Micah Logan is a dynamic entrepreneur, business owner, and visionary who’s built a diversified profitable health and fitness enterprise. From humble beginnings, he has nurtured a multi-service, multi-location, award-winning business. Boston’s A-list top five in personal training with a value proposition focused on high-quality client service. He’s also a trusted consultant to small business owners.
Micah Logan went to school for psychology, nothing like what he is doing now. He worked in various settings – boutiques, health and wellness and, medium-sized companies. Eventually, he opened his own business back in 2005 but it failed 13 months later. He partnered with a physical therapy company where he had a great relationship with them. However, because of the retraction, it didn’t work out. He took these experiences as a turnaround to create a business model that works really well. Now, he’s very excited about his brand-new business that focuses on the widgets that they reproduce, which is basically exercising relationships.
Watch the episode here:
Listen to the podcast here:
Clarifying Your Business To Delegate With Micah Logan
Brett:
I’m excited about our next guest. He’s a dynamic entrepreneur, business owner, and visionary who’s built a diversified profitable health and fitness enterprise. From humble beginnings, he has nurtured a multi-service, multi-location, award-winning business. Boston’s A-list top five in personal training with a value proposition focused on high-quality client service.
Brett:
He has leveraged his leadership communications and motivational skills to ensure that his customers are satisfied and his employees are high-performing and engaged. He’s also a trusted consultant to small business owners the relying on the competencies that he has developed throughout his career to help them level up. And he is here to jab a bunch of knowledge, a bunch of vision, and also give us some insights into how to level up our business. Please, welcome to the show with me. Micah Logan, Micah, how you doing?
Micah:
Doing great, Brett, man. It’s good to see you again.
Brett:
Absolutely, it is a pleasure to be on your show and it’s even more of an honor to have you now on my show with that being said, would you give our listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Micah:
Yeah, sure. I actually went to school for psychology, nothing like what I’m doing now. And as I was coming through the ranks in the health and wellness industry, I worked in various settings. I worked in smaller boutique settings, I worked in more corporate-like health and wellness settings, I worked for medium-sized companies. And then over time I eventually developed my own thought process and how I wanted to structure the business. And I opened my own business back in 2005. And fortunately for me, it failed, and 13 months later. And I say, fortunately, because as you know an entrepreneur, your success comes from, your education often comes from failure and not from success, right? The successes of a poor teacher. And after that, I went back into the course and I went to work for someone again.
Micah:
And then a few years later, I started the process of opening up more facilities again. And this time I partnered with the physical therapy company and it was great. I had a great relationship with them. I still do. And however, I was held captive to their own business strategies themselves, that they had a retraction of their business and I have four locations. And then because of that retraction, I ended up having to close three of them. And the fourth one ended up just not working out because it wasn’t the one that was my primary operation. And so what ended up happening after that? I actually got really fortunate.
Micah:
I opened up a brick-and-mortar downtown in Boston, and I ended up just creating this business model that works really, really well. And I’m excited to announce that in the first quarter of 2021, I’ve decided to franchise that prototype business. And I’m excited to see how that actually pans out. So that’s a brand new business for me, even though I’m in the business of selling that business, or I will be as opposed to focusing on the widget, the widgets that we reproduce, which is basically exercising relationships, things like that.
Brett:
Beautiful. So you’re scaling up by franchising it, and for those, by the way, before we get too deep into the episode here, where can they find those opportunities if they are going to be applied to be to maybe franchise what you’re doing there?
Micah:
Yeah. We’re still working out and mapping out the website, but when it’s up, it will be MELD, meldfranchise.com. That’s MELD, meldfranchise.com, and they could find all the information there. And the new franchise concept is going to be called MELD Fitness the Wellness. And it’s a wonderful concept that I can’t wait to introduce to everyone-
Brett:
Beautiful-
Micah:
The wellness 2021.
Brett:
… glad to have you back in about a quarter and to see how everything’s going or halfway through the year to see how everything’s going.
