PP 648: Reverse Engineer Your Success with Tim Meuchel
You have the opportunity in this world [to]… impact and help many people that are looking for that little piece to get them over that hump.” -Tim Meuchel
Success is a universally elusive concept. Everybody can define the word but only a few can really give life to its meaning. If your entrepreneurial journey is a struggle, maybe you’re up for a little restructuring. Today, Tim Meuchel shares his own ups and downs and the lessons he’s learned along the way. As a fellow in business, he had his own guilt trip and seasons of nothingness. Born from his failures was the 10 Factor program, the entrepreneur’s blueprint to success which will be introduced in this episode. Tim also shares 3 things that can help you to get to where you want to be. Tune in and learn about these awesome tips and skill sets. Know your worth and hold on to it. Only then can you hear success knocking on your door.
Highlights:
02:18 What It’s Like To Have A Good Job At A Good Company
12:12 The Road To 10 Factor
19:10 Talk More About Struggles More Than Successes
21:41 Hold On To Your Worth
28:18 The Guilt Trip
33:23 3 Things That Will Get To Where You Want To Be
38:50 Don’t Work Alone
44:40 Be Consistent
Resources:
Book
The Millionaire Messenger: Make A Difference And A Fortune Sharing Your Advice by Brendon Burchard
The 10 Factor: From Struggling to Thriving in Ten Months by Tim Meuchel
Inspirational Quotes:
“You have the opportunity in this world [to]… impact and help many people that are looking for that little piece to get them over that hump.” -Tim Meuchel
“When you go out there and you hear that these people aren’t working, you got to take it for what it’s worth- their marketing.” -Tim Meuchel
“Somebody in the seed needs to be able to follow the path to their success instead of breaking the chain link.” -Tim Meuchel
“If you hear that alarm in your head go off, of that’s not what my time is worth then say ‘no’. ” -Kim Sutton
“You have a choice. You can keep on going in less than desirable circumstances or you can put your foot down and get something better. -Kim Sutton
“You are a sum of all of the experiences added together that you’ve lived through your life, which makes you who you are.” -Tim Meuchel
“Be consistent. Show up every day and do it all with integrity.” -Tim Meuchel
About Tim:
Tim Meuchel is the creator, bestselling author, and podcast host of The 10 Factor. Tim held a good job at a good company for 12 years. He was confident that he will continue to work there for many years more. Not until his corporate life became unfavorable for his family that he made a crucial decision that changed his life forever. Tim set out on his entrepreneurial journey and everything was going well, or so he thought. He ran into a pinch point where he was no longer confident that he could make it work. In his struggles, Tim learned the value of investing in himself and when he did, he was back in the game in no time. Today, he is helping struggling entrepreneurs through his 10 Factor Program so that they too, can learn the blueprint to success.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity, this is your host Kim Sutton, and I am so excited because today, I have another podcast around with me. And you have heard podcast episodes on the Positive Productivity Podcast with other podcasts, and not that every single conversation isn’t awesome, but when you get two podcasters together, I dunno, there’s just conversational magic, that’s the best way I can say it. Our guest today though is Tim Meuchel, and he is the owner of The 10 Factor, but we discuss so much in the show notes, I’m going to fully disclose to him, I’m going to pull some of that in here. But before we get there, I would love it if you would introduce yourself, tell a little bit of your background to the listeners, and how you got to where you are today.
Tim Meuchel: Kim, how’s it going? Awesome to be here.
Kim Sutton: Oh, I’m just so excited to share even just some of what we already talked about, but even to dig in deeper, but yeah, I know you’re a bestselling author, you’re a podcast hosts of The 10 factor, you’ve gone through the ups and downs of business, but what did that look like? And what can you say to listeners who are going through the ups and downs right now and feel like giving up?
