RORY & AJ VADEN: Peace Is the New Profit

0:00I got fired. And the moment that I started just saying that, I have been shocked and amazed at how many people have come up to me and said, thank you so much for just being honest. I'm Michael Hyatt. And I'm Megan Hyatt Miller. And this is The Double Win, a show about winning at work and succeeding at life. And, you know, here at our company, Full Focus, we've identified nine life domains, which are body, mind, spirit, love, family, community, money, work, and hobbies that you can cultivate to help you be the person you want to be and live the life that you want to live. So today's guests cover a lot of ground, but I think some of the most relevant are in these domains of love and work.

0:46And man, was this a great conversation. Well, we want to introduce you to Rory and A.J. Vaden. They have been friends of mine for about maybe 12 years, 10 years, something like that. But we first met on a cruise, of all things. We were both speakers at a Dan Miller event. And we met there. We became fast friends. We had common values. Rory's been a consultant to our company. He's amazing in all that he's done. And AJ, that's the secret weapon of this duo. That's right. She's the CEO of their business Brand Builders group. And they're actually co-founders of this group together. And they talk all about this in the show, like how they ended up there.

1:26It's an amazing story. Along with their company, Rory and AJ have been featured in Inc. Magazine, Success Magazine, Fast Company, Entrepreneur. And without further ado, here's our interview with Rory and AJ. Rory, AJ, welcome to the show. Hey, glad to be here. So glad y 'all are here. I'm so excited about this. We never get to do it in person. This is so fun. I know. We rarely get to do it either. And it's a lot of fun to do it in person because you get to pick up on things that you don't see over Zoom. Like it's Redhead Day. Yeah. Or like I'm constantly hitting Rory being like, stop talking, stop talking.

2:01Apparently Rory and I missed the memo on that. Yeah. I feel like you guys could have tried a little harder. Okay, fair enough. Well, guys, just give us a little bit of background, sort of beyond the professional bio, which we already shared with the audience, but just a little bit about how you came to where you're at today, both personally and in your business world. So we started as business partners before we fell in love. Wait, wait, wait. Seriously? Serious. Was that a strategy? Quite the opposite. It worked out as a strategy for me to land a woman I probably never would have gotten otherwise.

2:40He always says to land, but I pretty much hunted him down. We were working together for a year, seeing other people, and on a Valentine's Day. So she grew up with somebody that I met in college, and they were close friends. And then him and I met in college, and we were like, hey, we're going to start a company. and he's like, well, if we're going to start a company, we have to have my best friend, AJ. She's the smartest woman I know. Which makes no sense. It was such a God thing. Made absolutely no sense how I got involved at all. But long story short, we were barely friends. We probably had five interchanges outside of work meetings in the first year we knew each other.

3:20And he randomly shows up at this Valentine's Charity Day event and I was on a date with someone else. You had just broke up with your longtime boyfriend. Long-term. And I had just broke up with my longtime girlfriend. And we see each other for the first time single. And I tell people all the time, it was literally love at second sight. It was like the clouds parted and the angels sang. And I knew right then and there, I was like, this is the man for me. Really? I sure did. Oh, my gosh. And I literally, I was on a date. And I told him, this will be our last date. Goodbye. We will not be seeing each other again.

3:54And he had brought me roses. It was Valentine's Day. And I literally told him that night, we're done. She dumped him on the date, in the middle of the date, and we danced the whole night. Is that typical for your decision-making? You're like very divisive. Yes. But then there is a part of the story that Rory loves to leave out and never tell anyone because three months later, he tried to break up with me. Keyword tried. And I said, no. She denied my application for removal. No. He was trying to be illogical, like we have this new business. it doesn't make sense for two of the founders to be dating like it was dangerous to me it was to me it was irresponsible potentially to go like hey we're building a company we've got other partners we've got people whose livelihood is now in our hands like this is not and i said well then i'll quit i'll leave but this this is happening the only solution is get married he was like i'm sorry what and i said you need to go think about this work this out I'll be waiting, but this is not ending.

4:57And I got that new. Awesome. Gail actually broke up with me twice during our engagement. I think it was three times. No, twice. Okay. Just during the engagement. During the engagement. But this is when I knew I had a career in sales. I sold her back into being engaged with me. And I had to do it twice. I was very patient. I didn't get rattled about it. I was just like, you know, it's okay. Take all the time you need. I'm not going anywhere. And it worked out. We've been married 46 years. Wow. Still love. When you know, you know. And I was like, I know. I know. So you're going to need to work that out, Rory.

