Rhamy Alejeal: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the people processes podcast. I’m your host, Rhamy Alejeal and I am excited today to bring you Dr. Angela Lauria.
Dr. Angela is the founder of the author incubator and creator of different processes for writing a book that matters. In 2018, The Author Incubator was ranked #275 on the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies and #87 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur 360.
Angela is an expert when it comes to building teams and scaling businesses and we are ecstatic to have her on the show. Welcome Angela.
Dr. Lauria: Thanks. I’m so excited to be here.
Rhamy Alejeal: Great. Well you got to start telling me how you got into what you do now. It’s a very cool niche and I know you’ve got a great story on how you got there.
Dr. Lauria: It is super cool. And I actually was recruited when I was in college to start working for an espionage author. He was a New York times bestselling author and wrote spy stories. I’m in Washington DC so I got my career tracking spies around Northern Virginia and helping journalists write books about them. And I know I was really lucky. And from there, I had an accidental freelance business. I spent 19 years as a ghost writer, proofreader, editor, blurb writer, publicist, anything in the book industry. I was doing it and my family would always ask me, when are you going to get a real job? And I sort of wondered that myself.
So I was like, maybe I’ll go to law school, maybe I’ll get an MBA. And all of a sudden a couple of decades had passed and I still hadn’t figured out what I was going to do when I grew up. And all the work that I did with books I was generating. I’m often for businesses upwards of 2000, leads a month from books that I’d done with them. And they were generating millions of dollars in revenue. But I sort of thought of it like pet sitting or babysitting dog walking. It didn’t feel like a real job cause I got it in college and I just charged hourly. And I didn’t even have a website. I didn’t have a company name. I was just like a girl who helped people with books. And suddenly I was a mom with a two year old who helped people with books. And I was like, I gotta figure out who I want to be when I grow up. And I found this book called finding your own North star. What I searched for on Amazon was books, like what color is your parachute? And I want to take a quiz that said like, you should be a personal injury attorney. And then I would like go do that. And what this book said was, you should do what you lose track of time doing.
And for me that was reading personal development books and reading and writing and editing the personal development business, books, nonfiction, like that was always my sweet spot. And I ended up hiring this woman as a life coach to help me figure out what I could make, how can I make money doing this? Cause all the books I had done were in a completely different genre and helped me. She actually trained me as a life coach. Her name is Martha Beck and I got trained as a life coach and she’s like, you can work with life coaches on their books. And I didn’t, I couldn’t see the money. I couldn’t see the revenue. I couldn’t see myself as a business owner. I sort of saw myself as a freelancer and I read about probably seven years, not quite seven years, six years really working on myself.
And then in 2013, I started the author incubator and we help life coaches write books just like that one Martha Beck wrote and I hired her. So I read her book, I hired her, I went to a three day workshop that was like $3,000 and then I spent another 7,000 7,500 doing life coach training with her. So within about a year of finding her book, I spent $10,000 with her and now I help other life coaches generate clients that are worth about $10,000 each. Generally our authors write books that generate between 25 and 50 clients in a year from their book. And they make somewhere between a quarter of a million and a half million dollars doing the very thing that saved my life and changed my life for other people. So their wellness books, nutrition books, business books, find a career you love, save your marriage, get healthy, all those different topics. And we’ve now just published our thousandth book. We we’re at about, 20 million in revenue. We’ll do about 20 million this year in revenue. We have 45 employees. We have two locations in the Washington D C area. I’m currently at the author training Academy in Georgetown. Then we also have the author castle on the Potomac river in Northern Virginia. And it’s pretty exciting what we’ve built in about six years.
Rhamy Alejeal: That’s outstanding. And I know that journey, there’s been tons of amazing successes and right now things are looking awesome. But I like to start our interviews after we kind of know a person we’re talking with a little bit and how cool they are. Now, I like to go back to the hardest parts because I think a lot of our listeners, and I know myself, we learn more from the mistakes from the big rough times and how we got through them than we do from the successes.
So Dr. Angela, could you go back on your last six years in this entrepreneurial journey of building out this company to such a success? And tell me about the worst entrepreneurial moment you’ve had, the one that took nearly took you out and, and take us to that time.