Micah:
I love it.
Brett:
Before we dive into some of the strategies and thoughts on how you’ve successfully built your business so far. And some of the learning experiences you had for the first failure. I want to take a step back. I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life. Mike, I believe these gifts, or some people call them superpowers. I believe their God-given gifts, and these gifts are given to us to be a blessing to others. Right? And so I’m curious, maybe before all the entrepreneurial stuff, and maybe back in the college days or even high school days, what was that one or two gifts you believe you were given Mike, and how does that help how you help others today?
Micah:
Well, first and foremost, I definitely agree with you that these are definitely God-given gifts. I think that’s important to state but I believe that the gifts that I was given were the ability to focus on a goal and to be able to create for whatever reason I had this brain where I never stopped learning. And so I’ve been able to develop the ability to create ecosystems and structures and get rid of inefficiencies and create efficiencies. And I feel like I’ve been given the ability to actually become a world builder. And that’s what led me into franchising, which is the thought that my ability to create systems and processes and enter into rid a business process of its inefficiencies, it really helped me to refine my business, which obviously took years of lesson learning and just in general business pragmatics, but also it helped me to able to teach these skills and abilities to people who would want to go into business for themselves.
Brett:
Excellent. Fantastic. Let’s dive right into that. I mean, what are the top, one or two secrets to creating or recreating an ecosystem inside of a business to get rid of efficiencies?
Micah:
Well, first and foremost, I think that everyone who starts a business and who is trying to create systems that become scalable, leverageable, and then ultimately saleable, and then they end up calling you is I think that business owners or entrepreneurs, need to be able to write everything down that they do. And oftentimes entrepreneurs, what they do is they keep a lot of information in their heads. They don’t really share it, not that they’re being selfish, but they just have a hard time trying to explain what exactly it is that they do. And one of the things that the franchising process has taught me is that you have to actually go into your head and really sit down and think about how is it that you do everything? How do you turn on the light switch? How do you open, have you close?
Micah:
How do you manage cash management? How do you manage projecting out marketing activities? How do you budget for the next year? How do you staff? What are the most appropriate staffing procedures and policies to use? So writing out everything is super important. I think that’s the number one thing is just writing down everything that you do. And the second thing that I think that second way that business owners and entrepreneurs can get rid of inefficiencies is by keeping their operations as lean as possible, learning how to somewhat grow through cash, as opposed to growing through debt and finance, which, although I have no problem with people leveraging up in their business a little bit. But the reality is I think that if you can learn how to manage on a lean budget and through cash, think that you’re doing something pretty magical there.
Micah:
It’s not always possible, especially at the beginning. And given that franchising, almost sounds contradictory because most of the people who would purchase a franchise probably are going to leverage themselves a little bit. But I think by doing that, you’re able to create for yourself profitable behaviors that end up leaning toward wider and more profitable ventures in the future because you can keep yourself constrained in your spending and how you’re dealing with your budget.
Brett:
Yeah. My thought on that is it’s almost like you’re working out your operations muscles, right?
Micah:
Yeah.
Brett:
And if you’re taking on too much debt or if debt’s becoming your solution to that, or you’re not even really a solution, but the bandaid over what’s bleeding right. Then you’re not getting to the core of what needs to be done. Right. So instead of I guess you don’t want to say the diet pill, right. You got to get below and get to your numbers and make sure that is that a fair summary?
Micah:
Yeah, I think so. I read a book by Mike Michalowicz the author of Clockwork. He also wrote a book called Profit First. And what I find interesting about the concept of Profit First is that regardless of what your operating expenses are what I’m going to say, defies convention and in gap principles, general accounting principles, right? which is basically, you always find a way to pay yourself, even in the startup phase, you find a way to pay yourself and after you pay yourself and he has a chart based off of what kind of revenue you take a year in, is how much you should pay yourself versus what you should spend on your expenses. And I just find the principle interesting that you should always seek to pay yourself not so that you’re comfortable so that you’re not looking around at doing other things while you’re trying to build a business.
