She asked for a Billion Dollar Idea with Jaime Cross

My guest is entrepreneur Jaime Cross. Two years after leaving her career in banking to be home with her newborn son, Jaime had this longing, I’d even call it a calling, to build a business that would be driven by purpose and that would have worldwide impact. Now, I’m betting that felt like a pretty audacious goal since she was at home, elbows deep in all the glorious messiness of raising kiddos and full-time parenting, but she was bold and she prayed. More specifically, Jaime asked God for a billion dollar idea. Yeah, that’s with a B, a billion dollar idea, which is pretty big. I mean, right?

Listen To The Podcast:

RESOURCES:

INSTAGRAM:

@thehereffect

@migsoap

TWITTER:

@migsoap

WEBSITE:

MIG Soap: https://migsoap.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

Mitch Matthews: Well, a few days later, Jaime got hit with a business plan in her sleep. Literally, the idea hit her in a dream. I love this because I’ve done over 200 episodes of DREAM. THINK. DO., and I think this is our first person who got hit with a dream in a dream. I love that. Then Jaime embarked on her entrepreneurial journey the very next day and instantly became a millionaire. No, I’m just kidding. It wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t that simple. But she went after the dream right away. She went to work.

Mitch Matthews: After eight long years of trial and error, a lot of mistakes and tears, her company now is one of the fastest growing organic skincare companies in the world. They’re selling millions of dollars of product. It’s called MIG. Its tagline is seed to skin, skin to soul. That’s what Jaime is all about. It’s an amazing story. I heard it and I thought, oh my gosh, I got to have her on. So I’m so excited to do this. Jaime Cross, Welcome to DREAM. THINK. DO.

Jaime Cross: Thank you. It’s so great to be here.

Mitch Matthews: Absolutely. Absolutely. I love, love, love your story. We got to meet at a conference. Pedro Adao, who was also a recent guest on DREAM. THINK. DO, introduced us and we got to meet at his conference in Texas a few months ago now, but I was like, oh my gosh, your story’s awesome.

Jaime Cross: Thanks, Mitch.

Mitch Matthews: I love it. So you’re in Colorado Springs. You and your husband have four boys. When this story started, you just had one. Now you’ve got four boys. Let’s go back. We’re going to time jump a little bit, and I want to hear about life now, but I think I want to hear about the genesis of this, and I mentioned it obviously in the intro a little bit. Let’s talk about that. You had left a career in banking …

Jaime Cross: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mitch Matthews: … to be at home.

Jaime Cross: Yes.

Mitch Matthews: That’s never an easy decision.

Jaime Cross: No, I mean, I was making great money banking, doing the whole corporate thing. It took Nathan and I five years to get pregnant. When we finally found out that we were going to be parents, I just could not imagine not being home with them. Came home. It was about two years into full-time motherhood that I was starting to feel that pull and that stir. Actually by then I had my second baby when I was starting to be like, okay, I know that I’m so satisfied as a mother, but something’s stirring in me, and I know there’s more. I think a lot of mothers feel guilty about wanting more, but I was just like, God, there’s something inside of me and we were struggling to pay our bills. I’d given up this huge salary. Nathan was teaching, and teachers don’t make very good money-

Mitch Matthews: No. 

Jaime Cross: … and so it really helped-

Mitch Matthews: They should. They should make tons of money, but they don’t. Absolutely.

Jaime Cross: Yeah, we were a one income family, trying to live debt free. It was a struggle. In that moment when I cried out to God, it wasn’t just because we weren’t meeting our bills. It was because there was this thing inside of me just raging to come out like, I know, I’m supposed to build something. I know I’m supposed to change the world. That sounds cliche, but for the drivers and the entrepreneurial spirits out there, it’s just something you cannot rein in. I was struggling even with some depression and postpartum stuff because I was squashing the dream trying to discover it, what is this thing.

Jaime Cross: Laid in bed one night crying, feeling all the weight of the world in my spirit and on my heart and just cried out to him. I was like, “God, show me a billion dollar idea so that I can change the world and change my family’s legacy.” Just peace settled over me like, okay. That was when it started. It wasn’t when I had the dream. It started when I was like, “Okay, Lord, what is this thing?” 

Jaime Cross: I know that there are teachers that will tell you don’t worry about your passion. For me, it wasn’t like I need to find my passion. It was more like, “Just put something in my hands that I can be faithful with, and I’ll do it. Whatever you asked me to do, I’ll be faithful with it.”

