$100M in Annual Revenue – Reid Tracy, Hay House, Inc.

Explicit content warning

08/29/18 • 54 min

Reid Tracy is the president and CEO of Hay House, Inc. Reid has played a crucial role in the strategic development of authors such as Dr Wayne Dyer, Dr Christiane Northrup, Jerry, and Esther Hicks, and Anthony William’s The Medical Medium”. Reid is also directly responsible for establishing Hay House’s offices in New York, London, Sydney, and New Delhi.

Reid is also the president of the Hay Foundation which is a non-profit foundation founded by Louise Hay dedicated to the empowerment of women, children, and animals.

What were some of the jumping-off points for Reid that led to his initial success? (3:10)

Louise Hay founded hay House when she was only 16 years old.
Reid started working at Hay House in 1988 as a CPA and a financial director for the company.
In 1988 they have three books and five tapes and about $1 Million in revenue. This grew steadily by the year until they hit $100 Million in 2008.
Louise wrote her first book in 1976, it was called Heal Your Body. She printed about 5,000 copies of the book and sent them out to Religious Science and Unity churches.
Within a year she sold the first 5,000 for a very small amount of money.
Over the next few years, she became more and more well known before writing her next book in 1984 titled ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ which turned into the backbone for Hay House and her work.
In 1987, Louise started Hay House so that she could publish some of her friends’ books.
If Louise hadn’t wanted to publish her friends’ books too, she would have never started a publishing house.
More and more people came to Louise to have their books published and over the next few years she happened to also go on Oprah and Donahue’s tv shows and in March 1988 She was on both of those shows in the same week.
Those interviews took the company from zero to a million very quickly.

How did Reid end up transitioning into the Leadership role? (5:48)

The company was growing quickly at that point and like a lot of companies starting out, everyone thought the initial success was very easy.
Everyone figured that it would just continue the way it has been. Then they started adding more employees and moved their office down to the beach in Santa Monica.
They started to release other people’s books and these books did not have the same success that Louise’s did.
As Financial Director, Reid was telling the president and other employees that they should control their costs better and no one really wanted to hear this from a 25-year-old kid.
One morning he had to tell the president of the company that Reid was not sure how he would make payroll and the president ended up telling Louise who then told a friend of hers at Max Factor.
The guy helped start Max Factor and so he called a meeting with their 42 employees and 30 vice presidents. The man asked each employee what they could do to get the business out of its crisis.
Reid replied and said they should fire all of the people, including himnself.
The Max Factor man agreed and they fired everybody in the room. Louise asked Reid if he would run the company for them.
Reid initially said no because he did not know enough about book publishing but he would run it with another guy named Jim who did know about book publishing.
So Jim and Reid ran Hay House together for a year or two and then Jim left and Reid was left to run it himself as he has done so alongside Louise for the last 26 years before she passed in 2019.

How much of Reid’s success came down to his willingness to learn and timing? (19:13)

The biggest thing that helped them when they started Hay House was that there wasn’t a self-help section in bookstores yet.
In Louise’s books, you can hear her life went into either a call or an alternative message. She did not like the usual kind of categories you would find in a bookstore.
Then a bookstore came into existence called BHorder’s Books, the standard bookstore before Border’s had about 10,000 books in it.
Border’s then came and made stores with over 100,000 books in them. Border’s would take every single book that Hay House published into their shops.
Whereas other bookstores would make take three or four of their books into their stores.
The expansion of Border’s superstores at that time had a huge impact on Hay House and many other publishers.
Border’s started noticing that the self-help books were selling the best in the non-fiction section of the bookstore.
They decided to create a huge self-improvement section that housed a lot of Hay House’s books.
They also started a section called New Age books which Hay house again had the most books in and ended up selling a large amount of.
Those two ...

Reid is also the president of the Hay Foundation which is a non-profit foundation founded by Louise Hay dedicated to the empowerment of women, children, and animals.

What were some of the jumping-off points for Reid that led to his initial success? (3:10)

Louise Hay founded hay House when she was only 16 years old.
Reid started working at Hay House in 1988 as a CPA and a financial director for the company.
In 1988 they have three books and five tapes and about $1 Million in revenue. This grew steadily by the year until they hit $100 Million in 2008.
Louise wrote her first book in 1976, it was called Heal Your Body. She printed about 5,000 copies of the book and sent them out to Religious Science and Unity churches.
Within a year she sold the first 5,000 for a very small amount of money.
Over the next few years, she became more and more well known before writing her next book in 1984 titled ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ which turned into the backbone for Hay House and her work.
In 1987, Louise started Hay House so that she could publish some of her friends’ books.
If Louise hadn’t wanted to publish her friends’ books too, she would have never started a publishing house.
More and more people came to Louise to have their books published and over the next few years she happened to also go on Oprah and Donahue’s tv shows and in March 1988 She was on both of those shows in the same week.
Those interviews took the company from zero to a million very quickly.