And I think that there’s something there too that and his system of profit versus the envelope system, but I think it worked for startup businesses. And so what happens is startup businesses, they’re so distracted by how much money they’re not making and that they have to go and pursue other opportunities just to keep the lights on that because they’re not paying themselves. Whereas if you had some of that opportunities to think about how you wanted to deploy your capital, if you had to be a little bit cheaper, if you had the second-guessed something, if you had to restrategize, maybe do a little more guerrilla marketing, that’s cost a little less to be more effective, create better partnerships and personal relationships to drive referrals, it drives those behaviors when you have less to spend on marketing and certain other capital expenditures.
Brett:
Yeah. Very well said. Likewise, I’ve read those books. Think there’s a Pumpkin Plan, there’s Clockwork and then Profit First. And they’re very challenging, right? Because you follow it to a T, which I think it’s wonderful. It’s almost like you need to me, at least in my brain, the way my brain works like an entrepreneur driver personality expressive. I need to hire an analytical person. Right. And until I just run that, I mean, I know that’s what I put in my brain. I need to own that and take responsibility and align that with team members. There’s I have I’m delegating and hiring more folks, but can you speak to just that overcoming that driver personality per se, versus getting in some of the nuts and bolts and making it all work.
Micah:
Yeah. So it’s funny that you say that. So every time I test on a personality test or the personality spectrum or something like that, I’m a Myers Briggs on the EMTJ, I’m a type-A personality on the eight 8w7 wings on another test. I’m a dominant A-type personality on every single test I take and it just gets worse. So I stopped taking them because it’s all the same thing. Right. But what I find is people maybe like you and me, who can build ecosystems, these worlds, the structures of businesses, oftentimes terrible managers. And I think that you get into this with your point, which is that if you start focusing on too many of the day-to-day details, there are people out there who excel in middle management and day-to-day details.
Micah:
And those people should be running the business because they have the opportunity to run. You drop the playbook as the coach and they run the play. But for you as a world builder, you have to keep a singular focus on what your long-term vision is, and then create those steps by which your business can grow, generate revenue. And so that you could actually train and bring people along so that they’re happy and healthier in their career. And they want to stay there. And creating a coaching tree-like in football, I think is really important. And having a plan for that, because if you’re not helping your employees and maybe your co-founders or whatever the case is, grow professionally and personally when they’re employed by you which is should be a part of your plan.
Micah:
Then I think you need to revisit what your plan is because you want people to slowly develop over time. So people who are more detail-oriented had the ability to do that. Because they can focus on the day-to-day. And what ends up happening is as an A-type, personality extrovert that you just like a world-beater. When you start focusing on the details, you get exhausted by mid-day or a third of the day passes. You’re just like, “Dude, I have no energy to the podcast. I have no energy to build a business.” It really is. And it’s hard to explain, and maybe you feel like this too, but what do you focus on so me details, like middle-management details during the day, you are so drained, you’re white.
Brett:
100%, right, I mean, that’s just, “Hi, my name is Brett and I’m drained by all the middle-management details. I’m here to find help.” Right?
Micah:
Exactly.
Brett:
I feel like… And then when I find that amazing hire, which I have an amazing one, she’s our executive assistant and she’s and so now I’m like, “Hey, how are you doing?” She’s like “Go hire another one of you, you are cute doing that” Whatever you need if I lose you, it all comes down.
Micah:
Yeah, no, it is amazing. And it helps you to focus on Clockwork. What do you call it serving you queen bureau, which is basically focusing on what you’re best at. And a lot of people call it, different things. The Pareto principle, which is 20% of your customers are going to produce 80% of the sales for you. And work if you were in actual the deployment of business and entrepreneurism if you reverse engineer that Pareto principle, 20% of whatever produces 80% of the results. You need to save your whole 5% at what you’re good at for what you do really, really well. And then the 95% you have to outsource. And if that starts to reverse itself, then you start to just get that drain. And it’s hard to be creative and continue to try to push the envelope in your business and to figure out frankly, how you want to grow.
