CEO Kid Chris Hughes tells us Who’s Chris Hughes? and lots of tips!

Last week on the Saturday Morning Mastermind, I interviewed Chris Hughes! He shared so many truly valuable tips for CEO Kids.  I absolutely love what he shared about juggling and how having creative outlets like juggling help you in business and in all areas of your life.

Here’s the rest of his interview and you can listen to it by clicking on his name in the Audio Section for Members:

Sarah – Well, good morning, I’m Sarah Cook from Raising CEO Kids and I’m where with Chris Hughes all the way from New York City, well not New York City, Elmira, New York.  And the other side of the country from me at least.  And so I’m very excited to bring him to you because he started as a young entrepreneur.  He’s a little bit older than a teen now but is doing just great things and he’s really transitioned into taking one business and growing it into another, into another, into another.  So I’m really thrilled that he’ll be talking to you today.  So let’s go ahead and just ask Chris a little bit about how he got started and where you can find him on the web.  So go ahead Chris.

Chris -  All right.  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here and kind of share with I’ve been learning.  But when I first got started, I basically was in college, I was about 19 years old and I saw the sign up on campus that said, “Oh, want to make money from home doing calling, doing some random things.”  And of course that kind of piqued my curiosity and I ended up calling and getting signed up into network marketing and then started developing a business through that and that kind of pushed me into the direction of information marketing and kind of providing internet marketing services, which is what I do now.  So it’s kind of taken me from absolute beginner into fairly experienced with other things over the past couple of years.  But the easiest places to find me are probably on Facebook.  And my easiest way I’m at is facebook.com/whoschrishughes.  And the same thing on Twitter is whoschrishughes and YouTube whoschrishughes.  And then my actual website is WhosChrisHuges.com. So it’s kind of easy to remember.

Sarah – It’s smart that you did that because it keeps your brand really succinct.  And I think that was something I didn’t realize when I first started because I have never been online.  So as we’re starting Raising CEO Kids, we actually had a different name and we had to change it and I think it’s important that whatever your using as your name that you stay the same across the board because then people know exactly how to find you.  So great job on doing that.  So what were some things that –

Chris -  It sort of took me a while too.

Sarah – Did it?  Okay.  So what were some things that –

Chris -  Yeah, I had a couple.

Sarah – You had a couple other names, right?

Chris -  Yeah.  So I had to bring people over from those other accounts onto my main one.

Sarah – That’s what we’ve been doing the last two weeks.  So okay, and what influenced you was that you just started college, you were needing some money.  But did you start other things?  It sounded like you were doing juggling before college or was that something in college too?

Chris -  Yeah, I started juggling actually when I was about eight years old.  My father had brought in a professional juggler to teach his team at IBM and it was kind of a whole relaxation kind of creativity performance for the guys.  They’re under a lot of stress from working in a high stress environment, IBM corporate America.  And as soon as my dad learned, he comes home and he’s like, “Oh guess what I can do?”  And he’s like, I can juggle. So he taught me as well as my two older brothers and that kind of became a passion when I was younger. And I juggled at birthday parties, festivals, marching in parades, pretty much everything I could do for the community to kind of entertain people.  I was doing that.

Sarah – And so was that a form of a business or was that all pro bono?

Chris -  It was part business because I was doing about one sometimes more birthday parties and charging per $25.00 for birthday party.

Sarah – That’s good.  So you were doing some income on the side! Yay!  All right and so as far as, because I love the aspect of the juggling part.  So tell me a little bit about what you feel like juggling has brought to you in the area of business?  Like what have you learned about going to those birthday parties or being in the parades or doing community events and how it’s related to stress management things?  What are some of the things that you learned that influenced you in the businesses that you use that you are doing today?

Chris -  It’s a great question.  One of the biggest things that I feel like is time management and project management.  Because as jugglers, there’s three balls in the air or there’s like five balls in the air or seven balls in the air and you’re always kind of making sure that everything is working out, everything is balanced.  You can’t be putting more focus on one ball and forget about the others; and that’s the same with business.  Like you need to have people specialize in certain tasks and put actual focus on those things.  And throughout business, it’s helped me because I realize the importance of not just focusing on like one aspect and kind of forgetting about the rest.  And it kind allows me to balance my time a little better as well.

