Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

Run Your Biz Like Climbing Ice

by Walt | Feb 23, 2023 | Success | 1 Comment

I want you to think about running your business like you’d think about climbing a frozen waterfall.

It’s not likely the first analogy you’d jump to.

But stay with me here.

Ice climbing is cool. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

Frozen waterfalls especially so.

But this activity, which is a particular passion of mine, tends to be fraught with pitfalls for the unwary: like falling ice, sharp axes (I put one through my lip once), pointy crampons, lacerations related to pointy crampons, frostbite and hypothermia.

Then there’s this thing called a single point of failure.

When you’re anchored into the ice, you want to be sure that you’re anchored by more than one ice screw. Because, if you’re anchored into the frozen waterfall by just one screw, and that screw fails, well, then you’re kinda screwed. If you catch my drift.

So the principle: Never, ever have a single point of failure in your system.

True in ice climbing.

True in business too.

It was a beautiful summer day. (Not ice climbing season.) I was in a beautiful, boutique hotel, on a main thoroughfare, in a well-traveled resort town, broadcasting a webinar to an audience of about 600.

Suddenly the internet dropped out. And the power.

A construction crew out front, doing sidewalk work, accidentally cut the power main.

Luckily, I had a back up roaming router, and a power pack. Voila, back online.

Now we travel with the roaming router, a satellite router, a power pack and a solar panel.

Because our business depends on it.

Across our business, we are constantly assessing for and protecting against single points of failure: in team, tech, communication, systems, and processes.

My invitation to you: Where are you vulnerable in your business? Where are you dependent on a single person or system or piece of technology? What backup can you create? What can you do right now to protect against that point of failure?

Single points of failure can be fatal in climbing.

They certainly can leave you battered and bruised in biz.

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Want help growing and scaling your business? We have an extraordinary team of coaches. Email me for a no-obligation convo: walt@summit-success.com

And be sure to stop by for a visit at: https://summit-success.com/

Out Of Prison Finally

by Walt | Feb 16, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

I’m free.

Finally free of the prison called my inbox.

We get hundreds of emails every day.

I only see a handful of them.

Talk about time freedom!

But even more than that, there’s a psychological freedom; and a sense of spaciousness and ease.

You can have that too.

Most entrepreneurs and business professionals get a lot of emails.

Here’s what most do: They dive into their inboxes first thing in the morning.

That’s bad.

Because your email inbox is some else’s agenda for your day.

If you’ve planned out your day, if you know what you value most, and if you know what your highest priorities are, your email inbox can easily hijack your day.

If you use your inbox to drive your day, you’re in even worse shape. You move in and out of email all day long. You feel like a little silver ball in a pinball machine. You end up exhausted, depleted, and wrung out.

I’ll use my very best Bob Newhart coaching: Stop it!

Some Basics

Let me share some tips and tricks.

First, get your email inbox to zero.

I worked with the CEO of a large music company who admitted to having 3300 emails in his inbox. That energy suck is dangerous. It’s like leaving the dome light on in your car on a cold winter night. Your battery just drains away.

Here’s a hack for getting to inbox zero right now: Declare amnesty. Create a email folder called Email Amnesty. Move your entire inbox there. Voila. You have fresh start with an empty inbox.

Now, second, with your new empty email inbox, commit to checking email no more than 3x a day. For example, create a block of time from 9am to 9:45am; another block of time from 1 to 1:30pm; and a final block from 4:15 to 5pm. (Committed block time is one of the most efficient ways to work on any task, especially email.)

Third, when you go into your inbox in your designated blocks, practice the 3 Ds: Do; Delegate; Delete.

Do means do what the email asks you do (like respond).
Delegate means forwarding on the email to your assistant, colleague or associate to do.
Delete means delete from your inbox (or in the alternative, moving the email into a client or customer folder).

Your inbox is back to zero!

The Advanced Practitioner

Once you have these practices down, I have some graduate level strategies that will open up the prison gates for good.

Get an assistant who’s job it is to review your email for you. (Yes, I know, sacrilege, especially for you lawyers reading this. No one can do it like you can. Except that you can create really clear protocols or standard operating procedures that your assistant can follow.)
Have your assistant Do, Delegate or Delete following the protocols you establish.
Have your assistant create a label for the emails that they want you to see. Then when you go into your inbox, you’re just looking at the labeled emails.
Better yet, create a dedicated private email just for you; not available to the public. (I have two of these. One I share just with my closet friends; one I share only with my Inner Circle Coaching Clients.) Have your assistant forward emails that you need to see to your private box. This is where the magic is. Because now you’re just looking at a handful of emails from people you actually want or need to respond to!
Once you’ve got an assistant trained on your email protocols, and once you have your own private email inbox(es), commit to staying out of the general email inbox. (This will be hard at first because you’ve gotten some good dopamine hits from all of that email chaos. But, you’ll soon discover a whole new sense of freedom.