Dr. Lauria: Yeah. Well God knows there’s a lot of those. It really is hard to pick. There’s two that come to mind and I’m going to share about both of them though. The one that really took me out that was like, I guess this is just the end, was when I formed a partnership and I think a lot of people in business do this. Early on, very early on for me. I formed a partnership with one of our authors, her book had done so well. Her business. She had been in business for like I think five years maybe, and had made no money. And within three months of her book coming out, we did over $100,000. She was one of my very first authors. I was just learning the different process. She was one of my Guinea pigs and it was super exciting.
And one of my coaches said to me, what you should do is partner with her. You should be taking a percentage from all of your authors instead of just having them pay you and you bring so much value you should get, you should get more value than just being paid back money for value. Right, right, exactly. Which sounded really good to me. So we partnered and I decided instead of having lots of clients, I would just have a few, like maybe three or four, but I would own like 40% of their business and I would do all the marketing and they would provide the content cause I’m super good at marketing and they’re good at whatever they’re good at. In this case, it was a woman who taught self care to new moms. And so she could do her program and I would do all the marketing and then I’d get 40% of the value and it worked.
We partnered, we made tons of money. I was like, this is a great strategy. I’ll do this with four more people and that’ll be my whole business. Cause if I get four people to a million, then you know, that’s all the money that I’ll need. Like I’ll be done. It’ll be great. And super simple. And then about six months in she was like, Oh, I don’t want to do this anymore. Now I want to do this thing and I don’t like the marketing copy or writing and I don’t want you to have my passwords for social media and everything you write, I want to approve and I’m not going to give you the password to my email. All the emails are coming out under my name. And all of a sudden I was like an employee and she wasn’t very good at marketing. That’s why she hadn’t made any money in six years.
So I was in a position where I had invested so much in this partnership. Like I put all my eggs in this one basket and without full control of the marketing, I knew I couldn’t make us any money and I didn’t want to just be an employee. That was like why I was starting a business. So we terminated that partnership. She went on to go back to not making money and did the marketing her way, which is what really felt good to her. And I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t do partnerships anymore and that I wanted to always have full control of my own destiny.
Rhamy Alejeal: Before we move on to your other story, I think that’s really interesting and I hear that we actually just finished up an interview last week with an older gentleman who’s been in business for 20 years. And his story was the same as first business didn’t go well, and it was because of a partnership that he didn’t control. Right. He didn’t feel like that wasn’t his issue.
But from your story, what do you think if you know, our listeners should take away from?
Dr. Lauria: Don’t do partnerships. That’s the line. It’s hard liner on this. I very rarely hear positive, not never, but I very rarely hear a positive story about a partnership. And if you think you’re that exception, you would not be asking the question, should I do a partnership? So anyone who’s asking the question, should I do a partnership? The answer is no.
Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah, I think that’s fair and reasonable. I think that’s very reasonable. Some people are, you know, I’m kind of with you. I think probably in the last 30 interviews I’ve done a bad partner in the beginning has been the number one problem or moment of near destruction.
Dr. Lauria: It seems like it’ll make things easier. It makes them exponentially harder. And I don’t even, I’ve totally made amends with this person, but I don’t even, it wasn’t her fault. She was like, I don’t want something going on. You’re like, good, then do your own marketing. But then all of a sudden I had nothing to sell. And this happens in so many ways with partnerships that yeah, if you’re asking the question, it’s a no.
Rhamy Alejeal: Right. And it’s one of those where you know either if you’re investing and you’re getting out sized returns because of your value, then the other person or the majority owner will feel that they’re paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for something they could hire a great marketing company for five minutes. And so there’s a structural view that leads to resentment a lot of times, unless there’s a much more complicated structure for like a publicly traded or, you know, venture capital kind of setup. But, for the vast majority of our small business listeners, I completely agree with you. A partnership just as you’re asking for pain, you’re asking for, well, you said you to tell us another story though.
Dr. Lauria: Well, I did because that’s the story that’s really gotten me here. This is the one that I think is an even better lesson. So, when I started my business I thought as I got busy, there would be tasks that I could hire people to do those tasks. And so it was a very transactional idea I had about hiring people. And the idea was I have a task, I give you money, you do the task. I love this idea, I daydream about it. Sometimes I just stare off into the sunset. This idea is not reality. Anyone anywhere, anytime. And it’s very hard to believe that cause your brain, at least my brain wanted to be like maybe if we pay them more, maybe if we find a different person, maybe if we make the task smaller, but no, the actual problem with this mistake is thinking you can get people to be transactional.