Brett:
Okay. So we’ve got to focus on now already, okay? So Micah.
Micah:
Yeah.
Brett:
How do you help me, how to help us as we’re listening anyone who’s an entrepreneur, maybe a type A personality driver expressive. How do you help me to focus on the top 5% and then outsource the next 95? And in a particular case, I guess it could be budgeting and paperwork and the day-to-day, the processing of the deals, right? How do we do that?
Micah:
That’s brutal. Well, first and foremost, you have to make a hire. I always think that it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. So in your case, obviously in finance, if in my case health and wellness, I’m also the CEO of a manufacturing company. So even in that case it doesn’t matter what business you’re in your first hire should be in the system, I believe before you hire a technician. And that also goes towards the E-Myth. If we’re just throwing random entrepreneurial books out there to create what Michael Gerber calls the franchise system. Now we’re not talking about the franchise system in terms of the actual franchise right now, but what we’re talking about is systematizing a small business so that it grows in maturity.
Micah:
And so that your business can develop. And so the best way for an entrepreneur who has a crazy mind like you and me, and has a hard time reigning ourselves in, is you have to hire someone who can organize your thoughts and your behaviors first because your business is going to grow so fast by having somebody who can take how you think and what you say and distill it into a stream of action and things that need to take place.
Micah:
Or even if you can distill your thoughts into written form, if they’re not getting done because there’s no one to take those and run with it, then you’re losing money and you’re losing time and you’re losing business, frankly. So the first thing I would say is to hire an administrative assistant. And nowadays with this global economy, you can hire a virtual assistant and virtual assistants function nicely. And just a few tips for that. I would say that virtual assistants come from all over the world. And so if you’re listening to this podcast in the United States, you want to make sure that your virtual assistant speaks English really well, and that they dictate well. They can write, that they have good grammar and that they understand basically, we all have idioms and things related to where we live, so they should understand basic U.S. idioms and things like that.
Micah:
But once you find a VA who’s qualified and if they’re out of the country can understand language and all the other stuff. I think it’s really important to make that hire so that they can take some stuff off your plate, including having them answer emails in your email account for you, which I think is awesome.
Brett:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s so well said. And we’re distilling my thoughts to written form. I love that, organizing my thoughts and behavior first, right. Someone who’s going to be able to systematize, make that hire the assistant. And so I have that one and I think at this point I need to double, I need to say, “Hey, find someone who’s like you and then double.” So would you double that person or would you find an assistant to the assistant, what were your thoughts there?
Micah:
I think the framework is to hire an assistant to help you organize 95% of the things in the details that you don’t need to be focused on. And then you start to offload 70% of the things that people can do of yours 80%. So if you can find somebody who can do what you do, but do it 80% as good as what you do, you have to realize that in the business world often that’s good enough because 100 doesn’t exist in the business world. And so what I find is that it’s often not that entrepreneurs and small business owners or whomever you are, that they can’t find these people is that they often don’t trust people to offload to, because they feel like they don’t do it as good as them. And that is a problem because if you continue to feel that way, then you’ll never actually offload the stuff that you need to offload.
Micah:
And so I would go a virtual assistant or assistant, in-person assistant. I would offload most of the detailed tasks that are more repetitive tasks and don’t necessarily require a lot of critical thinking. And then I would hire that person who can deal with the widget, whatever your widget or specialty is that can actually do the critical thinking afterwards. And then offload about 70 to 75% of what you do. That’s critical thinking. You can offload to them because you want to get into the position where you’re just making decisions about what to do, either project-based or 30,000-foot view decisions on the business itself. And then as that person starts to get busy, you give them an assistant. If you’re still a small business at that point, or you create employees to handle some of those tasks that trickle down from there.
Brett:
Okay so I get all that and I hear it. I understand it makes sense. But how did you make personally take the knowledge and put it into action to do that? And did you have coaching, were you in a mastermind, and besides reading the books, walk us through just your transformation there.