Sarah – That’s good.  I love that.  That’s kind of the things I was thinking too as I watched that.  I’m like that must really help him just learn to just keep it all, sometimes I’m sure your still probably a little stressed with all the things that you’re doing in your life.  But it sounds like that would really help you balance things out.  So what were, what are some good surprises that you found from beginning in business?  Like why would you recommend it to other kids?

Chris -  One of the biggest surprises probably would be during the summer, this past summer, I was taking summer classes and summer classes are 2 1/2 hours a piece per class and I was taking two of them.  So I was kind of really stressed out Monday through Friday.  And then that was for all of June and all of July.  And then I decided that all of August, I was just going to go visit friends and I ended up spending the whole month at beaches and working from my friends houses and like the beach and stuff.  So it was cool that I didn’t have to be at my house or be in New York working somewhere.  I could kind of take it with me.

Sarah – Yeah.  I think that’s the beauty of when you’re looking at what business you want to start.  Like look at it from the perspective of, is this going to be a job that I’m going to have to go to every single day or is this something that’s going to allow me to have a lifestyle that I want?  And that sounds like kind of what you’ve chosen is to have a business that creates a lifestyle.

Chris -  Yeah.  A great quote that I heard about that is, “Design your business around your life, not your life around your business.”  So it’s kind of make sure that you have fun first and otherwise we’re going to end up getting older sooner and not really enjoying our youth which is what we need to be doing.

Sarah – We would be doing that smart.  And some people have asked me, “Well, why do you do 7:30 in the morning on Saturdays because kids aren’t even up then.”  And I said, “Well that’s the time I have.  I have three children and I get up really early to get then because it’s quiet then.”  And when my kids starting waking up, which I hear them start to wake up right now, it’s going to get noisy at the Cook house.  So it’s 10:30 on the east coast and it’s way later in Europe so we’ll record it and the people that are snoozing right now can listen to it later.  So do you do everything yourself or do you have your own team?  And if so, how did you find the people along the way to be on your team?

Chris -  Well, when I first started I thought I could do it all.  I literally was trying to do everything.  And what happened was the things that I was doing that I wasn’t good at, you could definitely tell that I wasn’t good at them.  It just wasn’t professional and I felt, I was disappointed in the stuff that I was putting out.  And I started to read, I’ve been reading a lot of books.  And one that kind of pushed me along the terms of finding workers was the Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris.  And he talks all about like outsourcing and like partnering  up, just kind of leverage your time and I’ve hired people from like local people in new York, people over in the Philippines, people in like various countries to do the things that I’m not good at.  And I found that it’s relatively easy, you just got to get resumes from people and kind of take the time to go through them and work with them.  And then if they work good, then keep doing it and if not, find somebody else.

Sarah – Right.  Right.  So what are your daily efforts then or weekly efforts?  Because I know you’re prescribing to the four hour work week.  But what are you daily and weekly efforts?

Chris -  That would be basically what I focus on, I try to work out every day because exercise is really important to me.  And then I always try to either create a blog post like educating my subscribers or create some sort of value to the people I’m teaching, whether it’s audio like this, video trainings, there’s eBooks that I’ve been kind of creating and just trying to create as much value as I can every single day so that I can kind of leverage that later on.

Sarah – Right.  That’s good.  I think it’s important that you stated that you take a little bit of time each day.  Because if you don’t, you kind of get out of the routine.  But if you’re in the routine; it’s just like exercise.  You get up, you work out or whatever, you’re doing the things that you’re doing and it becomes kind of a good habit towards wealth building which is great.

Chris -  Yeah.  It definitely helps out.  Because working out, I love it because it gets me, that’s like my time to think and be kind of not worried about school or work or anything.  So it’s a good feeling when I get to do it.