Tim Meuchel: Well that’s a perfect place to start because the ups and downs, I’ve been on this little bit of a kick lately of trying to be transparent to the people that are following myself, and following other people on social media, and whatever Avenue they take content and podcasts. And there’s this trend where people tend to live the perfect life in what I call the storefront versus the back of house. And the back of houses is generally going to be a mess, and entrepreneurship in general is one of the hardest things that you’re ever going to do. So I started, I followed the track, a very traditional track, I knew what I wanted to do when I was younger. I was always interested in building things and how things went together. So I ended up going to Virginia Tech here on the East Coast, the Maryland is where I’m located. Went to Virginia tech and majored in civil engineering. In four years I got my degree from there and went out and I specialized within the construction management facet of that field. And I took a, what I would say is a really good job with a really good company, a hundred year old company that had weathered the storms of the Wars, and the political issues, and the oppression and things like that. And they had sustained through all those different events.
And what I didn’t do at that point in time was I didn’t have any aspirations to be an entrepreneur, to own my own business. I was dead set that that’s what I was going to do. I found a good company, I was comfortable, I was making good money. And then over time as my life evolved, a couple things changed. And one of the issues I had there was with my relationship that started to develop, and I moved into the next phase of my life, there was a travel element that wasn’t conducive to the wife that we were trying to put together. And then it was also, it was a money issue where I was making good money but a lot of the money was on the back end, and I was trying to bring what would be my future wife home to be a mom with the kids while I went out and provided for the family to just wasn’t going to work there. So we started, we talked for about five years, we went back and forth strategizing what to do and ultimately ended up starting a side business. And this was going back a ways. This was 2007, I had toyed with some other things first, but I started this side business at that point I had a dozen, almost a dozen years of commercial, high level project management, coast-to-coast across the country. We’re working on big projects, upwards of 50 or $60 million. Started out a little small construction company in Maryland, doing some side work that wasn’t competing with what I was doing there. And that company started to grow pretty fast on the weekends and nights. And I ran into a pinch point where I didn’t know how he was going to make it all work. I was trying to take care of a house, I was trying to take care of a family, we don’t have any kids yet, but I was working through that and decided business was getting busier, and busier, and busier.
So now we fast forward to 2008, I’m about 15 months into this side deal, and I get a call on a Friday afternoon from my boss for a long time, and he calls me up to the office, and I was working on a hospital emergency department renovation on an active hospital at the time. I was managing the job and he calls me up to Austin, says: “Hey, we’ve got a problem up in New York and I know you’re from New York originally, but we got a problem up in New York and kind of a bad job and you’re the fixture. We need you to go up there and we need you to bail it out.” I said: “Wait a minute here. Number one, I get this job that I’m running. We’re in a crunch time right now, we’re trying to get this thing turned over. We’re turning in his pieces over. It’s a very, very critical part of the project and you’re gonna yank me out of here, number one. Number two, what’s this deal up in New York?” So I started asking some questions. It was a Friday afternoon and said, okay, so at this point, I had never really pushed back. I had always been one of these people that I went with the flow, I was firm, but I respected the people that were above me that they had to make business decisions.
So I started asking some questions and the first question was: “Have I been committed? Do they have my resume already?” He said: “Yeah.” Second question was: “When do I need to be there?” It was Friday, so we need to be up there Monday. And then the third question was: “How often do I come home?” And it was pause at that point, I already knew it. Well, once I come here, I’m not coming home. When we were in the process of trying to have our first child at the same time, there were a lot of moving parts and pieces. So I pushed back and I said: “Look, I’m not going, I can’t go.” And my boss, we were good friends too, he said: “Wait, this is not a negotiation.” And I said: “Well, I hear you.” So he pressed a little further and I ultimately came clean and I said: “Look, I got this side business in addition to trying to start a family. I’ve got this side business, I’ve got commitments here that don’t affect my work, obviously it’s been 15 months and you knew nothing about it, which was done on purpose because I had my own tools, my own vehicle, I had my own computer, I had my own phone, I had done everything clean because I knew that if I ever got called out I didn’t want to be accused of [inaudible].” So I had done all of the stuff that I had done that just who I am, paid big dividends on the backside because I didn’t want to burn a bridge.