Micah:
I travel a lot because of masterminds and coaching and some of the stuff that you said, seminars I spend thousands of dollars a year on education for myself to continuing ed. I spend a lot of money on books. My bookshelf, sir. Off-Camera but they’re all over the place in here. But what I can tell you is that I took available of all the free time when I normally would be sitting there as an example, before I even decided to franchise something like maybe 12 years ago, what I did was I was on a flight back from California to Massachusetts where I live six and a half hour flight six, depending on the jet stream. And instead of just going to sleep, I started thinking to myself, well, one day I may franchise, or one day I may just want to sell the business.
Micah:
And I remember sitting in the presentation where it was just like, well, if you’re going to sell your business, the money is in the operating manual and not just in your funky business, that has no exact plan. So what I started to doing is I started to think, okay, what do I do every time I entered the facility? How do I want it done? And I wrote it down. If I was going to go in and start at the beginning in the morning to open up for our customers, how do I do that? And I slowly started writing down open the door, turn on the light, turn this on, turn that on. And then I started stepping through each and every phase of operating the business as excuse me, as grueling as it was.
Clarifying Your Business To Delegate With Micah Logan: If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.” – John C. Maxwell
Micah:
I stepped through each phase to decide, well, okay on this phase now, what do I do? And I wrote it down and I stepped through an entire day. And then I did that with every single position in my business. And then once I did that with every position in my business, I then said, okay, now globally, how do I make decisions about my business and for my business that helps to move my business forward? And then I wrote down that stuffs. So even on the higher level, so I took myself out of a technician’s role. And then I started making applications and writing down contextually what I did and making decisions even higher. And then once I did that, I started to say, well, when have I engaged marketing firms and what have I engaged them for and what have I needed them for?
Micah:
And then I wrote that down as an example of my higher level decision-making. And so I just eventually was able to get to, I would say about 95% of again, I never used the amount of 100 because in the business, really, because your business, you have to save that 5%, four times when you go to a seminar or you speak to someone who’s another entrepreneur, and you hear something that helps you to evolve your business. And so 95% of my business has been documented, it’s well-documented I can pass it on to someone who I don’t even know to run it today, tomorrow, and you can just step in and then just run it. And it comes from slowly, systematically over time, thinking about every single position in the business that existed, and thinking about if I were to grow, what would be the ideal position? What would be the ideal person I would want in there to help propel the business forward and write down what I would want to have them do.
Micah:
And then I’d write down job descriptions for every one. I wrote down what I thought that it could make, for profitability and all the other stuff. And I just took it all out of my brain and put it on paper.
Brett:
Amazing. So you did the work and the smallest detail for every single role, everything that you were doing in the business, you’re writing all of that down and documenting it and you go, “Hey, for the entire day, if I was this role,” which is, let’s say transaction coordinator, or I was the one doing the budgets, or I was wondering the podcast and you just going to write down each step and then document all that and then say, okay, who’s the hired. And I’m going to give that to them. And I’m going to trust them and train them and coach them up to about 70, 80%. Because I’m never going to be 100% and then let them just run with it. And now I’m going to move on to the next one, make the next hire for that. And the next one is that a fair summary?
Micah:
That’s exactly it. And it sounds so stupid writing down something as simple as flip this switch or turn this dial. But frankly, when it’s all together, it is amazing what effect, simple instructions have on a person. It builds confidence slowly over time, and it allows them to take ownership of what they do. And if you read the book Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, taking ownership of employees is important. You give that to them when you actually provide them with the ability to handle a job in the right way.
Brett:
Amazing. So is there a digital resource to help to document, write this stuff down A and then what’s the one book? Would it be the E-Myth would it be would it be the Pumpkin Plan? Would it be Clockwork? What would be the one if we say, “Hey, just start with this and this to start that process,” what would it be?
