Paul Reilly
MEMBER NAME
Paul Reilly
COMPANY
MidStrong
INDUSTRIES
Health/Fitness
Paul Reilly, Founder/Owner of MidStrong
THE CHALLENGE
The biggest mistake Paul made as an early entreprenuer was the belief that he could do it on his own, that he didn't need the support, the camaraderie, the encouragement. Paul equated investments to expenses. So instead of looking at it like, “Hey, I'm going to invest this money and see a greater rate of return than I would if I didn't invest it.” He was penny wise and pound foolish. Heistant to invest in his growth with The Lions Pride,
Paul was working ridiculous amount of hours and just not seeing the results he wanted. So he finally relented, overcame his skepticism, overcame his hubris and made the investment. We are so glad he did!
Since Paul joined The Lions Pride, he received clarity around his branding and company, MidStrong, a health span coaching company where we help busy mid-lifers to make better choices that maximize their health span. He also hired an A-player team and found personal happiness that led to crystallizing life long dreams.
Keep reading to learn more about Paul’s journey.
THE JOURNEY TO tHE 0.01%
According to Paul Reilly
Hone In On Your Zone of Genius
ESSAYONS is our motto in the army, “Let us try.” Even if it's too hard, we'll figure out a way. So we figure things out. We're scrappy. We took pride in our scrappiness.
Now, when we transition to being an entreprenuer, we want to be the best version of the human we were meant to be. We know we have a finite amount of time. But we're depleting so much of that impact time and all those impact hours doing things that are outside of our Zone of Genius, even if they might be in the Zone of Competence or even in our Zone of Excellence. The more that I've been with The Lions Pride, at every Tactical Advance that I've attended, I have found that I come away from each one of those mileposts spending more time with intention in my Zone of Genius and less time in all of the other zones. Eventually I will have a staff and a team that I can delegate nearly all of the Zones of Incompetence and most of the Zones of Competence. So all those tasks that just, you know, suck away from us and suck our time completely away from us, those will be handed off to the people who whose Zone of Genius they are. And I’m starting to do that now, so I can exist almost entirely in my zones.
Application is Key
The Lions Pride is not for the faint of heart. So everybody that joins The Lions Pride, I wouldn't say difficult. It's simply a matter of application. You have to put aside time, preserve the time, this is true of anything that's of value, and then do it. So you have to work your way through the curriculum. And the curriculum is robust. There's a lot of stuff that, you know, that's there for you to take advantage of, but it's built in a way and delivered it in a way that's very user friendly, very available and the support to get yourself through those tools is best in class.
So whether it's Sam Dillenback being available to help you through the A-player coaching or Erin Dawley there to give you some encouragement on getting your OPBP quarterly rocks done.
You know, having Jeff Evenson be available to hop on a phone call and give me some insight into a thing, you know a thorny little problem I have. The team is remarkable and available and encouraging, empathetic, energetic. Bill has created a first class team.
Paul Reilly’s Tools For Success
The quality of the tools offered through The Lions Pride is outstanding. So without any reservation, I can tell you that these are the most useful and applicable of business tools that I have found out there. And I am a avid reader. I'm an avid searcher for answers and for tools that I can use to do practical things in my business to make it stronger and to improve revenue and profitability, so forth.
There are some specific tools that I use regularly. The OPBP, One Page Business Plan, is essentially the bread and butter. It's the tool that members are encouraged to work on and held accountable to complete every quarter and to share it with accountability partners to make sure we’re keeping each other track.
It's a significant investment of your soul at the beginning. There's the left half of it that's relatively philosophical. And you have come to terms with what is your real purpose in life? Why are you doing this? Why did you invest your life savings in this company? Why are you investing your 60+ hours a week, every week into this effort? So coming to terms with that and really crystallizing it into a sentence is one of the key things.
And then from there, taking it down and saying, what are your core values? What does this company that you're creating stand for? And what are you going to do with that? You know, with the production of all the good that this company is going to create. So it's those kind of things that takes some time and it takes, you know, a first shitty draft and a second and then a 700th crappy draft before, you feel like, “Oh I really got it.” I would say that in the almost two years that I have been in The Lions Pride, it's only been maybe in the last quarter or two where I have felt like, “Wow, I really got it, I've nailed it.”
I know what MidStrong’s purpose is. I know I've got the values down and so that kind of clarity is, is priceless. So the One Page Business Plan is probably the flagship tool of The Lions Pride. But there's so many others.
One of the things that I am intent on doing as I build this company right now, there are five of us, two full-timers, my wife and I, Jules, and then three part timers.
So in the infancy of MidStrong, I'm going in with the intention to create an A-player culture. So it’s first the who and then the what . I am going to create a company where people would be happy to take less money to come work for us because the culture here is so awesome and the results of what we do and the impact that we have is so outstandingly excellent that it speaks for itself.
There's a tool in the curriculum called the A-Player Culture, and it begins with much of the other things that we were just talking about, the core purpose and the core values and what not, communicating those through your hiring process, having crystal clarity on who you want to have work for you, and similarly who you don't.
Then from there, creating all the steps and tools that you put in place as a corporation or a company to ensure that those amazing people continue to grow and be amazing, and then attract more A-players.
That's another tool that I've that I've really embraced.
GET THE TOOLS PAUL MENTIONS HERE - FREE!
Paul Reilly (center), at a recent Tactical Advance near Jackson.
WHY I JOINED THE COHORT
At the time, I was penny wise and pound foolish. I was overwhelmed or overcome by my own hubris and believed that there wasn't really any need for me to engage a coach because I already knew everything I needed to do and could read a book just like anybody else could. And I continued to sort of scuffle through 2019 and then well into the pandemic.
For those of you who aren't familiar with The Lions Pride, Bill makes open source practically all the tools that he provides to us. And let me endorse those tools. These tools are real practicable, applicable, useful tools that will help you improve your business unequivocally. And so, again, in my frugality, which is, you know, maybe a virtue and maybe a weakness of mine, I believed “well, I'll just impose on Bill's generosity here. He's making all his tools available to me for free. I'll just use them.”
So I did that for most of 2020 and they were awesome. And it definitely made an impact on my business. But what also became very clear to me was that I was still missing something and I was struggling, working ridiculous amount of hours and just not seeing the results. So I finally relented.
I finally was like, “I need to just bite the bullet and make the investment.” Then you (Bill) were obviously very gracious, welcoming, glad to have me. You know, we'd had a relationship for a year, year and a half while I was not actually a member of The Lions Pride But throughout that time you were exceedingly generous and gracious to offer me your best wishes and advice and encouragement. So I finally was like, all right. I overcame my skepticism, overcame my hubris, and finally just bit the bullet and made the investment.
And it's been a whirlwind since then. That's been almost two years. But coming up on two years that I've been in The Lions Pride and the first year again, in my sort of idiocy of frugality, you know I'm Captain Frugal I've never made a dollar I didn't want to save, but I joined the non-live component of The Lions Pride and I did that for a year. The entire time I was aware of what I was missing out on. So finally this year I up'd my investment and I've joined the full Cohort and that has been amazing.
Watch Paul talk about his acceleration journey with Bill Watkins below.
“You don’t have to do this alone. It doesn’t have to be a solo trek to the North Pole of abject misery. There are tools. There are groups available like The Lions Pride that are going to get you out of the stuck place that you are in and give you the boost that you’ve needed.”
“Not only do you not have to do it all, you shouldn’t do it all. There’s no human on the planet that can scale a business and do it all. Somewhere, there’s going to be a sacrifice, and it usually ends up to be either you, your health, or your relationships.”