So anyway, that led to, they didn’t send me. They found somebody else, but it was time, so I gave my notice, that was April of 2008. And then my business blew up coming out of the saddle once I transitioned to full time, and I realized that that was the most productive I ever was in my career, because I had been doing so much for so long that when I took my full time job off the plate, which was really a 50 to 60 hour a week job, I had so much time that my side business turned full time just exploded in that first year. And that’s really what I had to come back to two years later when I ran into problems, what did I do so well that first year? And really it was about dialing everything in, and focus, and knowing exactly what I wanted to do, and basically working off those good habits that I had developed while I was doing so much in order to keep everything straight. But then what happened was those good habits started to erode over time. As I got more comfortable, more complacent, and was able to, my wife came home and we had our first child later that year, and everything worked out like the storybook was supposed to work. But we ran into the woes of entrepreneurship over the years, and what happened was I essentially bottlenecked my own business. We grew out of the gates and that’s where we were. And I was there for a lot of years before I ran into a bigger problem which led me to The 10 factor.
Kim Sutton: Well, you caught my attention in a variety of different topics. Number one, I was always a child who liked to take things apart and put things together. So out of high school, I also went to college for interior architecture.
Tim Meuchel: Nice.
Kim Sutton: Yes. So that’s what I thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to be like Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, and living in a fantastic loft in Manhattan, and work my way up in the chain where classy suits, I didn’t care about the clothes, and be a rich and famous designer. However, our life took a little bit of a detour very early. Within six months of graduating college. I got unexpectedly pregnant, at least I was out of college. But having a newborn in Manhattan as a 23 year old is different than having a newborn in Ohio as a 35 year old, it’s just a little bit different. I mean, the cost to put him in daycare for a week in Manhattan is as much as it costs to put three kids in daycare in Ohio, so it just wasn’t going to work. But I also realized I just wasn’t passionate about that. I didn’t like being told that if I took an hour off in the morning because I had to go to a doctor’s appointment, that I was going to be dapped for a half day, but I’ll work an hour later tonight. No, doesn’t matter, you are late. Really? Okay. And then we moved to Ohio, be closer to family and better the cost of living. But I was designing schools, and when 2008 came, the economy tanked in the school construction industry here in Ohio because people weren’t paying, or the people didn’t want to pass the tax issues, the bonds to pay for school renovations when they couldn’t even pay their mortgage.
So all of a sudden my services weren’t necessary, and I had already started at a side company in 2005, I cannot say that I was doing it all on my own time, my own dime, yes. But when I get bored at my job, I must admit I use their computer. I am totally 100% truthful about that, but I lost my job. And here in Ohio, it’s not the Mecca of interior design. I got a divorce and I couldn’t find another job and that’s how I’m here. But everything for a reason and I love it. But the other thing that really fascinates me about what you said is that your positive habits were eroding and you became the bottleneck in your business. And what I found is the same thing, I’m completely the bottleneck in my business, but I guess a bitter, bigger bottleneck was that I started, and I’m working my way out of this now to give more attention to clients than I did to my family. Did you ever find yourself in that position where, I’ve been joking these the past couple of weeks, it’s not really a funny joke, but I said there’s one client in particular who I feel like I’ve been having affair for three years, not sexual, he’s just gotten more attention than all my family members combined in that needs the end.
Tim Meuchel: That’s such a great question because it’s actually, it leads right into what in my wheelhouse of what I do. So I grew up in a, both of my grandparents on either side were entrepreneurs. So on my dad’s side, they were farmers in the Midwest. Actually my uncle still farms the land out there. And my grandparents here on the East Coast, it was my mom’s parents, they owned a bar. So that hard working kind of business comes first mentality is something that I grew up with. My dad is still, he’s 20 some years into his business. He’s still a tremendously hard worker, and that’s just something that it’s in my blood I guess. So when I worked the corporate job, I tended to, if work needed to be done, I took care of it. But at that point, that was really pre-kids because I left that job before the first child was born. But in that facet there was enough of me, I think to spread around to be able to do both as my relationship developed. But once I started my business, going back, it went full time, so 2008 and it was different I guess. I never realized how much time I allocated for the kids and for the family until people started to come to me and say, how do you do it? And the thing that you mentioned earlier is what I did, Hey, if I need to work an hour here, I’ll do it here or whatever. And I wasn’t able to do that within a corporate job, but I structured my business to make that happen. So I’m the dad that’s at school with 15 moms hanging out at the 11 o’clock party because I just make it happen. And that’s always how I’ve been, I always coached the kids in sports, and I’ve always managed to take care of me in the sense that I’ve kept myself at least in decent shape, not as good in shape as I used to be, but decent shape that I feel like I can perform at a high level.