5:27Okay, so tell us about the business. What kind of business were you in? So we started a sales training business. So we're in our 20s, right? And I had been going door to door in my summers, 14 hours a day, six days a week. And so the only thing I knew was how to sell. But I wanted to be a speaker and I wanted to be an author. My dream was like, how do you get to be the guy on the stage in the arena full of all the people? and so we were like we're going to build the greatest sales training company the world's ever seen and so we had this model that we took a Yellow Pages phone book and we literally shredded it into force there were like four people this is 2006 I mean some people don't even know what you're talking about yeah there was a book it was like Google in a book is like what it was for those of you it's a great way to explain that I'm going to file that away and we literally took four piles and we said, you call these people, you call these people.

6:23I was the least experienced, had never sold anything in my life, so they gave me W, X, Y, and Z. Amazing. I had no idea. I was none the wiser, but it turned out in my favor. I picked up some really big accounts like Wells Fargo and Yellow Book, which I imagine doesn't exist anymore. So we would call on these companies, offer to come into their office to do a free one hour sales training. And then the goal was if we blow everyone's mind and the boss's mind with how much value we can teach in an hour, give us an opportunity to sell all your people a ticket to come to our one day event. So we were selling sales training to experienced sales people as 20 something year old sales professionals, convincing them to buy a ticket to come learn from us for another day.

7:17Wow. And then was there an upsell beyond that? So in other words, if they came to... Oh, there wasn't. No. No. We hadn't thought that far. We were not that far ahead. It was all about selling. One step at a time here. One step at a time. We were doing it the hardest way possible. We moved to a new city every four months for like four and a half years. Yeah, we lived in 14 cities in four and a half years. Because the strategy was all the events. It was like we wanted to be speakers. She didn't. She had no idea that speaking was even part of the job when we sold her on signing up for it. I just said yes.

7:49And so we would, but we sold like 700 tickets in the first three months and generated a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue. And it was like a week before the event that we were all sitting around going, what do you think we should teach at the event next week? Who's speaking? Who's doing what? We still do that. Yeah. It all comes together. It always works out. It's not contrived that way. So then we were just like, well, I guess we'll pack up and go to the next city. Like the circus. Yeah. And it was like the circus. And we did that. But we had a... And we grew that company to like$2 million in revenue within like the first year and a half or so.

8:26But we couldn't scale it because we couldn't... Nobody wanted to live on the road full time making cold calls. So that's how we started. But we eventually figured out... People said, oh, the events are amazing. What else do you have? And we figured out, oh, coaching. And so we started selling coaching. and things started to change. And then we figured out it was actually much faster and cheaper to sell coaching without the event entirely. We could just do the workshop and then sell coaching. And so that's what we did. And then we started to scale. And so we built an eight-figure business in the matter of like a couple of years.

9:04And so AJ built a consulting division that worked with like big companies. We launched a speakers bureau. We built a speakers bureau. She really built that. And then coaching was kind of like the main revenue stream. And then speaking. And so we were out speaking. And then we exited that business in 2018. In all fairness, I got super fired. So Rory's kind. He says we exited. He exited. I got really fired. Wow. I love this story. I don't know how much of it you can tell. I don't mind. Well, AJ got canned. But, you know, it's in all fairness, it's like, you know how sometimes like in your heart, it's like, you know that you shouldn't be doing something, but you just keep pressing along because it's what you've been doing.

9:53Right. And I knew years before I got fired that this is not where I was supposed to be. Wow. And I just didn't have quite enough courage to leave. I was really comfortable making a lot of money, being flown around the world, speaking at big events and working in Fortune 100 boardrooms. And I felt a little too cool and also felt really comfortable. I also felt a lot of responsibility. At that point, we had a team of over 200 people and there was a lot of pressure of going like, what would it look like if I left? Or really like, who would I be if I left? Or what would I do if I left? And so I didn't, even though I knew I should have.

10:32And then things started to change culturally within the leadership and some were going left, some were going right. And it was not a double win. I mean, it was a single win. It was work is life. Work is all that matters, 80 hours a week. Who's the top producer? What's the award? What have you done lately? It was just, I mean, it was a sales culture, right? So it was a very intense. But at the end of the day. All we did was work. But at the end of the day, it was celebrated that work is first. Yeah. Oh, I've been in those cultures. The culture was work is first. And I think that's a part of why I never left is my identity was tied up in this job, this title, this money.

