Motivational Keynote speaker providing leadership training, Keynote Presentations, Conflict resolution, and much more - Hugh Culver

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Hugh is a millionaire speaker and trainer. He helps people become experts and takes them through three steps to get there. So I asked all about those steps to get you started! Step Number one is CRITICAL, if you don’t have this you will fail! (I suggest anyone do this step in business!)

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Check out Hugh’s Intensive Workshop October 19th to the 21st in Vancover!

Go to http://www.hughculver.com/experts/ for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I’m Jaime Tardy and today we have Hugh Culver on the show again. I’m really excited to have him back on. He’s a speaker, trainer and author. He wrote the book, if you guys remember last time, called Give Me a Break: The Art of Making Time Work for You. I’m really excited to have him back on. He’s doing a lot of really cool new stuff with training and I know it’s something that you’re going to care about; especially if you want to be an author or a speaker you should be listening to this interview today. So thank you so much for coming back on, Hugh.

HUGH CULVER: Hey Jaime, this is exciting. Thanks for asking me.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, so let’s get into it, because we interviewed back in February I think or earlier this year. Now we’re in September. Probably a lot has changed for you. What sort of things has been going on in your business for the past few months?

HUGH CULVER: It has actually been a big shift. I’ve been in this business of, in the expert community, for about 16 years and for most of those years what I was doing was working for corporations, not for profits and associations and, you know, really enjoying a really good business. I mean I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to grow a really healthy business, have employees, have the big office and then about two years ago I came to this sort of crisis point where actually what happened was my main employee, the woman that sort of kept everything sane for me went on maternity leave and I had a reality check.

I started to rethink well do I really want to keep going down the path that I am going down? Building up this big, we had six employees. Over the last two years and especially this year what I’ve done is I’ve moved into the expert community as someone that now trains, coaches and mentors other experts. What I mean by that is people that are speakers, seminar leaders, authors, coaches and consultants and so what I’ve discovered is no surprise is that there’s a lot of people that want to be in this community.

There’s a lot of people that have really amazing talents and they want to go out there and teach other people. They want to mentor and coach other people but what they lack often is the business skills. What I’ve moved into is a number of programs that help people either by training them or by bringing them into events or bringing them into retreat settings where they can actually accelerate their business growth as an expert.

JAIME TARDY: So tell us about that. What are some of the things that you talk about in those programs that will help us accelerate our growth? Maybe we might not be able to come out right now or haven’t been to your event, tell us a little bit about what they would learn.

HUGH CULVER: So first of all, for a lot of people, they have an excitement around a topic. That’s fantastic. They love what they’re speaking about or what they want to write about. So they are just passionate about dogs or parenting or the environment or leadership or communication. But what I help them to understand is that’s only part of the puzzle. So the fact that you’re passionate about the topic is essential absolutely like you need to be. This is hard work much of the time so you need to be passionate.

But you also need to understand that you need to be speaking to a hungry market. So there has to be a hungry crowd out there. You need to massage and tweak your message so that it actually resonates really loudly with a hungry crowd. For example, you might be fantastic at talking about how to set tables for formal dining and that’s your passion and you say to yourself it’s a niche, like nobody is doing it, it’s amazing, nobody is doing it. Well first of all, that should be your first clue is nobody is doing it because there really isn’t a hungry crowd.

There’s a few people that would love to know that and it’s a nice maybe one chapter in a book on how to social skills or how to cook, but what you need to look at is how can I massage my interest in dining or my interest in creating relationships or my interest in celebrations so that it’s speaking to a hungry crowd. So what I help them to understand is first of all how to get off to a good start because a person could go well down the path of developing a book proposal and developing outlines for workshops and putting up a website, but if they haven’t got that formula figured out first, that’s a big mistake.

The other thing is for them to create a really simple one-page business plan. A lot of people that come into the expert community they are lacking in business skills. Like they work for somebody else, they maybe have been out of the workforce for awhile, but either way, they probably haven’t been an entrepreneur. I help them develop a really simple one-page business plan so they have actually a game plan to work on. The third thing that probably is the most influential for them is I help them design their own calendar in advance. One of the challenges with being an expert is that nobody needs you right away.