How did Reid end up transitioning into the Leadership role? (5:48)

The company was growing quickly at that point and like a lot of companies starting out, everyone thought the initial success was very easy.
Everyone figured that it would just continue the way it has been. Then they started adding more employees and moved their office down to the beach in Santa Monica.
They started to release other people’s books and these books did not have the same success that Louise’s did.
As Financial Director, Reid was telling the president and other employees that they should control their costs better and no one really wanted to hear this from a 25-year-old kid.
One morning he had to tell the president of the company that Reid was not sure how he would make payroll and the president ended up telling Louise who then told a friend of hers at Max Factor.
The guy helped start Max Factor and so he called a meeting with their 42 employees and 30 vice presidents. The man asked each employee what they could do to get the business out of its crisis.
Reid replied and said they should fire all of the people, including himnself.
The Max Factor man agreed and they fired everybody in the room. Louise asked Reid if he would run the company for them.
Reid initially said no because he did not know enough about book publishing but he would run it with another guy named Jim who did know about book publishing.
So Jim and Reid ran Hay House together for a year or two and then Jim left and Reid was left to run it himself as he has done so alongside Louise for the last 26 years before she passed in 2019.

How much of Reid’s success came down to his willingness to learn and timing? (19:13)

The biggest thing that helped them when they started Hay House was that there wasn’t a self-help section in bookstores yet.
In Louise’s books, you can hear her life went into either a call or an alternative message. She did not like the usual kind of categories you would find in a bookstore.
Then a bookstore came into existence called BHorder’s Books, the standard bookstore before Border’s had about 10,000 books in it.
Border’s then came and made stores with over 100,000 books in them. Border’s would take every single book that Hay House published into their shops.
Whereas other bookstores would make take three or four of their books into their stores.
The expansion of Border’s superstores at that time had a huge impact on Hay House and many other publishers.
Border’s started noticing that the self-help books were selling the best in the non-fiction section of the bookstore.
They decided to create a huge self-improvement section that housed a lot of Hay House’s books.
They also started a section called New Age books which Hay house again had the most books in and ended up selling a large amount of.
Those two ...

Previous Episode

$20M in Annual Revenue – Anik Singal, Lurn

Anik Singal

Anik Singal is an online entrepreneur. He is best known for his company, Lurn. Anik Singal has sold over $100 Million worth of products online, all by just using a computer and simple systems. He has made it his personal mission now to teach his secrets to Entrepreneurs around the world looking for true financial freedom.

How would Anik define what he is doing? (1:58)

Anik is working against people assuming he only does internet marketing, and that’s the only thing he has accomplished.
He loves digital marketing, and it has been an obsession and hobby since he was very young.
His bigger goal, however, is actually to not just do digital marketing but rather to serve entrepreneurs.
Today, Anik will do something like work with a baker who owns a bakery shop or he will help the person who does his car’s detailing scale their business, etc.
Anik’s business does not have a mission or a vision, but rather a purpose statement.
The statement is that they want to be a transformational home for entrepreneurs.
They have a physical and virtual home for entrepreneurs that acts as a ‘playground’ for them as they can run through several training courses to further their businesses and build their network.
Being an entrepreneur is a lonely and tough business. As a developer, you have to work every day and your people surround you.
But as an entrepreneur. You just do not have the time for those people, and so Anik made it his company’s purpose statement to make that community available for entrepreneurs all over the world.

Where did Anik come from, and how did he get to where he is now? (3:44)

When Anik started to get interested in digital marketing, he didn’t understand nor care for the concept of scaling.
All Anik wanted was to get started. But with $100 on his name he wasn’t about to go and just buy a franchise.
What initially attracted Anik to the online world was the fact that the startup capital was so minimal.
Especially today, there are so many tools that can do the hard, heavy lifting for you in the online business world.
What really addicted Anik to digital marketing, however, were the margins.
He didn’t have to deal with physical production, warehousing, design, prototyping, or patenting as a virtual product.
An online virtual product is delivered instantaneously when someone buys it. So those profit margins help you advertise more as you grow and upscale, faster.
The scalability of an online, virtual product is amazing, Lurn’s customer base is now 56% outside of the United States.