11:11And there was a lot of fear around, well, who would I be if I wasn't doing this? So did you guys have your children yet? No. Okay. We had - So you're married, but no children. That's also part of what was a part of the catalyst. Okay. Talk about that. because I think for a lot of people who are pursuing the double win, there is that catalytic moment when there's kind of like before and then something happens and then there's after and that really galvanizes the commitment to winning at work and succeeding at life. Well, in all honesty, it wasn't until I had Jasper that I realized something was really off because I only took a three-week maternity leave.

11:45Oh my goodness. There was so much pressure to be back at work and performing. There was so much fear tied around, well, if I'm gone for any amount of time, I'm like, what will happen? And so I only took three weeks. And three weeks later, I was on the road again, pumping in airports. She was pumping. I remember it was like three weeks. She had a gig in Knoxville. She was driving herself in the middle of the storm, pumping while she was driving, making sales calls, and she got lost. And it was like... I got off the wrong exit and went back to Knoxville instead of coming to Nashville. And it was like 10 p.m.

12:22at night. And I had one of those gas station moments where I'm like, what am I doing? And it was literally on that drive home that I'm like, something has to change. This isn't what it's supposed to be like. Why am I leaving my three-week-old child to go do this? And that was the beginning of, okay, something is wrong here. The whole idea that this is what I should be doing. I was being congratulated for being back at work. Something is wrong here for me. something is wrong here for me yeah and I think it's the classic you know we were really young we worked really hard we had a lot of success people were making a lot of money when young people get a lot of money in their hands they do different things and it's literally when people say it's philosophical differences that really is what it was and when we had Jasper it was like our values you know started to change and we started to realize like oh we actually have a different vision, I think, maybe for how our life should go.

13:23Was this changing for you, Rory, at the same time that AJ was coming to this? No, I would have had the logo of the former tattooed on my butt the day before it all went down. I mean, I was in for life. I was all in, and I was part of the culture. I mean, I was part of the culture. Like, this is, you know, we work, and we make sacrifices, and we're disciplined, and we do things. A lot of that was super healthy and super wonderful and beautiful and changed my life. There were wonderful experiences that came from it. We learned so much, and a lot of my personal character was just developed from that.

14:01And then, so anyways, no, I was all in. It was really hard to say. I got fired. And the moment that I started just saying that, I have been shocked and amazed at how many people have come up to me and said, thank you so much for just being honest. Same thing happened to me. and I've had so much shame around it to own it. And one of the things that dawned on me is that didn't happen to me. It happened for me. And for me anyways, I know not everyone's experience is this, but I was sitting in this room being told, like, today is your last day. Your services are no longer needed here. And I'm a somewhat bold individual, have opinions at times, share them often.

14:42in. And I heard this voice in my head, and it kept saying, keep your mouth shut, let this happen. Keep your mouth shut, let this happen. And I knew that wasn't me. I would never say that. And I just knew it was God, that God was saying, keep your mouth shut and let this happen. And so I did. And it happened. And I was walking out both terrified, humiliated, and completely free and light. I had an immediate unburden. Now, lots of burden came soon after, but it was an immediate like, I didn't have to do that hard thing. Thank you, God. Because I don't know if I would have ever had the ability to quit, but God was like, clearly you can't.

15:27So I'm going to step in and do it for you, but we're going to do it on my terms. And that's what I needed. And so anyone who was struggling with that, I would just say it's like, it's rather you're going to do it because you know you should, or eventually it's going to happen for you because you didn't have the courage to do it. And that was the best. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Wow.