You don’t have bureaus calling you up and you don’t have people saying oh I’d love to hire you because you’re not known. So one of the skills I show them is how to actually create your calendar in advance with activities and campaigns that actually will attract that audience. Not only does that help you to gain confidence because now you’re looking at a calendar that has all sorts of activities, but it gives you goals towards and so I show them how to put interviews like you’re doing today. Put those on the calendar. If you want to do some interviews with other experts or you want to interview people that are within your client circle.

I show them how to put campaign on the calendar so they might have a campaign where they’re actually going to promote an event that they want to do in their local town or they might want to have a campaign to promote through some public relations to get to the media. All these things are free and easy to do and the whole idea is to get them thinking in terms of this is a business, not a hobby.

JAIME TARDY: That’s awesome. So we’re going to sort of break that down a little bit, because the first thing that you said is make sure you have a hungry audience. The first thing that came to my head is how. How do you determine whether or not you have a hungry audience and where can you massage that so that way you can find it?

HUGH CULVER: Usually the person that I’m working with has had some experience. So they’ve gone out there and they have been in the food service business or they’ve gone out there and they’ve been an accountant or they’ve been teaching communication skills or stress management skills. So they’ve usually got some experience. What they need to do is they need to then go out and test the market. So they need to go out there before they invest a lot and see if there actually is a hungry crowd.

There’s a big difference. This is why this is such an important question. There is a big difference between a crowd that’s interested and a crowd that’s hungry. An interested crowd says well that’s really nice. That’s a really good thing that you’re doing,

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, good luck with that.

HUGH CULVER: The hungry crowd says, “I’ll give you $20. I’ll give you $40.” It’s a difference between giving a speech and going to the back of the room and having a line up or giving a speech and going to the back of the room and having an empty table all by yourself. The speech might have inspired people and they might have liked it but if they aren’t willing to give you money at the end, then that tells you they aren’t really hungry. Once you’ve tested the market and there’s lots of ways to test the market. One way is to start to send out emails inviting people to take advantage of something and seeing if they respond. So inviting them to join a teleseminar. Inviting them to call for more information. Inviting them to visit your website and to opt in.

If you experiment with different ways of doing that, like you go onto Facebook and very inexpensively you could create an ad on Facebook and just see if people respond or on LinkedIn. If there’s no response, change the message. Change it until you start to find that hungry crowd.

JAIME TARDY: Do you have any examples of this? It’s funny, I’ve heard this so often, actually, from not even necessarily just the speaker industry but from all the millionaires that I’ve interviewed, they are like make sure somebody wants it. You find a pain that someone is willing to pay for and then ask them about it so that way you know exactly what it is and how you can deliver on what they need. So tell me an example, because I’ve done this and I think other people have, where they’ve tested on Facebook and maybe they’re like well maybe my internet marketing skills just aren’t that good and that’s the problem. Not that the message isn’t good but that maybe I’m not really great with Facebook ads. It goes from there. So give me some examples that you’ve had that sort of have worked or haven’t worked.

HUGH CULVER: I’ll give you an example of someone I’m working with right now. This woman is very talented in a very specific area, which is working with local government offices on sustainability campaigns. She helps local governments to launch community awareness programs or green programs and all these sorts of things. Now that’s a great business. She’s done very well but she wants to move on. What I’m helping her to look at is what part of that, because the general public they don’t want to do a sustainability campaign. So that’s really nice but you can’t transfer it over.

But there’s a part of it that probably the general public would like to know about. For example, the general public or the corporate audience would definitely want to know about how to speak to the public. The audience wants to know how to speak to the media. So those are worth money to the corporate audience. Now the general public they want to know how to communicate with their coworkers. Well that’s all apart of communication skills that she’s an expert in. So they want to know.

So if you take what she already does and take chunks of it out, then you start to find what the crowd is interested in. Then what she needs to do is she needs to start to actually brand each one of those topics. So let’s go to the corporate audience. Well let’s say the corporate audience wants to know how to work with the media. Well that would have some appeal but there’s only certain people in the corporate audience that want to work with the media. But the bigger appeal would be how to work with the public.

So now you need to start creating, for example, a keynote title and subtitle or a workshop title and subtitle. Then start to see if that attracts them by hosting a free teleseminar or putting an ad on Facebook. So you take your existing skill set and then you rebrand it for where you think there’s a hungry audience and then go and test it out.