Sarah – Yeah for sure.  So tell us about what would you give as maybe your top five tips before I, because I want to ask you some questions about your parents as well and how the things that they did influenced you.  But what would be like your top five tips that you’d like to share especially with the kids that were the ages that you were when you started your juggling.  What would you recommend to those really young kids and the kids that are coming up in their tweens and teens and they’re thinking, “Gosh I really want to be in business.”  Because everything is so much more digital than it even was for you and I at that point because now you’re 12 years older than you were at the time that you started juggling and things like that.  So it’s more and more digital now.  It’s more and more easy, it’s easier to get outsourcing in place, it’s easier to get a lot of different things in place that it wasn’t as easy to do before.  So what would you recommend to them if they’re thinking about starting a business?  What would be some things that you would say, definitely do this, definitely do this, definitely don’t do this?

Chris -  Okay.  Definitely need to get a website up with a blog on it for like as much as you can because the importance of this is there’s no downside to having a blog I feel like because you are bringing yourself which will end up being beneficial for you long term.  You’ll be able to put up videos, blog posts and be able to network through that blog which will kind of help you build up your brand even more.  And I’d recommend kind of just finding something that you really enjoy doing and find a way to kind of get paid for it.  What I’m thinking of the book Crush It by Gary Vanyerchuck.

Sarah – Great book.  Yeah.

Chris -  And he, that’s kind of how I, I was on the fence about starting a marketing company for internet marketing and after I read that book, I was like, okay, well I just need to do it because that’s what I love doing.  So basically just find your passion and there’s always ways to get paid for anything you do.  Like I have a juggling course that I get paid to do and that’s just me teaching people how to juggle and I love doing that.  And there’s opportunities by leveraging the internet for all of this.

Some other kind of tips that I recommend are reading is probably one of the easiest ways to kind of learn how to kind of get through barriers or have business breakthroughs because we’re not doing something that no one’s ever done before.  People have been in business since before time and people have written books about it and how to be successful in business.  So I feel like when I have problems, I just look for a book that can kind of how to solve that.  Figure out how that person broke through the barrier and that kind of gets my mind thinking how I can break through it and how other people can get through the barriers.  So it’s a little cheating way of getting through things but it’s really efficient because you’re not having to learn the hard way.

Sarah – I don’t think it’s cheating, I think it’s brilliant.  Plus for kids because at the library, even if they’re families are not well to do or even money’s tight or whatever they can go to the library.  They can check it out for three weeks.  And usually you can check out like almost an unlimited number of books.  And so they can be pouring over those books, taking notes, even if they can’t write in the books because they belong to the library.  They can absolutely have an amazing education just for however young they are.  They, as long as they can read, they can start reading some of those great books and some of them are probably going to be a little over their head if they’re really young but some of them are going to be really inspiring and definitely that’s kind of what started this whole process with Raising CEO Kids is that we read a couple books as a family and the kids got excited, started their own businesses and started going from there.

Chris -  That’s awesome.  Yeah, the library’s a perfect resource for this.  If, go to the library and read as much as you can because it’s free and what we like as young entrepreneurs is free stuff because we don’t have the money built up, set aside.  So that’s a great tip on your part Sarah.

Sarah – Okay, so as your parents, you talked about before we started recording, you talked about how your dad was in business.  So do you think this kind of gave you kind of an edge?  Did you see some things going on because of him having his own business?  Tell us a little bit about that.

Chris -  All right.  So a little background on him is he went to college, got a job for IBM and had been working them for, he still works for them doing consulting stuff but he’s also started his own Hughes consulting business which is for personal finance.  And over the past like five or six years I noticed that he was starting to spend more time on his personal business.  And what I noticed was he was kind of a little happier because he go to pick who he was working with and he kind of got to pick when he wanted to work.  And the money hadn’t really been an issue for him because he has the other job.

So he was constantly getting information and books from IBM to kind of develop himself and what that allowed me to do is get books from him.  Like he would read something and he’d be like, “Oh this is a great book, you need to read this.”  And then that saved me money too because I didn’t have to end up buying the book or going to the library.  And I’ve found that it just, looking at him he seemed happier being in business  for himself instead of kind of forced to do something at this specific time for this reason with someone that he might not want to work with.  So that kind of, I don’t know, pushed me back along the terms of okay, work when you want with whom you want and you’ll kind of have a happier day, happier life.