Kim Sutton: I just choked on my coffee when you said that.
Tim Meuchel: That’s funny. But yeah, I’ve always done both and I’ve done it, but I’ve done it without really thinking about it. But then what happened was when my business went in the tank, which is, this is 2015, and I’m going to frame this out for your listeners because it’s really important to understand how life can happen so fast. We were transitioning. So we were going from a family of three to a family of five because I had twins on the way, and we had busted the seams of the old house and we moved. So here we are, our house sold right away and couldn’t find a house. So we’re scrambling looking at rentals and it was a very, very stressful time. And we luckily found a perfect house. It had the ability to handle my contracting business, was able to move everything in, had the perfect home office for me to do everything that I do on the consulting side, and was a perfect house and lot to raise kids. And somebody had just got to transfer out of town and needed to sell. So everything, there was a bird sitting on their shoulder, or an angel sitting on their shoulder that said: “Okay, we’re going to make all this work.” So we get into this house and we settle on December the 18th right before Christmas. So if you can imagine, I had a Christmas tree, we do live Christmas trees. So I had a Christmas tree in a home depot bucket at the shop ready to move into the house, and I wouldn’t recommend doing that because we had needles everywhere. But we did buy a Christmas tree ahead of time, and we got in the house and got Christmas setup.
And between that December 18th and Christmas, I got a disturbing call from my attorney because we had been working on a job for a couple of years that we had been not paid on, and it wasn’t going to turn out the way it was. So I got this very sobering call where: “Hey, this thing’s just not going to turn out.” So we went from being financially savvy, financially secure to almost bankrupt in the matter of one phone call. And that led me to go out and have a conversation with my wife and tell her that I got to go back and I got to fix some things in a complacency and bad habits and stuff I talked about before, all that came to fruition really quickly. And then to add salt to the wound that the twins were born a month later, so we had everything just blown up at once. So during that period of time I really had to put my head down, I had to do some soul searching and that’s what led me to do The 10 factor. So what I did was I went back to, what am I doing wrong? And what do we want to do? And I realized that I was in a business at that point that had been branded and wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to be long term like you had said with the architecture that the fire wasn’t there. I had become soured to, not the construction because I still really do, I still have active coaching clients in the industry and I still do expert witness work and stuff like that. And I’m actually growing that arm of the business now, working with those kinds of people. But it was just actually going out and running the jobs and that stuff was becoming more difficult for me to live the life that I had wanted to, to live and for me to provide financially for the family as well.
So all that got called out on the corporate. I went back, and what happened was I went back to doing a lot of stuff I was doing in 2008 which was became super, super efficient, and pretty quickly fixed the business to the sense of, turned back into a revenue driving business really quick with a lot less effort and a lot less time, which allowed me to go out there and do the consulting, and do the stuff that I do today, and write the book, and get out there and really ultimately give back. And that’s the thing that’s so cool about it is yes, you have the opportunity in this world, the way that the economy now is just you can go out there and you can impact and help so many other people that are just looking for that little piece to get them over that hump. And that’s really what I take a lot back from that. But all that being said, this entrepreneurship deal, which I feel like just the events that happened in my life that led me into it, it’s never easy. And to find a balance between your time with your family, and the time with your clients, and make sure that everybody gets their fair shake is a struggle for everybody. And the only thing I can tell your listeners is when you go out there and hear that these people aren’t working, you got to just take it for what it’s worth. Their marketing, and what they’re doing is they’re trying to market to you that shiny object of where you’re going to be. And I always like to tell people that it is really important that you talk about the struggles when you’re teaching more than you talk about the successes. Because if somebody is sitting there and listening to you, and I’m going to frame something out Kim, and you tell me if I’m on base or not, but if you go to an event and you hear a speaker, and they stand up on the stage and they’re like, go on this pedestal, they’re already up higher because they’re on a stage, they start talking, they’re just talking about how awesome they are, what the awesome things that they’ve done. And you watch the people in the audience, they kind of sit back, and they slouch, and they might be checking their phones. They’re not really plugged into who that speaker is, no matter what level they are.