JAIME TARDY: How will she know whether it works or not? What if she has a teleseminar and 10 people sign up, which could be really good like yeah I only had 20 people look at it and 10 people signed up or it could be really bad of going I only had 10 people and 1,000 people saw it.

HUGH CULVER: When she’s doing the teleseminar, she has to pay attention to how they respond. During a speech there will be a certain point when people lean in. When you’re giving a seminar, there’s a certain point when people pick up their pens. It’s not that maybe you hit a homerun first of all, but what you did was you had a chance to watch for reactions. When I am talking to people about time management and what my book is about, that’s great and they’re interested.

But when I, for example, talk about how to create what I call a jumpstart morning so that you are like an athlete preparing for your day and how I go through my routine starting the night before. People lean in because it’s something they haven’t heard about before. They realize that their mornings are kind of chaotic and if I talk about having young kids at home that are school age and they’ll go oh yes.

JAIME TARDY: Like I did in our last interview. I was like oh you have young kids, okay. You have school age kids?

HUGH CULVER: At that point, I need to pay attention. I need to go now that can be a blog. that can be an article. That can be a free download. That can be an audio program. So right there they leaned in. So whatever you do, you shouldn’t assume, because it’s not a slam dunk it’s no good. There’s going to be a piece of it that you can actually pay attention to that will inform you about what to do next. So it’s kind of this iterative process, right? You start out with communication and what you might end up with is communication to teenage kids.

Or you start off with health and wellness and what you end up with is health and wellness for diabetics or health and wellness for people that want to lose weight or health and wellness for people that can never keep a promise – they are procrastinators – so health and wellness for procrastinators. The whole idea is to keep doing research. The beauty, Jaime, quite frankly, the beauty with being in the expert community is, really with a few exceptions, nobody really cares what you did yesterday. I think that we think because they know me for this, I can’t do this.

If you’re a guru and you have 20 books, that might shake people up. It may be pretty weird for Deepak Chopra to start teaching people exercise routines. It just would seem a bit weird and we wouldn’t maybe believe him or for Wayne Dyer to start talking about dating. Like what? Maybe 20 years ago. With a few exceptions, people really don’t care what you did yesterday. I used to teach stress management. I haven’t taught that in 10 years. I just stopped one day because I realized that’s not my expertise. I don’t really care about it. I don’t go to a bookstore and buy books on stress management.

I used to teach sales training. I’m not passionate about that. I think I’m good at it, but I’m not passionate about it. So you just simply say, “Sorry, I don’t do that anymore” and start new. That’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur in this space.

JAIME TARDY: And we’re lucky to just be able to start a new website and target new people and they might not even know your old stuff anyway. We’re really lucky nowadays. So how do we know, right, so once we’re starting to get the inkling of going okay I think this is the path I should go, how far do we need to go before we’re like okay this is it, now I need my one-page business plan?

HUGH CULVER: I think that as soon as you recognize that you’ve got a match between a passion and a hungry crowd, you’re ready to go. If you feel strongly and you’re passionate about it, and I usually ask people could you commit for three years. So could you work on this for three years? Could you read about it, write about, study it and do you think that this crowd will still be there in three years? If it’s a match, you know, usually your intuition will tell you it’s ready to go. But what I do is help people to get more informed so they need to talk to more people and they need to go and test it out and then you’re ready to go.

JAIME TARDY: How many people? Is there a number? I know you probably get this a lot and it’s an annoying question to anybody, right, because there probably is no specific number, but how many people should you talk to that have either said yes or no, in order to know whether or not it works?

HUGH CULVER: If someone wants to commit their career to this, if someone wants to basically tell their family this is what I’m going to be doing for the next three years, the more the better. I mean I would take it seriously if the person said I’ve talked to at least three dozen people who are actually within my market, not my friends and family, but three dozen in my market. Nowadays, that’s not very hard to do. You put on one teleseminar and you have 100 people or 80 people on that call and ask them to email you afterwards. What’s one thing that they learned? Right away, you’ll get fantastic feedback.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. So then, you do the one-page business plan. Now what sort of stuff is in that? Now everybody that’s doing this is probably kind of excited and going okay so I do that as step number one, now what is a one-page business plan. I just want to interject too, because you’re saying the exact same thing. I’ve interviewed 70 millionaires. You are one of them. But it’s funny because this is what they say too. Don’t do and this is not necessarily for speakers, but don’t do a 30-page business plan. Do like a 1, 2-page business plan.