Micah:
So the process digitally is Google Drive, because it’s amazing. And if you have an assistant who can work with you and fact check or grammar check what you’re writing in there that works too. But the reason why Google Drive is nice, because no matter what device you have, you can always log in and edit it. And so whenever I had free time to edit what I was doing over years, remember this is 12 years and you don’t have to take 12 years. I just did it because I did it in times when I had spaces and travel and availability. You just document it, you write it down, write down everything you do. And it’s always live, it saves instantly. And so you never have to worry about your hard drive crash. And so I recommend Google Drive because it lives in the cloud and is secure in terms of the book.
Micah:
The E-Myth is the small business Bible. And I think that every single business, that owner that owns a business or entrepreneur, even if you’re an entrepreneur and you have interested in multiple different arenas or channels where you make your money, you need to read the E-Myth because you should still systematize how you invest and how you deploy your capital and your money. Having a system for that is just as important. And even investors get bought by other investors. So I think it’s really important to systematize everything you’re doing in business, because frankly at the end of the day, you’ll have nothing to worry about in terms of if I were to take six months off, well, my business still grow or is it going to crash?
Brett:
Beautiful, amazing. Wow. You’re like the business Docker Monica you said you did psychology in college, right. But you’re doing psychology all over the place here. So with business what are your thoughts on that?
Micah:
Well, I think business is psychology because it’s part of your life. The first thing that I coach when I’m doing small business consulting with all the businesses is this. And I think it’s very simple. What kind of life do you want to lead when you’re older? If you feel like you want to spend time with your family, if you want to have more time with your kids, with yourself, if you’re not married, if you want to travel, whatever the case is, I frankly, you need to figure out what you want to be doing later in life. And your business should serve your life. And not the other way around. There’s too many people whose lives and serving their business. And that’s an abusive relationship because the business has just taken from you.
Micah:
You need to flip the script and in order to flip the script, you need to have to start creating systems, a systematize a way to deploy your business. And it’s hard, especially when you’ve been doing business for a long, but you got to be honest with yourself and think about where you ultimately want to be. And that will guide how you actually deploy your thoughts around building a business and systems and things like that.
Brett:
Amazing and Micah do you help people do that? Because I want to make sure if we do, I want to point them to that website or that next action step for maybe part of your service or what is, tell us about that.
Micah:
I do. So I do these I think they’re pretty cool. They’re they call hot seat coaching sessions with people. So it was like 30 minutes. You call me up and then after you call me, then we just take a look at your business. There’s a cost to it. It’s like about 150 bucks, but we spend a half an hour literally ripping apart your business. And so what we do is, okay, we get on the phone or Zoom or whatever now, Zoom of course. And it’s like, well, what are the biggest problems in your business? And then of course you may say marketing, a person may say, well, decline in revenue. “I have a hard time retaining employees. I have a hard time actually growing or scaling my business.” And so one of the things we do is we take a half an hour and it’s a hot seat. You can ask me any question you want, and we just pick apart your business and go through how I can help you to rethink what’s happening in your business. What are some possible solutions to some of the issues that you’re struggling through? And I do have a link for that, that I can share with your listeners.
Brett:
Yeah just share right now and we’ll also put in the show notes, but what’s the link.
Micah:
I’m not sure. It’s micahlogan.com/hotseatcoaching.
Brett:
Okay. I’m going to share my screen right now with our listeners. So I’m on Mike is here because. So I’m going to go with the home, Micah here we go. And then I’m going to forward slash and I’m going to put say it one more time. Coaching, hot seat?
Micah:
Hot seat coaching.
Brett:
Hot seat coaching.
Micah:
And watch it be wrong. There may be a dash in there.
Brett:
She’s going to put in the show notes and we’re going to have that, but go to Micah-logan.com and then you can also contact him anymore. Micah that is fantastic. Are you ready for the hot seat? I mean, are you ready for the lightning round?
Micah:
I’m ready for the hot seat too.
Brett:
I’m ready for the hot seat.
Micah:
Let’s go, baby. I’m ready. Let’s do it.