Mitch Matthews: When you had the dream, was it like … I love this because it’s interesting. We get to talk with people about pursuing dreams, achieving dreams. A lot of times we’ll try to go back to a Genesis moment. For some people, it’s this organic crock pot, the dream started to … There was an essence of a dream, but really it took about 10 years to even getting clarity. Sometimes though, it’s more of a microwave lightning bolt thing. When you got hit with that in the dream, was it for a bar of soap or did you see more of a vision of what you’re doing now with MIG? What was that vision in the dream?

Jaime Cross: Yeah, and I’m glad that you mentioned that because people should not wait for a dream. They shouldn’t wait for God to show them. It’s important to just start with something. I always talk about vision is this upside down triangle because without a vision the people perish, so we need to be pursuing something that makes us come alive. For me, this dream was I was pouring all of these oils. There were vats and vats of botanicals, purple flowers coming out of these oils, and I was pouring them out. MIG came up out of it with these flowers surrounding the MIG.

Jaime Cross: What we’re doing now even, which I know we’ll talk about too with the Her Effect, I can look at that dream and say, “Wow, I’m pouring my life out into these women, and these women are blossoming into mighty oaks. It’s also really important to just not be like… For me, it was very clear at the time, start a skincare company. I didn’t know how to do that. I literally told my husband, “I’m gonna start a skincare company.”

Jaime Cross: I went out that day, and I got books on chemistry and Ayurvedic medicine and naturopathic healing and essential oils. I studied for a year on my own two o’clock in the morning, nursing my babies, every weekend, every nap time, every spare moment I had; I was researching and I failed chemistry in high school. It wasn’t something that I had been doing or knew how to do, but in that season, God gave me the grace to just learn things that I couldn’t seem to grasp when I was in school.

Mitch Matthews: Yeah. I love that. I love that though because I think that so often we wait until we’re qualified to pursue something, but it’s not usually that. A lot of times it’s through experimenting, which I know you’ve lived the word experiment. I always say it’s amazing, people say, “I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough time.” It’s amazing how many 15-minute blocks, 30-minute blocks are just hiding within our day, or we can squeeze those things out to go and read three chapters from one of these books or to just watch a video on YouTube to say, “Okay, if I’m going to really focus in on this, I gotta learn a lot in a short amount of time.” That’s incredible. That’s incredible. You didn’t grow up a chemist. You didn’t grow up a scientist, but you said all right, with this vision, God gave you that grace to be able to learn some stuff and start trying it.

Jaime Cross: Exactly. So I did that for a year, formulated our first bar of soap. Again, it’s that thing of okay, this upside down triangle, what’s the firsts step. I’m going to be faithful with that first thing. Everybody needs to have a vision for their life, whether it’s in a specific vain, whether it’s entrepreneurship or whatever, but even having a big picture view of where you want to be five, 10, 20 years down the road. Having that vision, I knew that I wanted to be able to build something that would set us free to be in full-time ministry and do things with our family and never have to worry about asking a boss or worried about can we afford to do this?

Jaime Cross: We had no money when I started. I had this bar soap. Couldn’t afford to build a website. I literally went out and hit the streets in Denver and Colorado Springs. I was walking up and down the streets of Denver and the Springs here, walking into stores asking for owners, asking for buyers, talking to these people and making deals and just selling my product right there on the spot and-

Mitch Matthews: With kids in tow sometimes, right? You’re walking around-

Jaime Cross: Yes, I would call my mom because I had two babies and I couldn’t get a babysitter. It was like, “Mom, can you come and take the boys?” She would literally drive for eight or nine hours with the kids in the backseat while I would walk up and down. It’s funny, I was there last weekend. I drove on Third Street again in Denver down near Cherry Creek. I was like, “Wow, look at all these stores. That was the first step for me.”

Mitch Matthews: That’s where it started.

Jaime Cross: Yeah.

Mitch Matthews: That is so cool. Now okay, you literally boiled it down to one bar soap, just starting with one bar of soap, which sounds simple, but at the same time, I know if you get soap wrong, there’s all sorts of potential problems in that. Absolutely, but that’s where you start. I love that because especially now, if you guys go DREAM. THINK. DOers. go check out MIG’s website. We’ll get you all the information here in a little bit, but there’s a bunch of different amazing products on there now, but it started with just getting one bar of soap. I think that’s so huge because sometimes people get that bigger vision but they’re like, “I can’t achieve that with what I know now, with who I know now, with what I have,” all of that. I love how you gave yourself permission to start small.

Jaime Cross: Oh, absolutely. It’s being faithful in the little things. Absolutely. I had a girl ask me, she’s like, “You know, when you were formulating, was it 80% science, 20% intuition or …

Mitch Matthews: That’s a good question.

Jaime Cross: I told her, it was 20% science, 80% intuition. She’s like, “No, I don’t believe that.” I said, “How many products do you know of where people are getting off prescription drugs to use a skincare product?” I’m telling you there was so much … The next stage of the story was going from wholesale retail. I changed my business model because I was like I, “I don’t like having to go through these stores. I don’t know my customer.” I didn’t like serving these wholesalers because I just felt so disconnected from the market.