What did Anik sell and how did he do it? (13:06)

Anik tried many different things and he felt that some things he had, he had to reshape and put them together differently.
Anik likened it to building your own pizza. You take all the ingredients but if you don’t assemble them in the right order and do it right, it’s not going to be a pizza.
So what Anik was able to do was find out that he had to stop driving traffic to the sales page of someone else.
He was trying to be an affiliate, he did not have his own product. He was trying to promote software he had already has gotten good at using and he was trying to send traffic straight to the person he was an affiliate to.
The affiliate asked Anik to mix things up a bit and write an actual page. Using a took called Microsoft front page, which Anik reveres highly, he wrote an ugly page.
Essentially what he did was write a review page for the product rather than sending people straight to the product.
He wrote a pre-sale page and before bonuses were even a thing, the affiliate asked Anik to write a bonus page too.
Anik’s bonus at the time was, that if you bought his software you got his cellp[hone number for free, and he would offer support on the software for free.
This strategy only lasted a few days before that offer was taken off of the table.
But the strategy did end up working and it gave Anik a creative way to create traffic for his product.

Lurn

Lurn is an online (and offline) transformational home for entrepreneurs everywhere.

Founded by Anik Singal in 2004, our approach has always been a straight forward one:

To empower others to create and grow passion-based businesses, to encourage big ideas that will change the world. To educate people about how to be the best entrepreneurs they can be.

Resources

Connect with Anik: LinkedIn

Lurn: Website

See omnystudio.com/listener for pri...

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$4.5B Exit- Christopher Lochhead, Mercury Interactive

Christopher served as a chief marketing officer of software juggernaut Mercury Interactive which was acquired but Hewlett-Packard in 2006 for $4.5 Billion. He has co-founded marketing consulting firm Lochhead, was the founding CMO of Internet Consulting firm Scient and served as head of marketing at Vantive, a CRM software firm.

How did Christopher get involved with Mercury Interactive? (2:12)

Chris joined the company when it was approximately $350 Million in zie.
So it was already a 6 figure company. The interesting thing is that they took it to $1 Billion.
They repositioned the company around a whole new category and they set a whole new agenda for their space.
They crushed a bunch of their competitors by doing that and that increased their market cap materially.
Eventually, Hewlett Packard gave them an offer that they couldn’t refuse.
Chris started as an outside advisor for the company for a little over a year.
Chris considers that his ‘dating’ phase with the company.
After that and he ended up coming on board in the actual company, Chris considered that the ‘marriage’ stage.
He built a great relationship with Amon Land and the CEO and the rest of the executive team.
There are certain times in your life where you meet a group of people and you just know. Chris felt very comfortable within the culture of the company and so quickly fit in and helped propel the business upward.
He felt like he just fit in instantly.

How did Christopher approach things when the big influx of cash came in from exiting Mercury Interactive? (7:05)

Chris decided to retire.
He started his first business at 18 after being thrown out of school for being stupid.
He found out at age 21 that he was dyslexic and suddenly his education experience finally made sense to him.
He started his first when he was 18 but he started many companies at the start of his career.
He was living in Canada and his second company turned out to be a wonderful exit.
With that exit, he moved to Silicon Valley. He sold his boutique consultancy at the time to a Silicon Valley tech company that was already public and became their head of marketing.
At 28 years old, he was living in Silicon Valley and he was on the entrepreneurial path.
By the time the mercury exit happened, Christopher had been working non-stop from 18 to 38.
The end of Mercury was super challenging and Chris go to that point in his life where he thought he might as well hit the reset button.
He went through a divorce, moved to Tahoe. He had purchased a vacation home in Tahoe several years prior.
He did what some people do, but backward, he did not have time in his 20’s to go and backpack Europe.
He always had this dream of being a ski-bum and so he moved to his ski-house in Tahoe and is now what he considers a Ski-Bum.

What was something that Christopher had to ‘break’ to grow the company to where it was for the exit? (20:15)

The company’s economic buyer for the company at the time was a sort of community audience.
An extremely well-known company, with its software quality managers, or leaders within large organizations, people were depending on the size and already existing success of the company to keep growing it.
However, Chris says even though they had a good economic buyer involved who was spending $40-70,000 with the company in order for them to execute the vision of a new category.
The category being Business Technology Optimization. They had to go from selling that at a marketing level.
Building products from that level to selling to the C-suite, somebody with a board seat who typically reports to the CEO with the gigantic budget.
Christopher was not well known to that person and they did not know much about them either. This person knew them as a Niché player.
They had to figure out a way to have the moxie to walk into that person’s office and say they have a strategy on how she should run the business going forward.
They also offered her the technology to do it and so Chris ended up breaking 2 or 4 levels of the organization to be able to have conversations like those.

Mercury Interactive

Mercury Interactive is a former Israeli company that has been acquired by the HP Software Division. Mercury offered software for application management, application delivery, change and configuration management, service-oriented architecture, change request, quality assurance, and IT governance.

Resources

Connect with Christopher: LinkedIn

M...