So I think it’s really interesting, so you know the business stuff so well that you’re doing the same stuff but bringing it to the speakers and bringing it to the experts, which we don’t really see that stuff. That’s sort of new to the speaker and expert community. So what would be on that 1-page business plan?

HUGH CULVER: Again, the whole goal is something you’ll actually use. That’s why I call it a page. I used to be a consultant so I know what it’s like to write 50-page reports. It’s horrible to write them and it’s even worse when people don’t read them. So the idea is a one-page so that they’ll actually … so a couple of things. First of all, they should have their position, you know, their unique selling position – their “USP.” So either it’s a one-liner that I can help them to write that basically says what I am all about. Like it’s kind of like, sort of like a mission statement. It’s a thing that I wake up in the morning and I say this is what I am all about.

So mine is to serve people so they can serve others to change the world. So my job is all about serving people to the best of my ability, so they can serve others because I work with leaders and trainers, so that they can change the world and I think that if I’m not living up to that there’s something wrong with what I’m doing. So you have a statement. But then we break it down. So there should be something in there around your whole product development. When I say product development, I’m talking about live and non live. So a lot of people think about product development they think about well I’ve got to create a book or I’ve got to create a CD box or something like that.

Product development is also a speech, it’s a workshop, it’s a blog. It’s anything where you take your intellectual content and you repurpose it. You package it. So there should be some goals around product development. This is where, Jaime, a lot of people, they don’t really understand how many options there are now that are so exciting to do. I mean you can put on regular webinars or interviews and you can record them and suddenly you have a CD or a DVD. People don’t think that way but they need to have goals around product development broken down by the quarter. So every quarter what do we plan to do?

Then, of course, they need to have revenue targets. So those are broken down by the quarter. So four quarters per year over the next year. So what are your revenue targets? But those revenue targets have to be broken down in terms of well I expect to give this many live presentations, this many public events. I expect to sell this many products of this type and I expect to maybe have some other sources like I’ll do some mentoring or coaching or whatever. So you have five or six revenue streams and then you break those down by quarter. So you have product, you have revenue and then the other area would be administration.

So what are my goals as far as the backend? In the expert community, what comes along with it is you better understand a little bit about the backend. So you better understand a little bit about how to set up an office so that you’re effective. You better understand maybe how to use a virtual assistant. You better understand how to set up a few things for backup purposes or you need to set up some basics like you need to be on A Webber or Constant Contact or Mail Chimp and maybe you need to have PayPal accounts and you need to link your opt in on your website so it goes up to Mail Chimp so you can send out an automatic blog.

So there’s going to be goals around that because, for a lot of people, they don’t know how to do that. So once we have, you know, your mixed selling proposition, your USP, then you have your product goals, you have your financial goals and you have your administrative goals. That should be plenty. I mean we can go into a lot more detail but those categories is enough to run a business and it’s enough to give you direction.

JAIME TARDY: So pretty much that plan is really about who you are and then what your goals are for, is it usually for a year? Two, three years? How long do you usually look long term?

HUGH CULVER: So I want people to be thinking three out but they need to have a plan for one year and frankly, one year is probably as much as you can probably predict. I tell people that it’s not going to happen like this.

JAIME TARDY: Good, because it’s not. Things change as you go for sure.

HUGH CULVER: Totally, but get it on paper because, if you don’t, you’ve got nothing to look forward to and you got nothing. It’s all about really directing your energy. If you don’t have anything on the calendar, if you have no goals, then you really have nothing to attract people to. But if you’re excited about the fact that you’re going to put on a teleseminar in three days or three weeks, or you’re really excited because you’ve recorded this CD, then people will be interested. They will want to hear about it.

You’ve got something that you can tell them you’ll be sending to them. That’s why putting these things on the calendar is really important. But of course it won’t happen exactly as you plan. But that’s okay. What you’ll get is a lot more than if you didn’t plan at all.