Jaime Cross: We jumped into farmer’s markets for four years. That was really where I’m talking to people every day. I’m literally going back to the drawing board with my products, every thousands and thousands of hours of tweaking and fixing and, “Oh, I launched this. I spent four months on this product, got it launched, put it out on my table and nobody wanted to buy it. It was not a marketable product,” and going back to the drawing board, okay, what do people want. When I find that thing that they want, how do I perfect it to a point where I’m the only one they want to come to?

Jaime Cross: I’m in a saturated market. Don’t ever doubt yourself because you’re in a saturated market. You can absolutely create a new opportunity and differentiate yourself in the marketplace by doing your research and really dialing and getting to know your customer. There were things that I did because there were two or three other skincare companies at these farmer’s markets where I’m like … it was a hard hustle too waking up at 4 a.m., loading up the car, driving an hour to Denver, setting up your table, and then people trying to beat you out with low prices. I was the one table in the entire market that had $10 soaps, which is expensive for a farmer’s market. People would be like, “How are you $10,” but it would engage them.

Mitch Matthews: Yeah.

Jaime Cross: My pricing was [crosstalk 00:14:52].

Mitch Matthews: You’re being bold.

Jaime Cross: Yeah, or they’d be down at the other side, an eighth of a mile down the road there at the other end of the farmer’s market, and they’d come down and be like, we could smell your stuff all the way down … I was always pushing limits with our soaps too. Typically, formulations are calling for a certain percentage of the batch to be these essential oils. I was doing like 500% more, which you’re not supposed to do, but I was constantly pushing boundaries. You get our stuff, your mailman is going to be like, “What is it that you’re buying because I can smell it in the packages?”

Mitch Matthews:I love you. My truck smells great. Thank you.

Jaime Cross: Yeah. Anyway, it wasn’t like, “Oh great. I had this idea from the Lord. Now I’m going to go launch it and make a million dollars.” It was literally years and years and years of dialing in and talking to people and touching their hands and giving them hand massages and hearing their stories and hearing their pain points and then wanting to create solutions around that. It was a journey of figuring things out for sure.

Mitch Matthews: I think that’s huge from a marketing and product development standpoint, one, and also from a heart and spiritual standpoint too. But from a business and product development side, I see these people who go and isolate themselves saying, “I’m going to come up with this amazing product.” And you’re like, “That’s great, but what do people want? Do you know? Are you sure that you’ve tapped into what people want?” That’s hard work. It’s messy. People are messy and moody and grumpy and all that stuff, too. But it’s that you had the boldness and audacity to go and say, “You know what, I’m going to create something, but that’s just going to start the conversation.”

Jaime Cross: Exactly.

Mitch Matthews: “I’m going to keep that going until I really have those things nailed.” I love that. I want to talk about some of that next big turning point, that next big breakthrough. But I want to mine this for a second because I know you’re talking about a year’s worth of experimenting, a year or so or more of wholesaling, and then doing the farmer’s markets for four years. How do you stay motivated? How do you stay inspired? How do you stay with it when during those times, you’re probably making a little bit of money, but probably also losing some money, all those things? How did you stay inspired to keep going with the dream?

Jaime Cross: Yes. Well, I know that’s the power of a vision. When the Bible says, “Without a vision, the people perish,” it’s true. I talked about this at an event I spoke at that was … if the opposite is true, then with a vision people come alive, and how important is it to know where you’re going? So many people are waiting on God, and they’re waiting for answers. Vision and belief are two very strong, supernatural forces that pull you from the inside. When I read the scripture that says, “He will bless the work of my hands,” I’m like, okay, see a man who is diligent in his ways, and he will stand before kings and not mere men, and you will reap a harvest if you don’t give up. All these scriptures point to the fact that we have to work at something for seasons day in and day out and fail at something, but God is going to multiply your efforts. We cannot give up.

Jaime Cross: That’s the worst thing you can do is start something and then feel like you’re not getting the results you want and then leave it there. We are here on the earth to take dominion and to figure this stuff out and figure out how to make it work, and then he will multiply your efforts which takes sowing and sowing and sowing. If you look at farmers, gosh, they’re out there pulling rocks out of the soil, they’re tilling the soil, they’re fertilizing the soil, and then they plant a seed and hopefully in those first couple of years, they can get somewhat of a harvest. Like you said, it’s small in comparison to just if you stay dedicated and you keep doing your thing and you learn how to become an expert in your field, you will reap a harvest and you will stand before kings [inaudible 00:19:09].