Email is one of the single biggest time sucks for nearly every entrepreneur and business professional I work with. It dramatically reduces your productivity and performance and causes nearly unceasing stress and ovewhelm.

I did many years of hard time in email prison. You don’t need to.

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Want help growing and scaling your biz? Let’s connect for a no-obligation call. Email me: walt@summit-success.com

And stop by for a visit at: https://summit-success.com/

When You Want More Than Average

by Walt | Feb 9, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

We do it three times this year.

Travel across the country to spend three days with our mastermind community.

It’s a gathering of entrepreneurs from all around the world. Colleagues filled with passion; and driven by a sense of mission. Passionate like-minded comrades who want to create amazing businesses, who want to make an impact in the world.

Days of collaboration and creativity. Days of inspiration, learning and connection.

Here’s what is true: You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with most. Average in terms of what you want, where you live, what you earn, what you drive, and what’s in our bank account. Average.

There’s nothing wrong with average.

But, if you thirst for more, you need to surround yourself with others who also want more. You need to seek out new relationships and new communities so that you can be nourished and uplifted, supported and encouraged.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely path. It’s easy to get isolated. It’s easy to get brought down by the naysayers. It’s easy to get discouraged and despondent when you don’t see the results you want.

And so it is essential to seek out others who are on the path; to find your people; to surround yourself with those who believe what you believe, who want what you want. To be cared for by those who have your back, who want for your success. To drink at the well of inspiration.

Napoleon Hill first coined the term Mastermind. He saw that, “Two or more people actively engaged in the pursuit of a definite purpose with a positive mental attitude, constitute an unbeatable force.”

Unbeatable, and unstoppable.

At Summit, we’re driven to help others create lives that are rich and full and deeply satisfying; and we’re on a mission to help others share their unique gifts in in a big, big way.

So we regularly we travel far and wide to be with those who do the work we do, and want to make a difference in the world.

We need that support. You do too.

Because with BFFs, anything is possible.

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If tired of the naysayers, if you want to be with others who believe in you and want for your success, if you want world-class training and support, join us in our members only community HERE.

When Your Cart Goes Off The Tracks

by Walt | Feb 2, 2023 | Success | 1 Comment

This is the end of the line for most folks. This is where the cart goes off the track.

Despite the most heartfelt resolutions, despite whatever the best intentions might have been, most folks give up on their New Year’s promises to themselves… right about now.

Not because they didn’t mean what they said.

Not because they didn’t want to change… because they did.

Not because they don’t have dreams for a better life… because they do.

But because life gets in the way.

I know. I was a single dad for a dozen years raising three young boys. I would get up (too late) in the morning, run around getting dressed, getting the kids up, finding the lost socks, and the lost homework, making the lunches, packing the lunches, unpacking and re-packing the back-packs, running the kids to school, tearing off to my office, arriving (too) late to gather up my files, speeding off to court, tying my tie in the rearview mirror and balancing the coffee in my lap (and spilling it), getting the call from daycare to come back because the kid had a 103º fever or head lice or both, scheduling parent-teacher meetings in between client calls, rushing off to soccer practice, making dinner, mitigating the fights, helping with the homework, returning emails and phone calls, and falling into bed exhausted and depleted… only to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

I know.

But change can happen. (I know this too.) What you really, really want in your heart matters. Your hopes and dreams and aspirations matter. They are the call of your Spirit, the Divine within you, to live your best life; to share those gifts that are yours and yours alone to share with the world in the most perfect way possible.

And it’s not too late. (It’s never too late.) Yes, January may be over. But the canvas of this New Year still awaits you.

Here’s what’s true: All you need to do is apply a very basic success principle, one of the easiest of all success principles. Take tiny, tiny steps.

At just 1 pound a week, you’ll still lose more than 40 pounds this year
At just 1 page a day, you’ll have well over 300 pages for your book
At just 1 watercolor a week, you could mount an entire show
One job application a day is 30 in a month
One extra sales conversation every single day might double your sales

Take that tiny step today. Just for today. And then do it again. And again the next day. Small steps magnified by time leading to magnificent results.

But today, just think about this day. And take just one tiny step forward.

Remember, races are run one stride at a time; businesses built one product at a time, one customer at a time, one sale at a time; mountains are climbed one step at a time; novels written one sentence at a time; symphonies written one measure at a time; and cathedrals built over generations one stone at a time.

Go back to the beginning of the year, and remember why it was that you wanted to set out on your path. Reclaim that grand vision of that perfect life that is yours.

In every moment of danger, there is also opportunity.

Opportunity still waits for you.

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If you’d like help getting your cart back on the track, email me: walt@walthampton.com

Why SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) Really Matter

by Walt | Jan 31, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

Standard operating procedures increase productivity and reduce error. They save time and facilitate training and delegation. In this short masterclass, you’ll discover what they are as well as when and how to create them.

Watch this video all about why SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) really matter and learn why and how you can start implementing SOPs right away.