Sarah – Right.  Rather than just working with whatever clients going to pay you.

Chris -  Yep.  Yeah, that’s the big thing.

Sarah – Well, especially when the money’s tight sometimes you get in that trap.  But if you really work to not only structure your people that are on your team but really just say, you know I’m only going to accept clients that have these characteristic, you’re business is going to be happier, you’re going to be happier and it sounds like that’s what your dad’s done which is just great that he’s been able to do that.  So did you parents introduce you to mentors?  Like did you go to other juggling classes or did you just kind of learn that all on your own from your dad?  How did that work?

Chris -  Actually my father was really encouraging for it and there was a local professional juggler who was in Binghamton which is about 45 minutes from my house.  And my dad took my brother and I to go meet him and kind of pick his brain on juggling and learn some stuff from him.  And then after that experience we kind of fell even more in love with juggling and the concept of it and we ended up traveling to different conventions.  There’s one that was at Cornell university, there’s one that was at Rochester Institute of Technology and they’re a bunch of international conventions that we went to that we actually got to travel and been up to like Montreal, I’ve been to Wisconsin, I’ve been Philadelphia, I’ve been to Ontario and this was all within a couple years where we’d go up and tons and tons, thousands of jugglers would be gathered together teaching each other and performing.  And it was an awesome atmosphere to be around because these are people who are passionate about juggling and when you find people like that they’re willing to help you.  They’re willing to give you tips that they’ve picked up and it makes your juggling go like just like speeding up your process.  You get better quicker.

Sarah – Right.  That’s awesome.  And also it sounds like he’s definitely introduced you to mentors through books.  How about other business mentors besides jugglers?

Chris -  He’s introduced me to a couple authors that he had known through his work.  But mainly I’ve been, I do a lot of personal reading and stuff like that.  And I’ve been, if I really like a book, I end up doing a book review of it and then contacting the author and telling them how much I learned from their book and how appreciative I am of it.  And then I’ve met a couple great people through doing that.  And I’ve met some of the people who are my mentors as of now through recommendations of books that I should read and then how I can start to apply the concepts in the book into my business and my personal life.  So I feel that readings kind of attracted coaches to me and attracted mentors to me.

Sarah – Especially because you’re doing those book reviews which is a great place, a blog is a great place to do those reviews.  Plus it can actually be sort of an income if the kids even young kids if they were to do like an Amazon, like if they were able to do a review and then link it to an Amazon account.  Even if they make 4%, it’s still income that they could make.  I mean, I’m sure that you do that because it’s the smart thing to do.  And it’s not, maybe it’s not that much money but as people start trusting your reviews and things like that, they’re going to be able to, they’ll be like, “Oh Chris says to buy it.  Great, we’re going to get this one.”

Chris -  And it’s important to be sincere and to honestly tell what you’ve learned not just reiterating the information.  The first couple reviews I did I was just kind of copying parts of the book and sharing that.  But when I started actually saying how they applied to my business and how they applied to my life, like the principles, I noticed that people were kind of thanking me for kind of putting real life examples into a book, which is, that’s cool, that’s how I think anyways, how I can apply certain principles.  So make sure you’re doing that.

Sarah – Well, we have just a couple more minutes.  So what I want to do is go ahead and open up the lines.  I don’t know, I mute everybody and hopefully there’s not too much background noise.  But we’ll let anybody who wants to ask some questions. And if not, that’s okay; I have a couple more questions I want to ask you as we finish up.  So hold on one second.  I just like this opportunity to be able to, if people do have questions, let them ask them.  Okay, if anyone’s on the line that would like to ask some questions, go ahead and just jump on, say who you are, where your calling from and ask Chris anything you’d like to ask him.

Q -       Hi, I’m Abby from Winters California and I was wondering how you actually earn money?

Chris -  Okay.  Hi Abby it’s nice, you said your name was Abby.

Q -       Yes.