JAIME TARDY: I agree completely and this is very similar to what I do with my clients and stuff like that too. So you have this calendar and you have your goals. So I am assuming what you do is you take your goals for this next year and you look at your calendar and you try and make sure that the activities you’re doing matches with those goals, is that pretty much the point of the calendar?

HUGH CULVER: Yes, so this is where, unfortunately, this is where a lot of entrepreneurs fall down is in the area of discipline.

JAIME TARDY: I was going to say it’s really easy to write stuff down but it’s kind of hard to actually follow it.

HUGH CULVER: I mean I’ve spent a lot of years working in the corporate arena where we finish the day and there’s eight flip charts and stuff all over the walls and everybody really excited and then nothing happens. So discipline is one of the key ingredients. Now what I mean by that is the ability to stick with it despite the fact that you are not being rewarded. You see, I got an email yesterday from someone that I have been mentoring. It’s one really great guy and he’s actually a really top notch athlete and he said, “Why is it I never miss a workout but I have such a hard time writing every day?” Because one of the key things that I really encourage all experts to do and this is really important is they have to write every day.

They have to be, the better you write and the more you write, the better you can speak and articulate your message and the more valuable you become. It starts with writing. You need to write every day. You need to compose, whether it’s a really long email or it’s the beginning of a blog or it’s the beginning of an article, but you need to be composing every day. Stephen King in his book, which is a brilliant book called Stephen King Writing which is all about writing well, he says that there’s really only two things you need to do, if you want to actually write better and that’s to read more often and to write more often. So read more and write more. What he’s saying is that it’s a skill you have to develop and the same thing for the expert community.

If you want to be better at articulating your ideas as a speaker or a seminar leader or as an interviewer or as an author, you need to write more. So this guy was asking how is it I never miss a workout but I have such a hard time writing and I said it’s because you don’t have the discipline and the way to get better discipline is you have to get oriented [Inaudible]. He’s getting closer to the goal of the event. So he has an automatic reward. So it’s obvious for him. Get up in the morning, go for a workout, come back, shower, I feel better, I cross it off my list, there’s my reward. The secret to discipline is to be able to keep on doing it [Inaudible].

So once you have your business plan it’s all about discipline and again, to me, the definition of discipline is doing it when there is no payoff. So my advice to the athlete was, because he’s also a very talented presenter, is you need to create little rewards along the way that aren’t there now. So once I have my business plan, I reward myself for any kind.

JAIME TARDY: How do we do that and how do we put these little things that makes us keep wanting to move forward, because it can get discouraging, especially like you said, if you’re not getting the feedback or the rewards that you really want. How can we add those in?

HUGH CULVER: Sure. Now what this comes down to is two sides. Again, because most people coming into the expert community are not entrepreneurs or they’ve not been business owners in the past or they worked for other people, they don’t really have a lot of the discipline around how to plan. So if I want to create little rewards along the way, what I need to do is I need to create little plans along the way that I can actually then accomplish. What everybody needs to do is they need to plan one week at a time.

So, for example, I want to write a book. That’s a huge deal. Most books are going to be 50,000 words. That’s 200 plus pages. I need to go out there and I need to get someone to design my cover. On and on it goes. How am I going to do that? I’m not going to get it all done at once so what I need to do is I need to have a plan every week and in that plan every week there’s a bit on the book. I can cross that off and I can get onto the next part of my plan for the week and then I can cross it off. So the whole idea as an entrepreneur is to think about all the buckets I am responsible for.

So in my one-page business plan, I’ve got product buckets, I’ve got revenue targets, I’ve got administrative buckets, I have all these buckets that need to be attended to and every week what I need to do is to cross some of that off and then progress. I see the progress. I think the reason why a lot of people never finish their book is because the target is so far off they don’t see any reward and they get discouraged. But if you spent half an hour and you cleaned up your table of contents, that’s a reward. Cross it off, feel good about it, now go onto some other bucket. Life is little rewards so that you can get to the big reward.

JAIME TARDY: And it feels like we’re doing something and accomplishing goals and therefore we’re actually getting some stuff done, okay. It’s funny, because you actually mentioned to me that many experts call themselves laborers. So what exactly do you mean by that?