Kim Sutton: I try not to puke. A full disclosure, I’m just like, really?
Tim Meuchel: But then when you hear somebody go up there and tell their story about where they almost lost everything or what they went through their struggles, and you see the people in [inaudible] and they’re on the edges of their seats, I feel like what the speakers don’t understand is that somebody in the seat needs to be able to follow the path instead of making like breaking the chain link, because most people have such a scarcity mindset that they can’t visualize themselves being on that stage.
Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh. We’re going to take a quick break really fast. Okay, so you’re going to be the first person who hears about this on the podcast, but listeners have heard that I have had a chronic issue with saying no. I felt like I needed to say yes to everybody because I was going to offend them. Well, I got over that, I’m over that. As of the day of this recording I’m a good solid six months over that which isn’t long enough, listeners you better be listening. But what happened was I got this huge opportunity presented to me worth a lot of money, and I knew, there’s an and a but, I knew what the value of my time was worth. When I took the opportunity, I told the person what my rate would be and I got talked down by a good amount of money, but the money was still so much in the long run that I felt like I better take this. If you hear that alarm in your head go off of that’s not what my time is worth, then say no. Say no listeners, something else will come up. Because you said something that alarmed me, but it alarmed me because I’d been there. You said you hadn’t been paid for that project, I’ve been that person. But what happened when I said yes and I got into this project was that all my time started going towards building this client’s business, and the people that I was white labeling for versus building my own. And over three years, all of my other clients went out the door and my business was reliant on one client, which is a scary place to be. It’s like I might as well be an employee again.
Well, earlier this year there was a situation where somebody lied about me and said that I didn’t do the work that I had actually done, and the client flipped around and changed the terms of payment, and made me refund for work that I had done. I had no recourse, plus I already had a whole ton of other projects started that I was waiting for payment on, and I’m talking about hundreds and hundreds of hours invested, which would mean the world to my family. So I kept on going, and I didn’t get paid for four months. We’re in foreclosure right now, Tim, like I’ve never shared this on the podcast or on social media, but I want listeners to know that I am not scared about it and that we’re going to come out of it, but we’re in foreclosure because I allowed myself to feel like the victim and be in scarcity mindset, and instead of knowing my worse and holding into my worst and saying no to opportunities, which I know didn’t serve me, I kept on going. But I took a big step and I told that client a few months ago that I’m not going to do the work anymore. And with that, I’ve been wrapping up each project I had already started. I’m not dropping anybody, I’m just not taking on new work through that client. And with each one that I drop, a new client of my own in a whole nother basket comes my way. And it’s amazing because not only am I getting other work and I’m no longer out of one basket, I’m getting paid my worth. Tim, I thought I was like, Oh, you know what? I’ll be able to take on half the amount of work and get paid the same amount as I was for two clients.
Well, what I didn’t realize was that the true value of what I was offering when charging the right amount is fair. It’s probably still low, so I thought I would have trouble selling. I’m not, and I still have just as much work, which is damned scary. I’m like, okay, do I need to raise prices again? Because my goal here is not to be giving up all my time. My family needs my time back. So that’s why I’m not scared about coming out of foreclosure, plus I’m in Ohio. All I need is one client to get paid, but they just didn’t want a partial payment. And I’m not looking for a sob story here, but I want listeners to know that whatever you’re going through with a client, you have a choice. You can keep on going in less than desirable circumstances or you can put your foot down and get something better. But when you were talking earlier about people who don’t have jobs, sometimes you feel like that’s their choice. And I know that might be unfair, but I started a little shop on eBay that turned into a $40,000 a year business that I didn’t like, but I still did it. There’s opportunities if we look for them, there’s legal opportunities if we look for them and if we’re committed to doing the work, but it’s a choice to be unemployed in my opinion, and I know I could get some heat for that.
Tim Meuchel: Welcome. I’m glad you brought all that up because number one, obviously what you’re going through, and you’re right, it will get better. Because one of the things, and I can take this back to one of my best clients who’d seen just tremendous success, and a lot of people that come to me are years into business and they’re just trying to clean up the loose ends and get those missing links to take it to the next level. And the best, the ones that see the most success are the ones that are coachable, that listen, they’re not hardheaded. They say, okay, well, I’m coming to you for a reason and you’re right about what you charge. They do get tremendously more value than they pay out. It’s just people don’t always understand that on the front end because a lot of people aren’t coachable.