Dr. Lauria: They, in my experience are not, and it is so much more rewarding to actually build something with someone. I know it doesn’t sound that way. When you’re on the other side of it, you’re like, would you just shut up and do what I’m asking and do it my way. My dad was an entrepreneur and he used to say this thing that I never understood. But now it makes so much sense. He would say to his employees, I don’t pay you to think, I pay you to act. I don’t pay you to think it did not work. But I now know why he said that he had it written all over his office. There were plaques everywhere that said, I don’t pay you to think Mickey Lauria, to remind his employees all day long to just do what they were told. And, I think the reason why my dad, my dad has super successful business, he’s in the hot rod hall of fame and got his business to $5 million. But I think the reason he capped out at $5 million is that’s about how far you could get if you don’t pay people to think. If you want to get beyond six figures or beyond seven figures, at least you’re going to have to pay people to think. And that was my biggest lesson.
Rhamy Alejeal: Well, I think that’s very reasonable. And that’s a lot of course. What all our listeners are familiar with in people processes and that kind of thing to build out those structures to develop people. I’m really interested. I know we’re going to cover that a little bit later. We want to hear about how you actually implemented that.
But tell me about the realization point for you. Like why, how did you come to that decision?
Dr. Lauria: Yeah, it was, it was a lot of misery. What happened for me was, I wanted to hire people and have them document what they were doing and it seemed like every time I would hire them and try and get them to document it, they had all these suggestions and changes and then other people in the organization, it would mess them up. And it was just a disaster after it was like I was constantly fighting fires and I just decided there was one morning I was in Tuscany and it was the last day of an event that I was running in Tuscany and I just refused to get out of bed. I’ve never had burnout. I hear people talk about it and it sounds dumb to me, but that day was the only day lasted about 45 minutes where I was like, I am just not going to get out of bed.
There’s no one can make me, you are going to have to like drag me out of here because I just couldn’t handle another crisis. I knew the second my feet hit the floor that the crisis is we’re going to start there was, I was staying with my team in this Tuscan village and at the bottom of the steps I was staying in the master bedroom in this villain. At the bottom of the steps was the kitchen and I knew once I got to the kitchen there would be a question and it would be something like real quick, what do we do when a customer does this, but it wouldn’t be real quick and it was going to be from 7:00 AM until midnight that I was going to be badgered with fires and it felt like Puranas were just literally picking my body to pieces every day and I didn’t know how to do it.
One more day. Like I just could not go on one more day. And somehow I dragged myself out of bed that day and then the next day was a day off. And that was when I decided to build a real company and to stop hiring people and to start really to start over from scratch with the idea of having relationships and partnerships with my employees and really understand fundamentally what they were getting out of the job and what they wanted because trying to get them to do it my way just wasn’t working. So I had to start learning more and caring more about them as whole people. And I really made that decision in Tuscany, in 2016 and rebuilt my business. I came back from Tuscany and completely rebuilt my business with a lot more employees, but they’re more empowered. So I was really trying to do the whole thing backwards.
Rhamy Alejeal: Wait for dive. I’m looking forward to diving into that. It reminds me, and it’s so funny that it was 2016 because, it was right around, it was the end of 2015, early 2016, my wife and I had gone on a trip to Barcelona with family. I had almost the exact same thing. We’d doubled in size a few years in a row. We were making money, things were going great. And I just remember two or three first time events, you know, where the standard operating procedures just wouldn’t cut it, popping up every day of a five day vacation. And I remember sitting there, you know, time zones were different for US. So we would check in, you know, my things would start blowing up around like 4:00 PM in Barcelona. And I remember my Liz and I who started the company together, at least started the company with me years ago.
We were up at midnight in Barcelona while everyone else was asleep in our beautiful middle of nowhere Wine, country Villa. And we’re sitting there pissed cause we have bad internet trying to figure out how to deal with these problems. And that moment of, there’s gotta be a step beyond, you know, you read the emails, you build a company, you think there are technicians, then there’s this, this layer and you just have to build standard operating procedures for all the processes and then it’ll all work. But at scale that doesn’t work. That is not the end. There’s another step past that you got.
