The One Thing That Will Guarantee Your Studio's Failure

Chris Graham (0:30)

I hired a new assistant.

Brian Hood (0:31)

That's great.

Chris Graham (0:32)

That's been going really, really well.

Brian Hood (0:34)

Practicing what you preach there.

Chris Graham (0:35)

Indeed.

Brian Hood (0:36)

By the way, this is something we didn't plan to talk about today, but Chris spent a lot of time building out a manual for his assistant to take on. So when he hired her, she could just pick up and go from day one. She was ready to take on all the things he needed her to do on a day to day basis for his business. So I think that's a great way to go about it.

Chris Graham (0:53)

Yeah, actually, it was thanks to you. You referred the book Virtual Freedom to me.

Brian Hood (0:58)

Yeah.

Chris Graham (0:59)

And I really used that as a blueprint for how to go about hiring an assistant. And so far, so good. She's great.

Brian Hood (1:06)

Yeah, that's the same book I read before hiring Sean. And Sean's the best thing that ever happened to me business wise.

Shout out to Sean.

Chris Graham (1:12)

There you go, Sean.

Brian Hood (1:14)

So if any of you are looking to hire somebody, I would highly recommend that book, Virtual Freedom.

Chris Graham (1:18)

I'm reading another book you recommended to me called Peak Performance. And that has been really, really, really good.

Brian Hood (1:26)

Yeah, I think I mentioned that on the podcast maybe five or six episodes ago when I was reading it.

Chris Graham (1:30)

Yeah, so I'm like, I don't know, maybe a third or fourth of the way through it. And it's been really kind of interesting to read it and think about how to apply that to being a little bit smarter and doing a little bit better work. And, you know, one of the big things for me personally, my wife and I, we are, we've got three kids and we homeschool.

And so this sort of idea of peak performance and, you know, helping our brains function as well as as well as they possibly can is we're really, really passionate about because we're homeschooling. You know, we're trying to figure out how to teach our children not just as good as public school, but better than public school. So thinking about psychology and brain development and all this stuff, we're really into it. And it has an awful lot to do with what we're talking about today.

And, you know, just about building a business in general, you have to optimize your brain. You have to get your IQ as high as you can get it, as much as I hate the word IQ, but there's a lot to this sort of self-optimization. You know, it's not just, you know, like we've talked about in the podcast in the past. It's not this, if you build it, they will come thing. It's this, you have to invest in yourself.

You have to grow. You have to get smarter. You have to learn new skills. And it's only through that pursuit that you'll build a successful business or a lot of dumb luck.

Brian Hood (2:46)

I think I have a little bit of both of that.

One of the things I liked about that book a lot actually was the fact that it's not just a hustle, hustle, hustle, grind type book. It's not like a Gary Vee book. It's more like a book that's about, you know, making smart decisions and working smart versus working hard constantly. Because I've seen people time and time and time and time again, they're just working 70, 80 hours a week, and they're getting less done than someone doing 30, 40 hours of really highly productive work. So I love that peak performance mentality versus work a lot.

Chris Graham (3:15)

Yeah, me too.

Brian Hood (3:16)

And before we get to the episode, I also want to talk about kind of what I got going on my world over here. We've got our students in the accountability program. So if you join the profitable producer course, when we launched back in December and January, we also had an accountability program that started right after that, which is an eight-week kind of a boot camp, accountability-accelerated boot camp. And it's like this eight-week program. Well, we're on week six. We just finished up week six today, actually.

And there were 10 teams or nine teams, and the top four after week six go on to the playoffs. So you think of it like this. It's actually, I haven't really talked to you much about this, Chris. It's kind of cool. Like throughout the week, every single week, the assignments and extra credit we give, the teams are racking up points, right?