Jaime Cross: I believe that so strongly. That kept me going, this vision of my husband and I having the farm that we wanted to have since we got married and raising our boys the way we want to raise them and having nice things. I think that’s also a guilt thing for a lot of people’s is, well, is it okay to lavish yourself? I’m like, “Do you think that God, with the streets in heaven being paved with gold or when he asked Solomon to build his temple, it wasn’t like, “Go find the cheapest stuff and build me a crackerjack box.” It was, “All the nicest things.”

Jaime Cross: My heart was just so much about serving people. That’s another thing. When you’re building your thing and making your products and doing whatever it is that you’re doing, how can you serve with excellence, and it’s really coming up. I figured out three things people wanted: they wanted the essence to be right, they wanted the texture to be right, and they wanted results. That took me a couple years of, how do I make this lotion not sticky but actually work and do something that no other lotion out there is doing, which is hydration. For real hydration, for more than 20 hours, how can I make a soap bar that hydrates and cleanses but doesn’t dry your skin out but gives you this great spa emotional mood experience. All these things, I was building line upon line, precept upon precept, layer upon layer and layer upon layer of figuring out what people wanted and responding to that with work.

Mitch Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. What I’m hearing is is that, especially in the early phases, I know you still take a lot of satisfaction from make an impact, loving your customers well, connecting with them. I saw you interact with a huge group. Every one of them, you were laser focused in on and just talking with. I can tell still that plays a part in who you are. I would imagine from what I’m hearing though too is is that during that time, it may not have been the money that was rewarding, but you were honed in on the vision, and you were staying inspired by continuing to walk it out but also continuing to connect and knowing you’re making and impact. You might not be making the money yet, but you’re making an impact of these people. That’s huge.

Mitch Matthews: I do think you’ve got to find ways to stay inspired in the midst of the grind. Even when money starts to come, it doesn’t mean that all of our problems are solved, we don’t have a problem in a day. No. You still have to find ways to stay inspired, but when the money’s not there, you have to find extra ways to stay inspired.

Jaime Cross: That’s where I think being able to create your own paradigm shifts and shift your state, that’s a discipline we have to learn, especially as Americans where we have it so good. Sometimes I’ll think about the fact that there are women in Africa carrying buckets on their heads, and they’re not getting paid well, and they’re getting beaten, and they’re struggling to provide for their families, and they’re getting … It’s a horrible life. Do you think they care about their dreams and their passions? They’re surviving.

Jaime Cross: If we get out of our comfort zones and start shifting our own paradigms of what would I do if I didn’t have it that good? Motivate yourself. Hey, we’re in America. We have free enterprise. We get to take dreams and ideas and build them. That’s amazing. Live a life worthy of the calling you’ve received, and be faithful with all this abundance that you have. Don’t take that for granted.

Mitch Matthews: Yeah. It’s almost a responsibility. None of us have an easy life necessarily, but for those of us that live in countries where we have more opportunity like this, I think it’s also a part of our responsibility to do something with that, to be able to say, “Gosh, we’ve been given so much. We should be doing something with it.”

Jaime Cross: Right.

Mitch Matthews: I love it. I love it. Okay, let’s talk about, what would you say was a major turning point because now multiple products, very successful. What would you say was another big turning point? You went from farmer’s markets to then a big shift.

Jaime Cross: Yeah, yeah, for sure. As an entrepreneur, we have this innate gift to discern seasons that we’re in. When I was doing wholesale retail, I was like, okay, I know I need to go to the next step here. I need to get close to my customer. How can I do that? Farmer’s markets are the best way because I’m actually talking to people.

Jaime Cross: Then I came through another season again where I was like, okay, I’ve done all the stuff, I’ve got a killer product line, I’m ready to expand again. When we were pregnant with our fourth baby, I was hemorrhaging really bad. We didn’t know if he was going to make it. I was on bedrest. I just remember sitting there, “I’m sitting here on bedrest. I’ve got three little boys, I’m running my business from my bedroom.” I had to hire girls to help me run my markets and stuff like that, and just searching now at this point, what’s the next step because I don’t want to struggle any more. I’m ready to go to the next level.

Jaime Cross: Struggle in this way, I should say, there’s new kinds of struggles at every level. At that point, I was like, “Where do I need to go? It’s time to go online and blow this thing up digitally.” I was looking for a mentor. I found Russell Brunson in Clickfunnels. That was huge because I remember seeing this video randomly one day. I was studying; online businesses and eCommerce, digital marketing. I see this video, and Russell’s doing this interview with this guy who’s doing four million a month selling gun cleaning kits. I was like, “I could do that with soap. I could totally do what he’s talking about.” I was telling Nathan, “I found this guy. He’s selling gun cleaning kits. He’s actually buying them from Walmart and just repackaging them online and doing four million a month. It’s time for us to do this thing.”