Dr. Lauria: And I was in the e-myth club and still love it. Like was totally in that club. But then yeah, just didn’t quite.
Rhamy Alejeal: I think it’s neat. I mean some people need a kick in the pants to get out of making the bread or writing the book itself.
You know, they need to get pass technician role, but there’s a step beyond making nice procedures for everyone to follow on a task based transactional nature. Absolutely. So I think I want to give you a chance to kind of show where you’re at and how you got there. I want you to have a chance to tell us about what’s coming up in the next six months and then we’re going to switch back to some of the insights you’ve gained. Because I think that’s gonna help round us out.
But in the next six months, what have you got coming up, coming out that’s got you just excited and rolling out of bed? No more burnout. Really, really excited to get what’s coming up for you? Yeah.
Dr. Lauria: Externally, tons of great stuff. We actually just had our grand opening on June 11th of 2019 for the author training Academy. That’s our Georgetown location. So 17,000 square feet, the largest collection of giant on the East coast. So Christina loves are stones. Yes.
Rhamy Alejeal: Okay. Ours for adults.
Dr. Lauria: Well, crystals filling our building. We’ve moved all of our team and our events over here which frees up the castle for what I’m doing now which is, adding a higher level. A lot of my authors have hit seven figures now and they really need help with scaling. We’ve done some really interesting and unique things here, which I write about in my new book, make ’em beg to work for you. And so I’m helping people plan a really successful team retreats and hiring strategies. So I am using the castle for our higher level authors, and then our new authors are working here at the Academy. So that’s one of the cool things that’s happening in the next six months. We’ve just added this second location. There’s also a film that a filmmaker in Hollywood made about me.
It’s called the weight of success and that is coming out in Netflix in the fall. And I also have a partnership with Jay Shetty, who is an inspirational storyteller. We are making a series of webisodes together. So we’re filming that and it’ll be coming out in the fall, which is super exciting. We have a new website coming out with the new author training Academy and all of our employees featured. So it’s that much focus on our editors and our team. So really transitioning away from the celebrity brand for the core business and the people who want to work with me directly. We’ll still have a way to do that in our other location.
Rhamy Alejeal: Nice. When you were coming, you said you had a new book coming out, make them beg to work for you. When do you have a release day on that?
Dr. Lauria: Yes, August 15th
Rhamy Alejeal: Well I think we discussed this earlier but we are going to schedule this podcast release right on that day as well. So if we have to,
Dr. Lauria: It will be free on that day. So those snappy listeners and you’re listening right away, if you go to Amazon and you search for my name, you will see that book, I’m going to try and make all my books free on Amazon on August 15th but certainly make them beg to work for you will be free.
Rhamy Alejeal: Do me a favor and we’ll follow up after this, but make sure to send me the links to those in the show notes. We’ll have a link down there straight to your Amazon page. That’s awesome. The release. That is excellent. And we we’re excited to get a free book. That’s awesome. So this is a couple of kind of rapid fire questions and just to get an insight into how you learn and what resources you use.
If you could recommend one book to go alongside, make them beg to work for you and your other makeup Beck series along with, of course people processes. What book would you recommend to aspiring business owners?
Dr. Lauria: Oh God, that’s like torture. I mean it depends on where you are. The big leap by Gay Hendricks. That’s always a top suggestion. Then anything by Brooke Castillo, she runs the life coach school podcast. I like her book self coaching one on one. That’s a good one.
Rhamy Alejeal: Not one yet. I’ll have to go put that on the notes. That’s awesome. Yeah.
Well, if you could go back to your first day in business back there in 2013 and write a letter to yourself or send yourself an email, what would you tell yourself back then?
Dr. Lauria: No, this, nobody’s going to your website. Just relax with the website. I spent six months working on my website. It was supposed to be released January 1st, 2013 I hired this poor guy named Mike in Honolulu and he was late, which I’m sure it was because I changed the goal post a thousand times. He was late and it ended up being done on February 7th and I remember thinking, God, this guy has cost me so much money. It’s like five weeks that my website hasn’t been up, and I guess I thought the website would go up. Millions of people would go there. You would read the website, you know, starting with the first page. After reading everything and contemplating it, they would call me. They would tell me what product to sell them and then suggest a price to me and offer me their credit card. I really didn’t realize the website wasn’t going to do anything. So when I hear people starting with a website, like for the love of God, do not start with a website. Start with clients.