Brett:
Yes. I feel like I’ve been on the hot seat because I got to improve. I got to stay at a level of my business game, but here’s a lightning round. All right. So knowing what you know now, Mike, if you go back to your 25 year old self, what’s the one golden nugget you would make sure you would do?
Micah:
Get a mentor, get a business coach.
Brett:
Cool. What’s the one book you’ve recommended the most or gifted the most in the past year?
Micah:
E-Myth, I’ve been gifted five times.
Brett:
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received.
Micah:
Good question. If we’re talking about business, the best advice I’ve ever received is to measure your results in business. You have to report to investors, so you should always provide some kind of assessment to whomever your customer base is, you should always be surveying your customers to see, is it’s all about refining your target market, making sure they’re happy. So yeah. Yeah. You got to treat the results in your business like you’re trying to provide an investment report.
Brett:
Excellent. Give us a mobile or digital resource you recommend for your business.
Micah:
Yeah. One of my favorite resources, free or paid?
Brett:
Free or paid doesn’t matter.
Micah:
Okay. One of my favorite resources for my business, I think is Mint it’s like financial software and you can break everything into categories. It’s supposed to be personal finance software, but you can just put all your business stuff in there. Another one is Personal Capital. I think it’s called Personal Capital I’ll look. Yes, it is. It’s called Personal Capital. And what it does is it takes all your business investments, your assets, if you’re in the stock market, you can put in your cars, you can put in and it creates a net worth for you. And it creates a whole bunch of different metrics. So you can see how your net worth is growing over the years. And it measures it. It reads my Vanguard account and things like that. And so it is nice because you can see how you’re actually, when we’re adults, our scoreboard is our balance sheet and our profit and loss statement. So it helps to keep that top of mind.
Brett:
Beautiful. What are you curious about right now?
Micah:
Frankly, I’m curious about the nature of the franchising industry. With the Coronavirus, it’s estimated that something like 30% of businesses is going to go out of business and people may be saying, “Well, with some of the restrictions, the shutdowns, why are you franchising a health and fitness business right now?” And I think frankly is because I think that the world is going to shift and change. I think it’s going to be a time where people actually leave businesses, that they feel like you’re uncertain and they want to gravitate towards more stable brands is the reason why Amazon and other well-known online e-commerce retailers have seen significant increases in consumer pay because people during an uncertain time gravitate towards brands. And so I’m curious right now to see how and what becomes of our franchise brand mainly because I want it to become this trusted brand in the U.S. I want people to make that association. And so I think that to me is very curious.
Brett:
Yeah, last question here, and then we’ll wrap it up. So after all your success, all the people you’ve helped. And the story of failure success in business and learning so much in between, how do you stay centered, Micah in your values, and how do you stay encouraged to charge for to reach new goals?
Micah:
Yeah. So that’s a good question. So I’m going to show you.
Brett:
Yeah, I love it.
Micah:
I have two phones and I didn’t always have two phones. And when I didn’t have two phones I guess it sounds like a really simple thing, but I was always getting buzzed in messages, text message, emails, all that stuff. And frankly, it was draining just knowing that the messages were coming in. It was hard to turn it off. And I have two kids and a wife and my wife has been extremely patient, extraordinarily patient over the years with the growth of my business, the lack of success in some areas, and then the rebounds and stuff like that. I think that being able to separate your work life and your personal life has tremendous intrinsic value and allows you to have some semblance of sanity.
Micah:
I do not do business on Sunday as a rule. Mainly because we worship on Sunday, but also spend time with the family, relax, watch football with the kids, watch a movie. You have to control your life as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner. And I know that in the ether, there’s this almost a religiosity to the thought that entrepreneurs, the hustle, the ground thing are like an 18 hour a day thing where you don’t sleep and sleep is for losers and you can sleep when you’re dead. But for me having kids growing up, a family has become infinitely more valuable. The time you spend with your kids, more valuable with your wife, valuable. And I think that I’m not naturally a person that would have paid attention to those things. If I wasn’t married to my wife who forces me to pay attention to the stuff like that.