Jaime Cross: Our baby was born and then he was hospitalized for the first almost month of his life. We didn’t know if he was going to make it. Nurses were coming in. I was like, “Please, can somebody just tell me he’s going to be okay, that he’s going to make it?” Every single nurse was like, “We can’t make any promises.” It was such a dark time.

Jaime Cross: I remember Nathan had paternity leave. He was going to have to go back to work at that … In that season, he was coaching wrestling and teaching. He was gone six to seven days a week. I was going to be left alone. I was terrified. I didn’t have any help in the home, which now I have a nanny. That’s so important for women. I just felt so alone. I’m telling you, having money changes so much. I knew that. I’m like, I’m building this thing. We’re ready to start prospering even more than what we ever have before. I took the leap. Got into funnel building and figuring out the whole digital marketing thing. There’s a whole story there too. I don’t know if you want me to get into that.

Mitch Matthews: One, thank you for sharing that part of your story. Your fourth son is okay now.

Jaime Cross: He’s okay, yes. He’s a little tornado.

Mitch Matthews: That is awesome. I love it. I just wanted to get that. I wanted to get that. I think a lot of times the temptation, when we’re hit with all those things, circumstantial things, family, health, all of that, the temptation is to shut down, to get smaller.

Mitch Matthews: To reduce. Instead, you said, “This is the time we’re going to expand. This is the time that we’re going to grow.” In some ways it goes, I think, against that human nature to go, “Oh, all this weight,” and you went, “Roar.” I love that. I love that. You also though, it wasn’t just a matter of I want to get bigger, I want to expand. You also were actively pursuing ways to do that. From an entrepreneur’s standpoint, it’s how do we scale. How do you grow and how it not be all dependent on me? At the same time, that scaling question happens deep on the inside first and then has to happen outside.

Jaime Cross: I love that you said that, yes. With anything in life and vision, the torrential downpour of life is going to try to rip that vision and that seed out of your hands and keep you small and keep you mediocre, but you can’t let it. You have to use those moments to throttle and push forward like you’re saying. When you do that, it’s almost like a sacrificial seed that gains … There’s more exponential growth that comes from bearing down and giving in those seasons when you want to go backwards. Don’t shrink back. Don’t look backwards. You’ve got to just keep moving forward.

Jaime Cross: I know it’s cliché too, but it’s the truth of it. Hold on to that vision and just keep moving forward. I did that. I literally called my mom again and then another friend that I graduated with as, “Hey, I need to go to this conference to learn how to do this whole funnel hacking thing.” They both drove from out-of-state so they could be with our newborn, and our three other boys, so everybody was safe. I literally packed up my breast pump, got a bunch of paper for notes, got on the airplane and was gone for four days and came back hitting the ground running. I built my funnel.

Jaime Cross: That too, was another process of how do I take something when … At the farmer’s market, everybody can smell your products. I’m giving them massages, they can feel our stuff. How do I take and write copy so well that it makes these products come alive online? How do I take images that make people inspired to buy our stuff. Also, there was this thing called the Perfect Webinar. I’m dialing into my script so that I could do video and sell product through this video sales letter basically is what it was. Did that over and over and over and over again. Did live videos on Facebook trying to present this thing and flopped completely. Didn’t sell anything for two months. Had my offer totally wrong.

Jaime Cross: I was, just the whole time, shifting around and, “Okay, I’ve got to change this offer and that product and change the way I’m saying this.” I was really good with sales though. For me, it was just, okay, if I keep doing this, I know it’s going to work. Russell said, “If you do a Perfect Webinar every week for a year, you’ll make a million dollars.”

Jaime Cross: This is what happened. Nathan and I looked at our life and we were like, “Here’s where we’ve come from. Here’s where we’re going. Here’s what we’ve done in our business. This doesn’t look like we should be doing this but,” Nathan quit his job. A perfectly good, safe job, gave up his salary, gave up benefits, gave up his passion for coaching, and we burned all the ships at the harbor. We said, “Okay, no to all of our farmer’s markets.” We said it’s either funnels or nothing. We’re going to make this thing work no matter what. We had three months to make it work before he was going to have to go out and get a job. We were going to run out of money in two weeks before we were going to be out of time.

Jaime Cross: I still remember getting my iPhone, sitting down outside my house to do this presentation again, this Perfect Webinar. I sat down and scrapped the script. I’d done it enough where it was in here, it was in my heart. I had gone from my head to my heart with it. I just thought about all those stories of my customers. I remembered I’m talking to people here. I’m not just trying to sell a product and get traffic and all the things that we do when we’re digital marketers. I personalized the whole thing, and did that Perfect Webinar.