Chris -  Well, nice to meet you.  the easiest way for is that I created an information product course teaching juggling and I earn money when people buy that course as well I perform internet marketing services for people to help them get set up on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and then develop a strategy though that.  And I also get compensated for doing that so people end up paying me for helping them develop a business strategy.

Sarah – And it looked like on your site, you had a service called, well anyway, I know about Traffic Geyser.  So basically you’re also going into different businesses taking video of them especially if they’re local, doing video and then setting up kind of a system to get that video out there so that it helps their search engine ranking and stuff like that.  Is that correct?

Chris-   Yeah.  That’s a great service, the Traffic Geyser.

Sarah – That’s awesome yeah.  Okay, anyone else have a question?  Thanks Abby for asking that question.

Q -       Hi Sarah, Don Osbourne, Profit Puzzle, how are you?

Sarah – Doing great.

Q -       Good.  Chris, I was just look at your website and I was tweeting a couple of your quotes so I hope I quoted to you correctly here.  But I noticed you had a question on a recent blog that said if there were no limitations or consequences what would you perfect average day look like?  What would your perfect, average day look like?

Chris -  All right.  This is one of my favorite questions to kind of get into when I’m actually working with people it’s a great way to kind of get to the core of what they want.  And for me, my perfect day would be to kind of wake around nine or ten, work out for about an hour and then ideally either head to the beach and relax for a couple hours or to a lake and kind of go waterskiing or something like that because I love warm weather.  And then after that, I’d want to be contacting people who are interested and anxious about what I’m offering and my services and work for them maybe five, six hours and kind of help them build their business through leveraging the internet.  And then for the last couple hours of the day, just kind of relax and hang out with friends and eat some good food.

Sarah – Definitely eat some good food.

Q -       It sounds like we’ve got to move you to California for that sunny, warm weather part.

Chris -  Yeah, I’ve been looking at it.

Q -       Anyway, thank you.

Sarah – Thank you so much Don for asking that question.  Anybody else have a question for Chris?  Okay, well let me go ahead and mute these other lines really quick.  And okay, as we finish up Chris one more time, you’re going to go whoschrishughes and that’s H-u-g-h-e-s, right?

Chris -  That’s correct.

Sarah – Okay, so you’re going to go whoschrishughes.  And basically if you type that into Google you’ll find him on lots of different places which is a great thing to do.  So be sure to check him out there.  And then the other thing I wanted to ask you is what do you feel like if you would have known something different, do you feel like you wish you would have known something.  Does that make sense?  Like hindsight 20/20.  What would you wish you would have known before you had started your businesses and looking back?  As a young entrepreneur, what would be one thing that you could share that you say gosh, if I had known this, this would have made a little bit of a difference for me?

Chris -  Probably the biggest thing is I read the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.  I didn’t read that until I was about a year, year and a half into business so I, I still had the mindset coming from like a place of need for money.  I had the employer’s mindset where I wasn’t really feeling the abundance that’s around us.  And after reading that book, my mindset kind of just shifted and I realized that you can actually think, if you have the thought, it can be turned into an action plan and it can be turned into monetary compensation for it.  So realize that the ideas that we have, the ideas that all of us kids have, they’re smart, they’re very good ideas, we just need to kind of develop a plan and that’s where mentors come in, kind of help you put your words into action steps and goals.  And then after doing that, I realized how easy it was to actually make a difference and get paid for it.

Sarah – That’s awesome.  That book, there’s a few books that I purchased for every single member of my family so they each have their own copy and that’s one of them.  I’m like as soon as you decide to read it, here it is, here’s your own copy.  That is so great.  Well, thank you so much Chris for being here with us on the Saturday Morning Mastermind and thank you everybody’d for joining us this morning and even if you don’t ask a question, thanks for being on the call.  And sometimes I think it’s a little scary to get on and ask questions so thanks for being brave and asking questions this morning.

I want to be sure that you know we have a a new YouTube channel and it is youtube.com/raisingceokids.  So you can find us there.  You can find Chris like I said at whoschrishughes.com as well as all those places on Twitter and Facebook and things like that.  And then you can find me at Twitter @RaisingCEOkids as well.  So have a great day, like I said before.