Ari Meisel

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126 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Ari Meisel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford · The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel · 29 Apr 2025 podcast

that's when we can look at outsourcing or delegating to some sort of specialist or generalist. But if you do it before that, which a lot of people do, they try to outsource first because it's this like hands off knee jerk reaction. I don't want to touch this. That's where we get into problems.

Yeah. So I think the actual average across all industries of productive work in a nine to five kind of position is like an hour and 12 minutes. productive work.

I mean, it's kind of like 80-20, right? Another really funny statistic is that in the average nonfiction book, there's like 12 pages of actual content. Everything else is just bluff. So we see that all the time. And it's one of the reasons that oftentimes when people say to me that they have no time or they don't have enough time, typically what I find is that they actually have too much time.

And they're just not using it correctly at all. I have no idea. I love when someone it's, I mean, I'm kind of a jerk about this, I think, but some, when people are like, oh, I'm so busy. How have you been? Oh, I'm just so busy. I always like to be like, what are you busy with? And like nine times out of 10, it's like, uh, busy. I'm just busy. It's like with what are you, you're not busy.

Exactly. Uh, so. people have too much time. There's an unpopular opinion, sometimes too much money. Like that's where these restrictions are really what breed innovation, as you said, mother invention or necessity of the mother of all invention restrictions are the mother of innovation as far as I'm concerned.

No, so the first one was Less Doing, More Living, and then I wrote another version of it called The Art of Less Doing, and then I think the third one was Idea to Execution. Okay.

Yeah, so this was 2015, August of 2015. a very large virtual assistant company at the time called Zirtual, which I think is still around in a different form than I thought. But they very suddenly went out of business. They basically ran out of capital. And I guess, you know, requirement-wise, they had to let everybody know, like, hey, we can't pay you, so you got to go home.

So it was like a Sunday night. No, probably like a Wednesday night. Excuse me. They sent out this email. And I had a lot of clients that were using Zirtual, and I had worked with several of the VAs. And so the whole day, the next day I'm getting calls from both sides being like VA's who needed jobs and people who were like, I just lost my assistant. Like my life's over.

And I was connecting different people like throughout the day. And that night I had planned on having dinner with a friend of mine and he and I had dinner and he was, uh, he was working in finance, but he was, he had working on a productivity app. It was kind of in space. So we're talking about it and about the, about Zortral.

And he was like, why don't you just start your own VA company at this point? And I was like, I don't want to do that. I was like, let's do it. He's going, well, my, you know, my wife's pregnant with our fourth child. Like things are good. And he was like, what if we do it together? And I was like, okay, but we got to do it quickly because I'm going away, you know, next week with my family.

And I guess we'll try it. So we launched two days later, a VA company with, with basically two VAs, which was me and my partner. And I took 10 of my coaching clients and brought them into it. And we did everything with free tools and we sort of built everything from the ground up in like a less doing image in a way. And three months later we were operating comfortably.

We had like three or four assistants and maybe 20 or 30 clients. And then we spoke at this, no, sorry. We had like 20 clients and we spoke at an event at Joe Polish's event, actually, you know, Joe Polish, right. And got 70 clients from that one presentation and quadrupled the business overnight, essentially, and then grew from there.

So what we wanted to do, the idea was to document month by month what we were doing to build the business because we never put a penny into the company. We did a million dollars the first year. We had 183 people working for us in 17 time zones. And I think at the end of the first year, we had like 300 or 400 clients and everything was being managed with Trello.

and amazing automations that my partner built coded custom stuff so uh that was a big turning point there because at that point not only uh up until then i've been doing a lot of work coaching wise with individuals about their individual issues but at that point not only were we growing our own business but we were starting to service a lot of small business owners so we were just seeing a lot more issues and challenges and i was doing a weekly webinar series for them for all our clients so uh

it was a lot of like on the job learning in a way.

Yeah. So the latest book is actually called on productivity, which is like my sort of, Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no. It was second to next or last year, but then I did this sort of like opus at the end. But the thing that I think may have also had some contribution there is, so I've always been really interested in history.

And in particular, I got the, I found this like passion around the world's oldest companies. So there are hundreds of companies in operation today that have been around for hundreds of years. And there are a few dozen companies that have been operating continuously for over a thousand years. And there are about eight traits that these companies tend to share that make them last so long.

And a lot of those, I think in some ways have informed the things that I've written about and what really makes a company that is a thing unto itself, as opposed to just a CEO who owns their own job.

So one of them is that they rarely, if ever, took outside investment, which I think is really interesting. And that wasn't a protective thing. It was more just like they wanted to grow under their own steam. So there were no unicorns per se that grew. Well, no, that's not true, actually. There are many of them, but they didn't like. They weren't overnight successes, you know, by any means.

And again, so like there is a hotel in Japan that started in 702. There is a restaurant in Austria that started in 806 that is still running. You know, think about the restaurant business. There are beer gardens. There are banks because banks used to be private institutions. All sorts of really crazy stuff and everything in between. But so...

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