Jaime Cross: Within a couple days, we were doing $1,000 a day. Within six weeks, we had done 130,000, and now we’re at almost three and a half million in the last year and a half with our online site, with our skincare.

Mitch Matthews: That is incredible. I love that. I think that’s so huge. I think it’s so important too because I think so many of our DREAM. THINK. DOers are entrepreneurs or wanting to be entrepreneurs. I think so many are also led spiritually. They pray. They look for that guidance. I think sometimes, especially when it starts to move into the marketing and the selling part, people start to wonder, “Wait, I don’t want to sell, or I don’t want to manipulate people.” It’s like, “No, it’s actually working on your message so that people can resonate with it, they can understand it.” But especially in today’s day and age where we’re bombarded with so many different things, you’re honing in that message so that you can connect with people and get their attention. You’re doing it in a way where you’re also inviting them into a mission, something bigger. I love the fact that you were down to just a few weeks left of, “We’ve got to make this work or things have got to major change.” There’s just so many elements of this that it’s made for a movie for crying out loud. I love it.

Jaime Cross: Yes. No. Yeah. If people could learn one skill in life, it’s selling. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you either have to hire somebody who knows how to sell or you have to become an expert at sales.

Jaime Cross: At my first job in high school, I was 16, I was a telemarketer. I remember always tapping into those skillsets that I learned. I would change my accent so that people wouldn’t hang up on me and cuss at me. I changed my name to a boy name so they’d be like, “What’s your name?” I learned so much about hooks and intonation and inflection and connection. Selling is a good skill to have. You have a moral obligation to get that product that you’ve created into the hands of the people that need it. If [crosstalk 00:34:02] serving your audience, then selling is just an easy thing of, “Here’s the problem that you guys have. I have the solution.”

Mitch Matthews: Yeah, exactly, and that’s it, it’s one of those, especially when you know, you’ve spent time getting to know your customer so well. You know their problems. You can speak to those problems probably better than they can. Then to be able to create a product that helps to meet those things, that’s a beautiful thing. That’s where selling is just an extension of relationship as opposed to some sort of manipulation or something like that. It’s huge.

Jaime Cross: Yes, of course.

Mitch Matthews: Yeah. I love it. I love it. Oh my gosh, there’s just so many elements, we could spend hours on that. I love … my gosh. With you, I think one of the other things that what I’ve seen with your business what you’re doing, is obviously it is about the products, but you’re also wanting to teach them about life and how to live and all of that. You see that MIG is everywhere as far as it’s obviously about product but it’s also about how they spend their day and how they’re … all of those things. It’s obviously so integrated for you. One of the questions I’ve got for you is how do you now … obviously the company’s rolling, growing, your family, four boys, you guys are all in. How do you on a daily basis, what are some of the things that you do to set up your day to stay focused, to stay successful?

Jaime Cross: I take time the night before, a production day where I have to get a lot of things done, and I just map out priorities. That’s so helpful because the next day, you want to just be able to get started. Vision is going to always expand. I know not everybody is like this, but most entrepreneurs are always thinking forward, future, more expansion. In order to accomplish the things I know I’m supposed to accomplish, I have to have a plan, and then having an assistant. When I started hiring help, that was a huge game changer. Now somebody helps me manager my calendar. Every morning, I’ll make a list on Trello. I have some project management systems and tools. She’ll be like, “Here’s your outline for the day.” She’ll remind me so that I’m like, “Okay, it’s time to go.”

Mitch Matthews: That’s awesome though. It really is. It’s finding those systems that work and whether you’re a solopreneur or whether you’ve got a team of 20 or whatever, it is, it’s a matter of finding out those ways to be able to say, “All right, what are those things going to be for me.” I know for me, I have a little alarm at 4:00 every day to say what’s up tomorrow. It’s that whole thing of being able to say, all right, I start to schedule out my to-do list versus my calendar, all of that, and to be able to say, all right, it may not always happen at 4:00 but I’m already thinking about it, all right, how are we going to maximize tomorrow, which does help a lot.

Jaime Cross: Yes. I will say that I have not developed the expertise in managing my time well yet. That’s something that I’m still working on. In our growth, we have operations where we make our own products. We’re doing our own production facility. There’s a whole team there. We just brought in our own marketing team, so for the last six months, we’ve been building our own in-house networking team. We do our own customer service, there’s all these things happening. It’s been a process for me to manage, hire the right people who are your front lines and just building a team is a lot of energy.

