Michael Hyatt
speaker
169 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Feb 2025
Michael Hyatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Winning at work and succeeding at life is a possibility.
If you're less stressed, if you're more healthy, you make better decisions. I do private coaching too, and a lot of my clients, I'll say, what are your hobbies? And the most common answer I get is, well, my work's my hobby. Sorry, that doesn't count. In July of 2000, my boss quit, and the CEO came to me and asked me if I would be the new publisher for that division.
It took us about 18 months, but we went from number 14 in revenue growth to number one. All of this came at some expense to me because I was working nights and weekends. My wife said, you're never home. I feel like a single mom. That was like a gut kick.
First of all...
Thank you so much for having me, Ilana. It's a privilege.
Well, it's funny because I was a music major initially, but it didn't take me long to figure out that I probably wasn't going to make a living at that because the competition was fierce. And I thought I was good till I got to college. And then I was around people that were brilliant. And so I thought, plus I need something practical.
So I decided to major in philosophy, which of course isn't practical at all. But I think the great thing that I got from that was that it taught me how to think and got me really acquainted with sort of the Western canon of literature and was really helpful and has really served me well in my career.
That actually occurred when I was 18. I didn't grow up in a particularly faith-based home, but I was drawn to it when I was about 18 and right before I went into college. And so I took a couple of theology courses and I said, I really think that what I need to understand is first principles and worldviews and delve into philosophy. So that's what I did.
And I contemplated going to seminary after that. I thought about going to law school after that, but I got really intrigued by business and I love entrepreneurialism and business. So that's what I did. Even in college, I was doing entrepreneurial things and I still, to this day, love business.
Well, it's funny. My boss at Word Publishing in Waco, Texas, took a job at Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville. where I live to this day. And so he invited me to come on as the vice president of marketing.
Now I'd kind of gone back and forth in the early part of my career between marketing and editorial, and I was really good at marketing, but I really loved editorial because I loved shaping ideas and interacting with authors on their ideas. And I, by that point, considered myself to be a bit of a literary midwife. You know, I just loved the idea of helping people give birth to their best ideas.
But it was a hard time at Thomas Nelson Publishers. And after about two years, we were kind of fed up. This was my boss and myself. So we decided, and by the way, we were in our early 30s and we were full of ourselves. We'd seen some early success and we thought, shoot, we could do this better than our boss. So let's just start our own company.
So we left, we started a company and it took off like a rocket ship. We had few New York Times bestsellers and the company grew. Then after about five years, it crashed and burned. And it crashed and burned because we grew faster than our cash flowed in. You know, it's possible to be very successful and still be cash poor.
And we just got to the place where we had so much money tied up in inventory and accounts receivable and author advances that we couldn't keep the lights on. And all of our assets were pledged. So we didn't even have enough money or enough assets to go bankrupt. So we just basically folded up the tent, and we were done. And it was an incredibly devastating experience.
I had people from my church bringing us food, and we were in dire straits. But my business partner and I, which, by the way, is still one of my best friends to this day, we decided that we would divide up everything, and he would stay in the old business so that when vendors called, he could talk to them. We just didn't want to like disappear.
You know, our reputation was important and we felt like we had a responsibility to tell them what happened. I, on the other hand, launched a literary agency with many of the authors that we had been the publishers for, and that began to take off. And once the old business was wound down, then he joined me and we stayed in that literary agency for about six years.
And I really felt like I wanted a team to play on. So I went back to Thomas Nelson.
Well, first of all, I think it's pretty normal for businesses to fail. I hate to say that, but according to the Small Business Association, 80% of all new businesses fail in the first five years. And of the 20% that survive, 80% of those will fail in the next five years. So if you do the math on that, you've only got a 4% chance of existing 10 years from now if you start a business.
And I think the key is resilience. And resilience for me was not a choice. It was a necessity because I had to feed my family. I have now five grown daughters, but at the time, I don't remember how many times I'd have to do the math on this. I think we had all five of them when the business went under. And so I just had to scramble. I mean, I was scared.
I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I knew that I had to do something to put meals on the table and a roof over our head. And so that really drove it. But yeah, that was kind of where we were back in the early 90s.
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