But one of the things that put that perspective for me was, I was out in California at an event, it was about three years ago I think, and walked up to, and I’m sure your listeners probably know Brendon Burchard. Walked up and talked to him, and we were talking, I was getting ready to launch my show and I was telling him about it and he was, you could just see the fire and the excitement in his eyes. And he said: “Have you read my book, The Millionaire Messenger?” And I said: “No.” And he said: “Get it and read it. It’s very important.” He said: “It’s an older book, but you should get a new [inaudible].” And I said: “Okay.” So I did. So I went and bought it, and I read it, and it was something in that book that really got to me, and I don’t talk about it very often, but what you said really made me think about it, actually turn around on my bookshelf, look at it while you were talking.
So he defines one of the things that people go through when they get into the personal development or the self knowledge of the self help industry, they go through this guilt trip where they don’t really, they’re asking somebody who’s coming to them because they’re maybe struggling financially, or with time, or money, and they’re asking them to pay him even more money and go deeper in the hole in order to hopefully get themselves out of that. So you run into that, like you use the word stop story. You don’t want to take somebody and get worse for them. So you go through a confidence growth period where you have to kind of yourself, you have to justify that what you’re doing is good enough for them to see success. And what he talks about in the book is that if you don’t make the money, you don’t charge enough, then you’re not going to provide for your family, you’re not going to be able to provide for those people, you’re not going to be able to have the systems and the processes in place in order to give them what they need. So you are truly running a business and your time is really, really valuable. And if somebody wants the free advice or they want the really, really cheap advice, then they just need to go to somebody else. And there’s a reason that the people that pay the money to continue their education privately, or through a continuing education program, or whatever it is. There’s a reason that those people are the ones that are successful because they’re investing to themselves. And if somebody doesn’t want to invest in yourself, then you cannot convince them that they need to invest in themselves. And you just hope that eventually they’ll figure it out. But more than likely there’ll be a statistic and that they won’t be in the three to 5% that sustain long term, they’ll be the ones that are bouncing from job to job, and that’s just the way it is. And that’s the normal attrition, and it’s very, very frustrating. But what I’ve found with my clients is that once I get the opportunity to sit down with them and work through a prequalification program on the front side in their funnels and in their marketing, their ability to land the right clients goes up exponentially. It sounds like you’re doing a lot of the same things, and a big part of that is saying no. It’s hard, but that’s probably the biggest piece to the whole thing is saying, no, I can’t help you with that. But I like to be able to say, but here’s who can, and I feel like that’s, for me, I always like to try to point somebody in the right direction. If I’m not going to be the one to help them. That doesn’t mean I can’t help them, it just means I’m not set up at that point in time to give them the best help that they need.
Kim Sutton: Absolutely. And if my passion is not there for the work that my client is doing, they can fit on a completely different wavelength, and yes, I mean wavelength and the spiritually. If I don’t understand what they’re talking about, if I don’t have the passion, then my passion isn’t going to be there, and it’s going to show in the work that I do. I want to thank you for talking about The Millionaire Messenger, that is the one book of his that I have not read and it was on my shelf. So I turned around and took it off and put it here on my desk. But you said earlier that the amount of work, you said differently, that you did before you had kids, it was different. Your role as an entrepreneur, as a business person was different. And I know I’m saying this completely, but I’ve often thought about that with Brendon Burchard. He is married, but he has no children. And I had to get over the comparisons to Brendon Burchard and stop giving myself grief for not being where he is and his business when I’m a mom of five, that’s like five little mini full time jobs on top of the business. I mean, just maintaining sanity with that many kids.
Tim Meuchel: It is, you’re right, yeah.
Kim Sutton: Yeah, and there are times, and I had to give my husband a lot of credit for this one. But there are times when just being a mom of my own twins has been more stressful than my business, but a lot of the time I have to say that my business is often more stressful than my whole family altogether. Even on those crazy weeks where I’m pulling a second shift as a mompreneur every single day, or not mompreneur, a mom chauffeur.
Tim Meuchel: Yeah.