Mitch Matthews: Yeah. It’s interesting you would say you’re not good at managing your time, but I’m guessing though that that’s also, in some ways, what’s brought you success. Hearing the part of the story of all right, I took a year, and I’ve learned about chemistry. If you would have tried to do that in proper time management ways, it probably wouldn’t have worked, but you just found a way to jam stuff in there and get it done anyway. There’s so many people who are builders. I hear that all the time. It’s like, “Oh, I’m terrible at managing my time.” It’s like, “No, you shouldn’t. You’re doing those things. Let other people that are super detailed know what’s happen with every 15 minutes of your day.” But for you, what I hear though is you’re saying I know what the priorities are. I may not know what the schedule is but I know what my priorities are for that day, and that’s what I’m going to focus in on. It just sounds like you’re taking a little different approach than knowing what every 15 minutes of your day is.

Jaime Cross: Yeah. No. I have friends that are … I don’t know if you’re on the Myers-Briggs but the S’s and the SJ’s, they get stressed out. I’m not a stressed out person probably for that reason because I’m like, “Whatever we didn’t get done today, we’ll do it tomorrow. Okay, we’re going to flip this around.” It’s like the Matrix when he finally figures out that he’s [inaudible 00:39:27] the one who’s all of a sudden the bullets and it’s just all this melding to whatever it is and then also having just … I don’t know, yeah. It’s a process.

Mitch Matthews: It is. You’ve been building the company so you can add people, which is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t necessarily make everything easier to have more people, but it certainly does allow you to be able to delegate. I also think that’s a huge part of the entrepreneurial growth journey because I think that that also takes humility. I know as we’ve added team members, it’s been some of my favorite but also some of my hardest times of our organization because there’s stuff I don’t want to let go of. I absolutely need to in order for it to grow and in order for it to scale, but it takes an amount of humility maybe to be able to say, “Yeah, actually somebody can do better. They can do it better.”

Jaime Cross: Absolutely. One hundred percent, replacing yourself is so key. Even I’ve looked at, okay, one of my priorities? It’s having quality time with the kids and making sure that the company sounds like who we are, branding is on point. Outside of those things, I have a nanny now, but I’ve got time where I’ve blocked out where I’m with them, and I’m doing mom. There’s so many areas that you can … I don’t clean my own bathrooms anymore. There’s a lot of moms feel guilty about that too, but it’s good, it’s a good thing to have help in the home and in your business and replace yourself in all the areas that don’t replace the core things that only you can do.

Mitch Matthews: Absolutely. I do think, and I don’t think this is … I don’t know, but I think that that weight, that guilt … this is probably an episode we could do just in and of itself, but I think that weight and that guilt, especially for women, is much more pronounced. I know dudes feel guilt for other things too. I think for women, I know for my wife who she’s a part of our company, she also does a ton at our church, she leads a major program there, all of that and being a mom, I just think there’s extra weight, expectation, guilt, whatever it is that you have to wrestle through and overcome that’s just different.

Jaime Cross: Am I doing enough? Yeah, for sure.

Mitch Matthews: Right. Right, and am I doing the right things, all of that. That’s probably its own episode, but we could dive into that. I love it. Now, speaking of that though, you’re also though, you feel called to really start another movement for women, entrepreneurial-thinking women. I want to talk more about that called the Her Effect here in a second. We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to hear more about that and why you felt called to launch that.

Mitch Matthews: All right, so are you a solopreneur and you’re looking for a way to reach more people and sell more of the awesome products and services that you bring into the world? If so, it is time to check out Clickfunnels. Clickfunnels gives you everything you need to market, sell and deliver your products and services online, and you can do it without hiring or relying on a tech team. It’s crazy easy to use. In fact, we started to use it for some of our online training, and it is so straightforward. It’s so easy to navigate. I think you are going to love it. Go to mitchmatthews.com\click to get your 14-day free trial. Seriously, 14 days to dive in, set up a site and get to selling. Mitchmatthews.com\click, 14 days for free. Get to it.

Mitch Matthews: All right, so let’s talk about the Her Effect. You’ve got MIG, which is this amazing company, and things are rocking and rolling. You feel called to do something else as well. Tell us about the Her Effect. What’s it about, why?

Jaime Cross: It was four years ago, a little over four years ago, Nathan and I were working with a nonprofit. Nathan and I were … part of the vision was we want to build a business so that we can impact the world and do ministry and do the things we want to do without ever having to worry about funding. We were struggling through a season of just being under a leadership that was … I know so many people have experienced this as well. I would call it spiritual abuse almost. This particular leadership was not pro-woman, like, “Hey, your only place is in the children’s ministry and having babies at home.” I just remember feeling so constricted because I didn’t grow up that way. My father, he was a builder, and he would take me on these projects. I could build you a house tomorrow if I needed to. I was always capable, and same thing with my husband. He was always setting me free. Here we found ourselves, God was keeping us. We knew he was preparing us for something. We were in this season of just serving this leadership despite our call.

