on the money all the time. You know, we have um uh scorecards in which we're we're tracking everything we need to track in a business at the at the highest level of revenue and profit and and uh lead generation and um uh paid traffic results and things like that. Uh, but then we have very detailed scorecards that other people manage about every aspect of the business's performance. So there's all that going on. So I'm just like high-level financial oversight and then vision, inputting vision. This is into our this is what we're gonna do now, product development. But uh and but most of my time is actually spent on thinking where we're gonna be a year from now, and and what do we need to be doing now so that we can be competitive and successful a year from now and two years from now. That's where I spend most of my time.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

I love it. I love it. So I know you've probably piqued the interest of our listeners. Share a little bit about your uh website, where we can find you, how people can get in touch with you and learn more.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Yeah. So heartmind.co, heartmind.co is heartmindstitute. And there's a vast amount of resources there if you're interested in taking ownership for uh for regulating your own autonomic nervous system, taking ownership for your own wellness, taking ownership for your own state of mind, your your choices and and for your well-being, your happiness, and so forth, to optimize your relationship skills. I mean, we just have the best evidence-based programming in the world that you can access around that. You'll find we have a membership there, a very inexpensive membership, which gives you all access to everything we have, basically. Plus, we have a community manager driving regular activities all the time uh for people that want to dig in and engage more. Um, and you'll find out about our various live events and so forth, all through heartmind.co. People can also go to fleetmall.com, uh, which is uh they can learn more about me there. And if somebody wants to work with me personally uh as an executive coach or something, they could they could go through there. And uh my best known book is uh this book right here um radical responsibility, if you can see that. So people are interested in that book, uh, which is all about really how to take ownership of your life and the results you're creating for yourself, um, they can go to radical responsibilitybook.com. Radical responsibilitybook.com, and then they can buy the book to whatever online bookseller

Working On The Business With AI

SPEAKER_00 40:39

they want, take the uh order number, load it into that website, and they get something like I think it's twelve hundred dollars in free bonuses, right? So if they want to take advantage of that and get the book, that's uh radical responsibilitybook.com. And I'll just mention we do have for business owners, we have an operator to CEO uh online event coming up with some of the top CEOs and and CEO trainers and top marketers in the world. Uh we have that event coming up in July. And um uh and then following that, we'll be launching a three-month uh operator to CEO uh intensive training, which is if you're feel like you're stuck uh working in your business and you'd really like to make that shift to work on your business, become a true CEO, uh, we'll train you to do it. We'll hold your hand all the way along to help get you there.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

Fantastic. And you have a website also, uh uh podcast also.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Yeah, the radical responsibility podcast. And they can find that on both websites, I think. Certainly on fleetmall.com. It's listed there on their podcast. And I I think it's you can access it through our our Heartmind website as well.

SPEAKER_01 41:53

As we wrap up, I always like to ask what is one thing that you would tell a room full of business owners, different industries, different sizes of business that might be applicable to all of them I think the one thing I would say is get really interested in the idea of ownership, taking ownership.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

And and the key distinction in my work is the distinction between ownership and blame. Because a lot of people think if I don't get to blame someone or something out there, I'm gonna have to blame myself, and I don't want to blame myself anymore. But radical responsibility and ownership has nothing to do with blame. It's not about blaming others, it's not about blaming ourselves. We don't we might look at what's my contribution to something, but that's just to learn. So if I learned the way I was doing it wasn't working so well, now I can do it differently. But it's really taking ownership for our own well-being, our health, our state of mind, our mindset, uh, the operation of our nervous system, our choices. So I can really live a choice, be in the driver's seat of my own life, and really, you know, I have nothing to complain about. I live in that place of possibility where whatever's happening in the world, I mean, there's gonna be moments when things are really challenging, oh my, really, you know, but very quickly we rebound and we just okay, this is reality. What can I do? There's a million things we can always do. So living in that place of really radical ownership for your own well-being, the circumstances you find yourself in and what you're doing with it, and living in that place of possibility. So almost all business owners have that to a degree, but are you really applying that at great depth? And are you applying it to every area of your life? Or do you still spend a lot of time complaining and kvetching and not following through, or maybe taking care of the business but not taking care of yourself? Are you succeeding in business at the expense of your health or your relationships? So, this idea of really embracing your entire life through this mindset of radical ownership, and uh it just streams life your life so much. And and and when we really have that perspective, we start letting go of all the things that sort of suck our energy and deplete our energy, and we focus. Focus on the things that keep renewing our energy and keep us excited about our lives and about our businesses and moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 44:07

Thank you, Fleet. You've been a blessing to many and a wealth of information. This is great insights. I appreciate your time and wish you continued success.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Thank you very much, Michael. It's been great to meet you and be on with you.

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Thanks for listening to Small Business Pivots. If you're ready to get unstuck and grow, schedule your free coaching session at MichaeldMorrison.com. On social media, you can find and connect with me using the handle Michael D.Morrison OKC. And if today's episode helped you, subscribe and share it with other business owners. Until next week, keep pivoting.