Rhamy Alejeal: There’s your website. Exactly. There’s an old, there’s a web comic called XKCD that I’ve loved since I was in college. It’s a nerdy web comic about math and science and those things. One of the web comics was an image of like regular people when they hear the FBI’s website got hacked. You know. Then there’s like fire everywhere and Oh my God, the FBI has been hacked. And then like computer people, when they hear the FBI’s website got hacked. It’s a picture of like a movie poster where someone had just spray painted like Inn sauna. It’s just like a poster. It’s just a tiny part of your plan. It’s not your business. It’s a poster.
Dr. Lauria: Is this, it’s a coder. I have no idea. And I was so mean to that guy. That’s the other thing. Like I was so mean. I’m like, how can you be late? Like this is you’re killing me. I had my last day at my corporate job in December 31st like I need this website to go up January 1st or I’m going to be broke. I was broke.
Rhamy Alejeal: In the meanwhile, for five weeks you were just staring at your email going, where there is nothing else.
Dr. Lauria: Yelling at him? And probably coming up with new ideas to add this. But I would do that all over again. Totally. Differently. And it’s amazing. I tell this story and people do not listen to me here. I overhear them beating up their web guy about a website no one’s going to, and it just kills me.
Rhamy Alejeal: You know, we’ve been in business 10 years and I think at this point we finally broke about 1500 people a month going to our website.
Dr. Lauria: That’s amazing.
Rhamy Alejeal: We’re a content generation here in 10 years and generating all that content, that’s how many people go there.
Right, exactly. Yes. So that kind of traffic, you know, it’s a lot. It makes a big difference. It really grows your company. But it’s just one tiny piece. I think of all of the money we’ve generated being online and just known, it’s probably a 10th of what really has billed through relationships and being in person and trade shows and referrals and all that.
Dr. Lauria: 10 years of investing in creating content and a lot of that content was about other things you were doing. Like going to conferences and going to events and then meeting people at those events and they’re the ones who go on the website. Not to mention your employees, your competitors and your clients are a lot of who that tribe and people looking for jobs. It’s like what you think a website is going to do even 10 years in. I mean even with as much traffic as you have is so much less than I was imagining. I certainly didn’t think it’ll take me 10 years to get 1500 page views, a hundred visitors or whatever, like I was just like start the site and we’ll be at a million and they’ll give you my like target prospects.
Rhamy Alejeal: Of course it won’t be, it won’t just be some random person scanning your website.
Dr. Lauria: Right.
Rhamy Alejeal: That’s 600 times a month. Right?
Dr. Lauria: So that would be my biggest piece of advice to a new entrepreneur. I mean, here’s how you get business. Go talk to people and make offers. There it is. It’s so important. You know, that’s what you have to do. Both of those things. You have to do both of them, people that have the problem you solve and then ask them for money in exchange for solving it all, all every word in there is needed. Right.
Rhamy Alejeal: Well, okay, so we’re getting towards the end of this. So let me try to wrap it up a little bit. We’re an HR podcast and of course your new book is focused very much on the HR world of recruiting and training.
What do you think in your organization is the number one policy procedure training that’s had the biggest effect on your company?
Dr. Lauria: Okay, so I’m going to blow your mind here, but this is what we do and this has changed everything. Most of the interview is not about the position, or whether the person can do the job. So we do that in a test before they come. So before they can interview with us, they have to actually do the job for about an hour, the length of an interview. They have to do a task and deliver it. Once I know they can do the job.
Then most of the interview is about them. It’s really life coaching. It’s what we call doing their career path. We actually start with, when are you going to leave the author incubator? If you get this job and it’s the best job you ever had, how will you leave when and why? What will your title be? What will your salary be? Why will you leave? And for some people they say, Hey, I want to work there for two years. I want to learn everything I can and then I’m going to leave to start my own business. There’s no change to my salary, no change to my title, but I’m going to sop up all the information I can and then I’m going to start my business. I have other people who are like, I’m going to be there for 30 years. I’m going to retire from the author incubator.
I’m going to go from being an accounts receivable clerk to being your chief financial officer. My last 10 years I’ll be a CFO and I’ll be making 200,000 a year and it is amazing what people will tell you if you ask them how are you going to leave the company and then in the offer lett