15:54Right after that, you guys are essentially starting over, starting from zero. Not just essentially. So both of our incomes went straight to zero. We had just moved into our new house. We just had our first child. Then we were not planning on starting a company. We had no plans. We had no strategy. We had no vision of this. And this is part of the story of what became Brand Builders Group, which is what we do today and has grown so fast, is we were faced with what is our identity and who are we and what now we were so all in on one thing and god literally it went evaporated overnight and my social media following was owned by the company um our podcast our podcast our email list our um all of our social media accounts everything was an asset of the company so all of that went to zero our team disappeared like and we had no plan and literally like the day this happens we get a call from lewis house which was a friend that i had been on his podcast so when take the stairs so our first book when it hit new york times i was 29 and i got invited onto lewis's show and he had this like new school of greatness podcast right and so i thought he was really cool because he was the same age as me and i was like dude you should write a book one day and he's like i'm actually thinking about it and i said well let me show you like i'll tell you you know let me help you here's how we hit the new york times essentially with like no following and no fame and no celebrity and like here's how we pulled this off and um and so we became friends that way and then we lost touch um and he wasn't a client or anything we were just like when we lost touch we hadn't heard from lewis in years wow and literally the day this goes down, you know, it's like Lewis calls and he goes, hey, I don't know why, but I feel like I'm supposed to call you.

18:02This is literally what he says. He has no clue. And he says, Amazing. my business has grown a lot. We're doing, you know, multiple millions in revenue and my podcast has grown some, but like, it's chaotic. I'm not, I'm making a lot of money. I'm not keeping a lot of money. I'm working like crazy. I'm pulled in a thousand directions. I'm hiring all these people. And I feel like I need your brain on my business. Is there any chance you'd be available? Let me think about it. Yes. Ironically, we have a lot of time on our hands right now. It's like calendar's open. So Lewis comes to our house. Literally same week.

18:41And we don't have any content. We have no plan. We're just asking him questions and we start walking him. Sitting in our basement. Through a process. and at the end of it he goes this is the most powerful business experience i've ever had this is what you guys were born to do wow and this is your new business what a literal godsend a literal godsend and it was like it was like no no this is not our business it was like we don't have a business like we just got out of business like all we've been doing is working like we're we're gonna like lay low for a minute and he's like no no this is what you're supposed to do and he said well and then it was like well Lewis we don't have a team we don't have an email database we don't have a software like we don't have a bank account like a we have nothing we have nothing and he said that's okay I'm gonna have you on my show and we're gonna tell the whole world that this is what you do and unbelievable and so and he did and he did and so we over the next like six months had over 1 ,000 people request a free call from that podcast interview.

19:46Oh my gosh. But I have to, this is a really important part of how Brand Builders got started because we are a personal brand strategy firm. We help individuals build their personal brands. And when we went on Lewis's show, we didn't even have a website, much less individual websites. No social media, right? It's all gone. No podcast, no email list. We had nothing. And we had an unstylized landing page with a picture of us with an orange button that said, request a call here. Sort of a sales prevention program. Yes. That it was really the power of understanding that those are not the things that build a personal brand.

20:27What builds a personal brand is the relationships that you build offline and the trust that is established by doing the right thing, even when it has no benefit to you. And it was because of the trusted audience that Lewis had and the trust he had in us that then they trusted us. And those were just like light bulbs going off left and right of how we were supposed to help people build their personal brands. Not just the idea of it, but how to do it, which was much more about trust and reputation and character and like really doing what you're uniquely designed to do. Not just how do you do it so you can launch a webinar.

21:05And not colors and fonts and logos and copywriting and what technology and marketing automation and what equipment do you use? And all of those things enter into the conversation, but they're all tactical things. The strategic thing is that we say personal branding is simply the digitization of your reputation. That's a powerful idea. It's really reputation. What I love about this story, first of all, I'm just like on the edge of my seat, everything you say, I'm like, I can't believe that happened too. But I love that the worst thing that ever happened to you was also the best thing that ever happened to you.

21:45And I think that's such a takeaway for you listening that, I mean, I would say this is true in our own lives, too. I mean, we can think about so many struggles that we've had. And, like, while you wouldn't want to relive that, that sounds like a horrible day, the meltdown day. But you couldn't be where you are today. Absolutely. And the other thing is that you now have a company that's all about identity. And this process was necessary for you to go through in order to excavate your own identity and separate it from kind of this ego piece that was keeping you from getting the double win and really keeping you from ultimately what you were made to do.

22:26It was in the way. It had to get out of the way. And what a gift. It's like a severe mercy.

22:41So when you started this new business, especially having the experience you'd had, AJ, with the prior company, did you intentionally say, we're going to allow room for life? Yes. And honestly, that was one of the reasons why getting fired was such a God's sin blessing. It really did have to be burned to the ground in order for us to have any hope to build something that we wanted. This was not one of those things that we could have just made some subtle changes and it's like, no, it had to be burned to the ground for us. Burned to the ground for us. The company's still doing great as far as we know.