HUGH CULVER: Right, well, I was shooting this video earlier in the week actually and what I wanted to explain in this video was how to create multiple streams of revenue, either as a speaker or a seminar leader or coach. What it occurred to me was that one of the mistakes and I have done this for many years, one of the mistakes that a lot of experts make is that they trade time for money like a laborer. So a laborer, like a plumber, all they can do is they can trade time for money. That’s all they can do.

Of course, they can sell pipe and they can sell fittings and they can make a little bit of money there, but basically, when you are a laborer, so again a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, you only have really three ways to make more revenue. You can charge more, which your market may or may not want because there’s competition, you can work more and as an expert working more often means getting on more airplanes, more rental cars and being in more hotels, which I’ve done for many years, or you can go and outsource it and that’s what some people do. They get someone who trains for them or they get someone who coaches for them.

I can charge more. I can work more or I can outsource it and that’s basically a laborer. But in the expert community now, and this has been really changing the last couple of years, maybe even just three years, there’s so many other ways to create revenue streams so you actually create an expert enterprise. So a laborer is stuck with only those three ways to increase revenue. An expert enterprise can have a CD box, they can have a book, they can have a membership series program. They can have audio recordings. They can have all these, they can put on events. They can have all these different ways so that they actually spend more time at home.

They actually have ways to earn income when they’re not available, when they’re not doing things and they also have put more value into their business so that they actually have something that they can either sell or they could maybe bring in someone as a partner and they can actually have that person invest into the business. So it’s all about changing your way of thinking and when you’re an expert, you know, the reality is that often you’re so busy doing what you’re doing, you don’t really see the opportunities, because you’re so busy getting on an airplane to go deliver that speech. But you need to step back and start asking yourself well where do I want to be in three years?

I personally, I used to delivery 110 programs per year. At 110 programs a year, that’s really the equivalent of at least 220 days you’re gone out of a year. It’s insane. So you’re so busy the thought of going to a studio, recording a CD and figuring all that out is just like that would be nice someday. But the reality is until you step back and actually look at your business as an enterprise, you’ll never really get strategic about it. So that’s what I mean is moving from a laborer to an enterprise.

JAIME TARDY: So if someone is new to becoming an expert, they have this idea, they really want to do it, they start going down the path, because you were saying that you actually help people do it a little bit faster than if they were going to do it on their own. What can they expect? It’s hard starting a new business, especially if you have a current job or you’re doing something else on the side, to go okay I really want to start this going as fast as I can so that way I can see revenue so I can either quit or stop doing what I’m doing on the other side.

So what sort of timeframes are we looking at? I know it’s going to depend on the person, but also what can we make sure we’re spending most of our time on so that way we are generating the revenue, because I know you’re about generating the revenue too. So what do you think about that?

HUGH CULVER: I mean the whole thing around the revenue generation it’s so interesting because it makes us sound like that’s all we care about but the reality is it is one of the ingredients. People may want to share their message and do great work, which I totally applaud, but the reality is if you don’t have the business, you don’t get a chance to do that. I’m working with some people now that in three months I know I can take them from where they’re at to a really much better position in the expert community. So, for example, they may be a coach but they realize they’re working like a laborer. So I can help them in three months to actually develop products, to have a much better position online and to start to be developing a much bigger following so that they can actually see multiple streams of revenue.

I’ve got other people that I put on a year-long program. That year-long program is going to help them to understand right from the basics what it is that I need to do to actually build the business and then over the course of the year, we meet four times a year. We also get, I coach them every month and so they can actually start to see progress, as far as they’re developing their book, they’re putting together a package of goods that they can sell at the back of the room. They’re improving the quality of their speech. They’re getting clear about how to communicate to their target market on a regular basis.

So for some people, it depends really, Jaime, where they’re at with their business, but for some people, three months is plenty to get going and for other people they want that year, because they’re already busy. They’ve got other things going on. But that year allows them time to keep this sort of business building project on the go and I’ve got some people in my year-long program, they’ve been speakers for longer than I have and they’ve been speakers for 15 or 16 years, but what they recognize is that they are so busy with what they’re doing they don’t have the time to get these other things started.