Kim Sutton: Yeah. But thank you for reminding me about that book because now it will be what I’m reading over the next few days. I want to go back to saying no, and then stepping up, and actually I want to ask you about your most successful clients, who are the most coachable. Have you seen any direct relation to the amount of struggles that they’ve had in their resilience, and their driving determination affecting their coachableness?
Tim Meuchel: Well, it probably indirectly is a better way to say it. What I believe and what I’ve seem to be proving out with each one of my clients and myself as well is you are a sum of all of the experiences added together that you’ve lived through your life, which makes you who you are. And when you figure out why you’re doing it, not necessarily what your passion is, but why you’re actually doing it, and you really, really figure that out. That is what makes you get out of bed in the morning. Things tend to clear up and become much more clear from a clarity standpoint, which is a mindset issue. And then there’s the confidence that goes behind it, which to me is the other piece of the mindset. It’s the confidence and the clarity working together.
So what I tend to do with my clients, I do it in my 10 Factor system, and I follow a very, very similar process in a coaching capacity when I’m working with somebody privately. But it’s really about figuring out where you want to be, not necessarily where you are, but where you want to be, and then figuring out how to get there. And I narrow it down to three pieces. Number one, you have to enjoy what you’re doing. So you have to find something that you would like, otherwise I feel like it’s not going to be sustainable when it becomes stressful. Number two, you have to be either good at it or you have to have the ability to get good at it, which can be either through training, or coaching, or education together with some natural abilities. And the third piece is you have to be able to make money. And when you can take all three of those things and put them together, and that goes back to Brendon Burchard saying: “It’s okay to make money because you don’t make money, you’re not going to be there to provide for the people.” So when you put all three of those things together, and when a client that I talk with is receptive from an open mind standpoint, and we use the word COACHABLE, and just for your listeners to understand what that means, coachable is not necessarily you’re telling somebody exactly what to do, what you’re doing is you’re looking from the outside and it’s not even really constructive criticism either, it’s just a function of, you’re helping the client figure out what they want to do. You’re just nudging them and establishing boundaries, and keeping them within that course, and helping them create more of a straight and narrow path versus a pinball machine path so that they can more quickly get to the end line or to the finish line.
Kim Sutton: Yup.
Tim Meuchel: And really it’s about defining why they’re doing what they’re doing? Why are they in the right space? They have to get the confidence that they’re in the right space. And then it’s defining down the road, what is that finish line? I had clients say that I want to work 30 hours a week, that’s all I’ve got. I have clients that say I want to be financially free in 10 years. Everybody has a different finish line. And then it’s just a function of working backwards from there, and that’s where my engineering mindset comes in where I go, okay, so now we know where the start is, we know what the finish is, we have to be brutally honest with ourselves about where we’re at right now. Just like you were being very transparent, you have to be very brutally honest with yourself of where you’re at right now, so you’re truly starting at ground zero, and then you have to understand where you want to be down the road. And then it’s a matter of working backwards, and we would call that reverse engineering. You’re basically reverse engineering your success, but then understanding that that’s one paper, but that’s not reality. So reality is you may have a client that doesn’t pay you, or you might have a client that fires you, you might have a change in your family structure, or somebody gets sick, or you have another child that’s unexpected that comes in that changes things. All these things that can interrupt the pattern of what you plan out. And then it’s a matter of constantly adjusting, and tweaking, and resetting over your course, and that’s where you’re living your life. And that’s why I feel like some people think, Hey, I’m going to have a coach for a few weeks or a few months. I’m gonna get my business straight and then I don’t need a coach anymore, and I think that’s a huge mistake. And I attribute that back to you thinking of like the professional athletes, the ones that are really, really elite athletes. When it’s at the off season, they’re still continuing to hone their craft. And that’s something that in business, it took me a while to figure out, and I write about it in the book, you are a professional, whether you’re a janitor, or whether you’re a CEO of a huge company, or whether you’re a self employed, small business owner, or whether you own a brick and mortar store, or whether you’re a cashier at the local grocery store, you’re a professional, whatever you do. And when you’re a professional, you have to continue to show up everyday, you have to be consistent, and you have to continue to keep up with the changes, and that’s really what the coaching in my mind really helps with is it helps you show up as your best self everyday, which makes everything better.