Mitch Matthews: This is leadership at a church, right? Leadership at a church?

Jaime Cross: Yeah. Despite the problems with the leadership, that’s another key thing too is just because things are hard doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to go and do something else. We were planted there. We felt called to serve there despite how difficult it was because we knew we were being prepared. We were learning about what not to do in leadership.

Jaime Cross: I sat down one day, and I was like, “God, show me the most powerful women in scripture. Show me your design for femininity because what I’m seeing is a limitless possibility.” He did. He showed me women who were like, “Hey, I’m going to go find the bad guys for you, King David,” and chopping the bad guy’s head off and throwing his head over the wall. Debra, who is leading armies and fighting wars. Then there was Mary who was a quiet and gentle spirit and birthed the savior, and Esther, royalty. He just showed me so many women.

Jaime Cross: What I saw, literally, I saw Lydia who literally housed some of the apostles. The church was planted in her home. She was this wealthy businesswoman. Proverbs 31, for goodness sake, she had made servants and she was buying and selling fields and turning a profit. The heart of her husband trusted in her, and her children rose up and called her blessed. I’m like, “God this is limitless potential in woman, but so many women are being in bondage, and they’re not free to pursue the things that you’ve put in them to pursue.”

Jaime Cross: The Her Effect at that point was born. I’ve just spent the last four years talking to women, learning about what their struggles are and me finding my own journey as well as what I’m calling Becoming Her. I’ve had the Her Effect trademarked and Becoming Her trademarked. Now I’ve learned women want community. They want to be surrounded by other like-minded women. They want to feel set free and be set free to pursue and become the thing that she’s called to be.

Jaime Cross: I’m building out this entire movement and world for women with eCommerce products. The content is all going to be available and free. I want to take the things that I’ve learned and bring in other experts and mentors, so all these her words.

Mitch Matthews: I love it.

Jaime Cross: We’re going to help be as iron-sharpening iron. For such a time as this, you were called, and it’s time to rise. Rise, run, Become Her, so that you can literally come alive in the things that you were born to do and Become Her. That’s the Her Effect. We’re launching here in the next couple of weeks with the community basically.

Mitch Matthews: That’s amazing. I love it.

Jaime Cross: And T-shirts.

Mitch Matthews: And T-shirts. That makes it all real. I love it. I love it. I love the vision. I love hearing the story on it, but I also love hearing the passion in your voice as you talk about it because I would imagine it’s a whole other area, a whole lot more work, but at the same time, it’s always amazing when you hear somebody who’s felt called to something versus somebody who’s felt pushed into something. The call draws us. The push, we want to avoid, we want to bail because it’s taxing. It just doesn’t ever feel right. When you feel called to something, it’s something else entirely. I love it. Jaime, how do people find out more about you? We’ll put all of this in the post as well, but what are the easiest ways to track you down and find out more about MIG and the Her Effect?

Jaime Cross: Yeah, we’re bringing it all together just under thehereffect.com. That’s the best place to go.

Mitch Matthews: Awesome. Awesome. I love it. I love it. All right, one last thing. We always love to wrap up DREAM. THINK. DO. episodes with just one last wisdom of the week. What would you say is something that has been helpful to you, whether it’s a pearl, whether it’s a quote, whether it’s a story? What’s something that helps you keep going and continue to go after these dreams that God keeps putting on your heart?

Jaime Cross: Thank you for asking that. This would be an encouragement to the men because I’ve seen my husband; I’m the visionary, he’s been in such a support role with this particular thing that we’re doing, and he’s always set me free. I would just encourage the men that so many of your breakthroughs in your family financially, in the way that you’re raising children is through setting her free. Jesus came to set the [cap-us 00:49:10] free. As you love your wife, as Christ loved the Church, think about how you can begin to set her free because there’s something inside of her that’s just waiting to come out. If you just can begin to foster that and be part of her growth, you will see massive breakthrough in your finances and just the way that she comes alive and serves you in what you’re doing. That would be my biggest thing for him.

Mitch Matthews: I love that, and it is so true. It’s one of those, definitely something I try to live to, not always been something I’ve perfect at, but it is amazing what it can do for a relationship when we’re trying to serve. I love it. That is awesome. Jaime, thanks so much for sharing your story. I know you’re in the midst of all these different things, launching, it’s so exciting. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know DREAM. THINK. DOers are going to love your story and want to spend more time with you, so thanks so much.

Jaime Cross: It’s so wonderful. Thank you so much.

Mitch Matthews: All right, DREAM. THINK. DOer, what stood out to you? What did you like from Jaime’s story?  I’d love to hear from you! Comment below and let me know.