What’s really exciting is that they are seeing a complete 100 percent and maybe even 200 percent return on their investment, even in the first couple of months. It’s because I helped to get organized around their pricing model, around what to get rid of. For a lot of people, they need to get rid of programs. They need to stop doing programs, even though they get paid for them, because those programs are filling up their calendar but there is no potential. Just by working with them I can help them to move forward either as three months or a year.

JAIME TARDY: What do people, what are the numbers too, because I don’t really know and I know some people are probably wondering too. Can I become a six-figure speaker/coach in a year or is it a three-year process? What have you seen? I know you’re just sort of doing this as the newer side of things but you’ve been in the industry for a long time. What do you think?

HUGH CULVER: I mean it’s not unreasonable for a person, in their first year, to be probably, as long as they’ve got that combination, you know, they got a great topic they’re passionate about and they’ve got a hungry market. I mean it’s not uncommon for them to be, they can probably be doing low six figures, certainly a little bit less than that in their first year, but there is a ramp up time because nobody will know them. A lot of people I’m working with they already have an established base so they might have, on an ongoing basis, a dozen or so people that they coach.

That’s much easier to build off of because they already have a loyal following and those people can much more quickly ramp up into a high six figures or mid six figures level, you know, within certainly three years. One of the things about the expert community is is that it’s not uncommon to have fairly high price points. So for a person to move in with the right passionate topic and the right hungry market, they can move very quickly into a sizeable income, which will allow them to let other work go and to focus exclusively on this just simply because of the high price point, but they need to be very strategic otherwise they can spin their wheels for a long time.

JAIME TARDY: That’s the reason why I wanted to sort of ask you about that because there is huge potential and it’s good to know what the potential is, but it’s also sort of good to know what your limitations are, because I know, especially when I started, I was like ooh confidence wasn’t necessarily there and so that, it’s funny how like that will stop you and that takes a much longer ramp up time to being able to sort of recognize what their limitations are so that way they can hit, you know, the high goals that are there and possible but they can’t without getting past these limitations and I think that’s what’s kind of interesting talking about discipline and talking about this stuff, but doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re doing all that much. Talking about discipline seems so intangible but really that’s sort of the meat of it all. So making sure we’re doing what we need to do and getting out there.

HUGH CULVER: Very much. I mean we’ve all been to workshops and not done anything with what we learned. There is nothing wrong with the workshop. It was a great workshop. The presenter was exciting. They have great content. But why didn’t we do anything about it? It’s because life got the better of us. We didn’t have the discipline to get our plan in place before we actually walked out of the room. We thought we’d do it once we got home. So what I help people to understand is that it’s really all about getting those great ideas and turning them into action as quickly as possible because left to their own plans, what a lot of people will do is go to the workshop and then they’ll say what a great, that was great content.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, I loved it and it was great.

HUGH CULVER: Then nothing happens and so one of the things and I can help people with and like there is other mentors around, of course, as well, coach and trainers is to help people to turn into action really quickly because again, with the example I was giving earlier with my friend who is the athlete, is that if we don’t have small rewards along the way, we will get discouraged. If you want to have better discipline in our life, in all aspects of our life, we have to establish small rewards and to enjoy those rewards as we go along. That’s all about turning the plan into action, seeing the results, patting ourselves on the back and then going for the next thing. We don’t leave the workshop hoping we’ll do something later. We leave the workshop with a plan already in place.

JAIME TARDY: I think that’s huge too. I just interviewed Dane Maxwell and he told us how he was so excited about his $1.50 that he made online. He was like woo-hoo I earned a $1.50 and I wasn’t there. He was really actually so excited about it and I think we sort of discount that – the small things – where oh I just got three people on my newsletter today. Well that’s huge and those are three people, real people, not just email addresses. So we really need to be happy with those small things and see the progression as we go for sure, especially when we’re just starting.

HUGH CULVER: We’re happy when we reward ourselves and we need to understand what is it that I did and how can do it again. What did they like about that blog? Or what did they like about the day of the week that I chose to have the teleseminar. Oh they liked it was Tuesday morning or Tuesday night or whatever. Then we need to replicate that. So every time we do something get a reward from our public, there is a lesson to be learned. What can I learn from that? As I said earlier, you might be giving a speech and then suddenly everybody leans in. At that moment, pay attention because you just hit on a chord and there is something there that you can develop that they really are interested in.

