Thank you, Michael Hyatt – My Big Wins

Bill Campbell, the former Chairman and CEO of Intuit was an executive coach to Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Erich Schmidt, Steve Jobs, and others. The idea of having a coach is not prevalent a lot yet in the business world. I have also read the book Trillion Dollar Coach and was longing to have an executive coach. I experimented with a couple in the past with little success. 

I was listening to Guy Kawasaki’s podcast Remarkable People about a year and a half ago where Michael Hyatt was one of his guests. I immediately visited Michael’s website and found out that he does Executive Coaching. I submitted a request on their website and signed up the next week. It was a great learning experience to be a part of Michael Hyatt’s program – Full Focus Business Accelerator program. However, they have decided to sunset the Business Accelerator program and focus on other key areas of the business.

I was a part of this program for over a year and a half.

What were my Big Wins from the Michael Hyatt Program?

Weekly Calls with Michael Hyatt: Michael’s a great guy. Michael Hyatt recommends not doing many things and doing fewer things. 2-3 Big Wins a Day, a week, a quarter, and so on. One of the big wins for me on being a part of this program is that you have a weekly group chat with Michael Hyatt where Michael discusses a topic for about 30-40 minutes and you can ask him any questions (not just related to the topic he discusses). It is a group setting and you get to ask any question to Michael. I copied this and did something similar within our company (DCKAP) where I host a session once every two weeks, chat on a topic and folks could ask questions. Other teams in our company have also started to do this. I also realize I need to be more regular and consistent with this.

The program also offered one face-to-face interaction every quarter in Nashville, Tennessee. I could not attend every intensive in person because of travel conflicts. However, the ones I attended were great. 

Executive Assistants: I have wanted to have an Executive Assistant for a while. Michael recommended Belay Solutions and I just decided to give them a try. It worked well. If you are looking to get started with a Virtual Assistant, you may consider Belay. The new CEO of Belay Tricia Sciortino was an Executive Assistant to Michael Hyatt. This was a BIG Win for me and it gave me the freedom to experiment with more things.

Kyle Coolbroth: (One-on-One Coach): Each person in the program is assigned a One Coach. My coach was Kyle Coolbroth. I was lucky to work with Kyle and I meet one on one with him twice a month. One of the best things about working with Kyle is that he is a great sounding board, listens to you, and also bounces off great ideas based on what inputs you provide. Kyle is a great listener. He listens, understands your problem or what you are trying to accomplish, and proposes ideas and solutions. It is action-oriented. Thanks, Kyle for all the wisdom and learnings.

Finishing Well: A Year and a Half into the program, we got an email from Michael Hyatt that said that the Company is closing the Business Accelerator program (which is the coaching that I signed up for). I was disappointed. Also, I had just renewed a few months ago into my second year.  I decided not to miss the Monday Weekly call with Michael Hyatt to listen into the rationale of the email. What I ended up getting was a Master Class on Finishing Well. At times certain products or units of businesses may not make sense to continue running and you need to shut it down. This is what Michael Hyatt did. For obvious scale reasons, Michael decided to shut down the program by the end of this year (he gave 4 months notice) so they could focus on the core area of their business. In return he gave loads of content that you could consume for free (usually priced at tens of thousands of dollars ) and also issued a refund for the months you are not attending. Michael did not have to offer a ton of free content, a final face-to-face intensive with the other members of the program (which I missed) and more. We can take great lessons from this and use it when we shut down a product or service.  How do you give more when you shut down a product or service so you finish well and also have return customers? 

One more thing: The best thing I love about Michael Hyatt is, he quotes the sources of his learnings. If we want to, we can go and learn from the source. He recommends great books that he reads. He also quotes and references some of his competitors. We could even go to them if we would like. This says a lot about him.

Thank you Michael Hyatt, Megan Hyatt Miller (loved your sessions too) and the entire team behind the program. While it is sad you are shutting down the Business Accelerator program, I do think it is great for your business so you can focus on bigger things.

Thank you to the wonderful Business Accelerator Community. We learnt from each other as much as we learnt from the program. Thank you for everything Michael Hyatt and Team.