Micah:
And so over time, I’ve understood the value of taking time out for the family, doing things together. I’m on a couple of boards in town from my kids’ school, I engage with the school system. I do things outside the industry and outside of work. And I involve myself in the personal life of very strongly of my kid’s education and stuff like that. And so that’s very important. It allows me to disconnect now stuff is still stressful, but I think there’s tremendous value in having a life outside of the hustle and the grind. And you should take actionable, I think hard system steps. I.e two phones to separate one from the other, have a day or two, when you either shut, do not disturb your iPhone because that’s why it’s there. And you can separate yourself and frankly don’t answer a text or email until the afternoon. That’s the other thing.
Micah:
If it is an emergency they’ll call 911. I truly believe that yeah.
Brett:
On your two phones, I’m curious. So you just like Monday through Friday you get the work phone, right. And then you just leave that at the office or whatever, turn it off. And then now it’s the personal phone you’re always carrying with you. Right? And then you pick it back up on Monday morning. How do you do that?
Micah:
Yeah, I keep my work phone on me Monday through Saturday morning. And then on Saturday morning, I may be like mid-morning, I shut it off for the rest of the weekend. And so I don’t get messages again until Monday morning. And so if I’m like, I’m looking at the internet, if I’m just, and I know it’s only like a day in three quarter a week, but that has a tremendous impact even my mentality because I think that over time, it’s just like when you’re eating, you can be full. My brain gets really full sometimes. And so taking that mental break and just knowing that for instance, I can be on the internet on my personal phone and I’m not going to get a ding when I’m on there that something needs to be done.
Micah:
It’s that stress not there. And I find myself less and less thinking about how many messages I have to get back to. And so if I go on vacation, I only take the personal phone too. So it’s a complete week where I don’t have anything and I do not have my work email on my phone at all. And the only people that have this work excuse me, the personal phone number also are people who are in a very small circle.
Brett:
Hey, so much wisdom there, right? Create a whole book on that strategy, right there. That is fantastic, so Micah, I want to thank you for being on the show. I want to encourage you to keep using the gifts and talents you’ve been given to bless others and help others in so many ways. Leadership, business growth franchising. I mean, amazing, by the way, you can find Micah at micahlogan@micah-logan.com, that’s micah-logan.com. And with that also want to thank our listeners for listening to that episode of the Capital Gains Tax Solutions Podcast is always, we believe most high net worth individuals and those who help them. They struggle with clarifying their capital gains tax deferral options, not having a clear plan is the enemy, and using a proven tax referral shadows such as the deferred sales trust or hiring someone like Micah to help you level up and scale your business and get your work-life sanity back is the best way for you to grow your wealth with that.
Brett:
Please rate, review and subscribe. Well, we can help you, who if you’re selling something a primary home, a business investment, real estate, defer capital gains tax, go to capitalgainstaxsolutions.com, get the free ebook, and also schedule your 15-minute consultation at no cost. We appreciate you. Thank you, everybody. Bye now.
Important Links:
About Micah Logan
He is a dynamic entrepreneur, business owner, and speaker who has built a diversified, profitable health and fitness enterprise. From humble beginnings, he has nurtured a multi-service, multi-location, award-winning business (Boston’s A-list Top 5 in personal training) with a value proposition focused on high-quality client service. He leveraged his leadership, communications, and motivational skills to ensure that his customers are satisfied and his employees are high-performing and engaged. He is also a trusted consultant to small business owners–relying on the competencies he has developed throughout his career to help them level up.
His world view is that people who have limited opportunities are an emerging market and he works passionately in many forums to set them up for success and activate their potential. He is focused on creating opportunities through a variety of forums including: Motivational speaking engagements (i.e. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Hopewell Inc., Blue Cross Blue Shield, J. Jill, UPS). He leads with honesty and integrity in all that he does.