As long as you keep doing that, you’ll keep learning and growing and you’ll keep serving and people will love you for it. But if you just go in there with this attitude that your great, you got all the answers and really it’s a one-way conversation, you’re going to completely miss out on what’s available for you.

JAIME TARDY: I love that. It’s like having a third eye or having somebody, you know, your other self looking in at the overview of it all instead of necessarily taking it for what it is. Like you said, once we get in our lives, we get so tunnel vision it’s better to sort of come up and go oh and try and look from a third party view. That’s awesome.

HUGH CULVER: Right. I think for a lot of people the answers are already there. They already know what they should be doing. They sort of ignore it because they’re so bullheaded they think oh no-no I know better, but they usually, the people are telling us what they want. You can go on Amazon and look at what books are selling. That’s an indication of what they want. You can sit in a room and watch someone else present and you can watch how people respond to that presenter. That will tell you what they want. So instead of trying to recreate the world or the wheel, just go ahead and serve it better than anybody else is doing.

JAIME TARDY: I love that. So to wrap up, I always ask the same question. I asked this to you last time – what’s one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

HUGH CULVER: Sure. First of all, I think what everybody needs to do is they need to look at what they are procrastinating about. When we procrastinate about something and we notice it, then probably that’s something we need to look at. For example, you can procrastinate about, I don’t know, knitting, but if you don’t care about knitting, who cares. But if you’re procrastinating about making certain phone calls or starting that book project or you’re procrastinating about asking someone for advice, which is such a wonderful thing to do is ask for advice, then that’s something to look at.

If you’re noticing that procrastination, then that tells you that it’s valuable. So look at what you’re procrastinating about and what you need to do is you need to create a better reward than what you’re getting now, because you’re being rewarded for avoiding. You need to create a reward for doing. When we, for example, oh I should phone this person. I think they’re so great. They’ve already written a book. I should phone them and ask them how did they write the book? Oh I don’t want to bother them. They’re probably busy. So write away you’re being rewarded for avoiding because you don’t have to make the phone call. That’s a reward.

You’re being rewarded for avoiding all the uncomfortableness that might come along with it. But if you create a reward for doing, then you’re more likely to step into it. So the reward for doing is I’ll get some answers. I was proud of myself for making that phone call. I will move my project forward. So look at what you’re procrastinating about. If it’s really important, then create a better reward for doing than you are getting right now.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. So tell me more about, I know you have new projects and stuff coming up. Tell me about some of that stuff. You are really excited. We were talking about it before.

HUGH CULVER: It’s so exciting because, Jaime, it’s so exciting to be working with entrepreneurs again, which is what my roots are. As you know, I started out with these crazy adventure comedies all over the world. It’s so exciting to be working with people that actually are invested in their future. So I have a year-long program I call Team Coach, which is a very exciting way for people to develop their business as an expert. I have an event coming up in October in Vancouver, British Columbia, beautiful Vancouver right downtown.

We’re getting Ford Sakes from Prime Concepts, who is one of the top gurus in SEO and website development for selling products online. He’s the guy behind Randy Gauge. I’m bringing in Clint Greenleaf from Austin, Texas who owns Greenleaf Books and the Emerald brand. He has got 15 New York Times bestsellers on his list. So I’m bringing in a whole host of experts and I am going to walk people through, at this three-day event, how to create an expert enterprise. What are the business development skills and we’ll actually create it in the room. So they will create the one-page business plan. They’ll create the calendar.

So that’s happening October 19-21 and people can access it or they can learn more about it by going to HughCulver.com/expertsintensive. they can go there or they can just go to /experts. Either one and they’ll learn more about what we’re doing and why I am so excited.

JAIME TARDY: Thank you so much for coming on and I’ll definitely link all that stuff out. So if anyone is looking to become an author, an expert in this next year or two, if that’s one of your goals, definitely Hugh has been great. He has been a great help for me too. So thank you so much, Hugh, for coming on. I really appreciate it.

HUGH CULVER: It’s a pleasure, Jaime. Thanks for the offer. This is great. You’re really fun. Thanks a lot.

Just to note, you can download the top ten tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

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