23:14But this was an opportunity for a true do-over, a true clean slate start over and we said, in this next iteration of life and business, we have to be able to do everything we do between the hours of nine and five. And after that... It's a cliff. It wasn't a boundary. It was a cliff. It was like, you know, it wasn't like a guardrail. It's like at five o 'clock. We are done. You shut the laptop. You stop taking phone calls. You have to be done. And we're not super hardcore about it based on the season that we're in. But I have two awesome little accountability partners that are four and seven who are my accountability partners.

23:56And they bust up in my office and they're like, you're done. And I'm done no matter where I am. But it was an opportunity for us to go, how do we want to do life? How do we want to do family? How do we want to do work? And really, what it gave us the opportunity for, at least in our lives, was to invite God into our business and say, God, this is yours. We will, you know, I love that saying. It's like, work like only you can, pray like only he can. And it was like, we will work to every ounce of our being from 9 to 5. And after that, God, it's up to you. You do what you want to do with this. And that other time is protected.

24:30and my spiritual life has gotten better. I actually have a dedicated regimen of time with the Lord, time reading, time with my kids, time with my husband, time for myself. Now, I don't get it every day, right? But I didn't have that before. So we worked with Lewis Howes to tie back to that story really closely for like two and a half years. And in the first eight years of his show, he went from like... He's hanging in there. He got to like 30 million downloads in the first eight years. And then the two and a half years we worked with him, he went from 30 million to 500 million downloads. And he gives us a lot of credit publicly, more than we deserve.

25:11And what people don't always understand is to go, like, we didn't teach Lewis how to be a great podcaster. We didn't teach him, like, an algorithm hack or, like, the secret hashtags or anything. but what we did do was when lewis first came and spent the first two days with us he had 17 streams of revenue he wore that proudly because you hear this advice which i think is terrible advice on the internet to have multiple streams of income and so he had 17 streams of of income and what we said as we said lewis this one little thing over here that is the podcast it's not making a lot of money, but that seems to be where all the natural momentum is.

25:55That seems to be where your joy is. That seems to be the thing that is over-indexing for you in terms of the amount of time and energy you're putting in and the results you're getting back. What would happen if you went all in on that thing? And one of our core beliefs, which actually comes out of the Take the Stairs book, that was written a long time ago, that we've now seen with Lewis and now seen in our own life and now seen with hundreds of our personal brand strategy clients is if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. It's as simple as that of going, if I have 10 units of resource, whether that's prayer, time, money, attention, team, technology, whatever, if I have 10 units of resource and I divide that, I spread that across 10 initiatives, Each initiative gets one unit of resource.

26:49That's how most of the world operates. So the reason there's so much noise in the world of personal branding is people are doing lots of initiatives with very little resource. Enough to make noise, but never enough to break through. And our whole central strategy is to go, what if we took 10 units of resource and applied it to one initiative? And we went all in. And that's with Lewis. For him, it was podcasting. With other clients, it's been different. With Ed Milet, Ed was already crushing it by the time we met him. But we were able to help him really focus on a book launch. We helped him pre-sell 117 ,000 copies of his book.

27:33Which is crazy. That's unbelievable. In just a few months. And then the book comes out, hits all the bestseller lists. He goes on to sell over a million copies in the first 18 months. And his keynote fee doubles. him. A lot of things grow. But that was downstream of the focus on the one thing. Yeah. That was a focus for a season, right? Again, so many of our clients, I mean, here's a good strategy is pick clients who are going to be successful with or without you. And then once they're successful, you get to take credit for it. That's a good business strategy. And on this strategy of diluted focus gets diluted results, although we're talking about it specific to personal branding, the same thing applies for anyone who's listening with your team, with your schedule, with your kids, with your marriage.

28:15And I just, as a working mom, I see all the time. It's like I have so many friends that are like, sorry, can't do this, we're at baseball. Sorry, we can't do this, we're at soccer. And it's like some kids on a soccer team are on three sports on the same day. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And they have three kids or two kids. And the parents are like, no judgment, judgment-free zone. I'm just going, wait, when do you guys spend time together? The mom has these two, the dad has this one. And I literally, I just sat down. And one of the things that we had said in our family was like on this effort of like our kids are allowed to do one sport at a time and they have to pick the same sport.