Kim Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So I have chronic idea disorder, I’m writing a book on it, but I’ve been recently conquering it for myself, which indicates to me that it’s really time to settle down and write the book on it. But what it meant to me was that I’m taking one project at a time to 100%. For years, that was my struggle, but the flip side, what I realized is I have one coach who asked me how many projects I was working on, and I told him three and he’s like: “Oh, you really? Based upon our last call, that’s not what it sounded like to me. Let’s write it down.” We can’t be working on 12 different projects at the same time by ourselves. I mean, when you were in construction, yeah, you could have had 12 different projects going on, but you had a team to support you in them. And then on the flip side, I get huge ideas in the shower, and one day I was thinking about my GSD list, I’m being respectful that people who are listening with kids, but my getting stuff done list. And I have regular conversations with God, and I heard it’s not a GSD list, it’s your prioritized purposeful actions. Kim, what are the things that you need to do today that only you can do that will make the biggest difference? So I instantly reframe those, things like cleaning out my inbox immediately get taken off my list when it’s reframed from a GSD to a PPA, to prioritize purposeful action. And then third, I’d been looking at what next level Kim would do? I told you in our pre chat and listeners already know my husband’s a video game designer. So I’m thinking about what it takes to level up, what does next level Kim do on a consistent basis that I’m not doing right now? And how many experience points do I want to earn every week? So I’m gamifying reaching that next level. What does 10 Factor mean to you? And what do you want it to mean to your listeners, to your clients, to the world at large?
Tim Meuchel: Well, The 10 Factor is, it’s basically a combination of all of my years of experience, letting life happen, letting business happen, missing some of the gut level signs that you had alluded to earlier in the conversation. Basically letting myself get walked down a path of having something bad happen that I could have prevented, and taking all of that and finding a purpose in it, which allowed me to go back to what I already knew. Figured out all over again, implement it, and then realize that when I got out of school, and I got out of my first 12 year job, and I really took my entrepreneurship full time, that I was really blessed to have so much knowledge about running a business and doing all those things that I took it for granted that other entrepreneurs are out there and they don’t have that knowledge and they’re learning by the hard knocks. It gave me the opportunity to put something out there from a legacy standpoint that was going to be there for lots and lots of people to go through whatever level they wanted to handle it, whether they wanted to do it themselves by following the steps in the book and the roadmap in the book, and whether they wanted to reach out to me and work with me privately, or whether they want to work with me in a group, it gives me the ability at different levels depending on what other people desire and need to help other people provide for their families in a way that I feel like I’ve been able to provide for mine. So that’s really what it’s all about.
Kim Sutton: I love that, and I want to thank you for being so transparent. I’ve realized, especially over the course of the last three years with this podcast that, well, I feel like I can help more people by being real, and by being transparent, and by sharing the negatives, even though this is Positive Productivity, but the what nots to do that was not proper grammar, and why not to do it. Like you were saying before, having a big ego and sharing how big I am, I just wouldn’t do that. To me, that’s in genuine and it’s out of integrity, and I want to give hope to the hopeless. So thank you for everything that you do, and for being real, and authentic, and transparent, and sharing your story. Tim, where can listeners find you online, learn more, get your book, listen to your podcasts and all that awesomeness?
Tim Meuchel: Well, the easiest thing is just go right to the10factor.com, so that’s going to be T-H-E-1-0-F-A-C-T-O-R.C-O-M. So if you go there you can, there’s a link to go right out, you can purchase the book, you can find the podcasts, and you can find access to my programs there as well. And just read about me, and obviously follow me on social media as well. That’s the best/easiest way to keep it to one place where you have all the information.
Kim Sutton: Love that. Listeners, if you’re driving, trying not to burn dinner, don’t want to fall off the elliptical, you can head on over to thekimsutton.com/PP648 where you will find all the links, even links to books that we’ve talked about and everything else. All the great stuff will be over there, and again, that’s thekimsutton.com/PP648. Tim, you’ve offered us so many golden nuggets already today, but you have one more that you can leave us with.
Tim Meuchel: Sure. Be consistent, show up everyday, and do it all with integrity.
