Megan Hyatt Miller:
This could also be titled “Megan’s Biggest Failure of Cascading Communication Ever.” So, that could be the title of this episode.

Michael Hyatt:
Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael Hyatt:
And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast designed to help you win at work and succeed at life. And this week, we’re going to be talking about a big project we’ve been working on for months now, and we’re going to give you a peak behind the curtain so, stay tuned.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I feel like I should do a real drum roll. Let me see if I can do it and you can hear it.

Michael Hyatt:
I don’t know, I think there’s a sound effect for that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Nick is always getting on my case because I whack my desk with my hands. My inner Italian comes out, so I just thought I’d do it on purpose this time. So, we have made a really big shift as a company, and we wanted you guys to be the first folks outside of the company to know. So yeah, this is going to be big.

Michael Hyatt:
Yes. I think though that you should give some background, Megan, on how this unfolded, the history of it because, this as I recall happened last summer when I was on sabbatical. All kinds-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
… Of mischief happens when I’m gone.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
So, this was just one more in a long series of mischievous events. So, do you want to go through this?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, you’re not wrong, and this could also be titled “Megan’s Biggest Failure of Cascading Communication Ever.” So, that could be the title of this episode, except it’s not, because the announcement is a bigger deal than that.

Michael Hyatt:
I think you’re too hard on yourself, I don’t think it was that big a deal.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It was a pretty great failure. One of the things that we have been working on for a long time as a company as we’ve grown and evolved, is how do we streamline our product offerings and take what, over the years, has become quite an array of things that we bring to you to try to solve the problems that you’re facing as you are leading in your businesses and on your teams and, how do we make that simpler to understand? How do we make it, when you walk in our door, virtually speaking, how do we make all this stuff make sense so that you can find what you need most easily?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So, we were thinking about this, and we talked with a marketing team probably in the spring of last year about trying to solve this problem from a branding standpoint. And so they came back to me in the summer and they said, “Okay, we are really excited about what we’ve come up with. We’re going to do this branding presentation to you.” And I’m like, “Great, can’t wait.” So they have all the people, all the marketing team, all the leaders who have different parts of presentation to do. We have the designers, the directors, the copywriters, all the people. And they basically present us with a couple of different options.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And then, they presented us with a what’s-behind-door-number-three option, which was actually the option that they were recommending to us. And instead of a refresh, it was a total rebrand of Michael Hyatt & Company to become Full Focus.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s the name.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And we were like, that’s the name.

Michael Hyatt:
Full Focus.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Full Focus. So, I’m going to tell you that, steal our thunder here, Michael Hyatt & Company, as of today, when you’re listening to this episode, is now Full Focus. Okay, so let me tell you, back up a little bit. I know. It’s pretty exciting. Nick is clapping. You can’t see him, but he’s clapping and we’re clapping too. Because this is a pretty big deal. To do a major rebrand at our stage of business is a big deal. It’s actually not the first rebrand that we’ve done way back, Dad, like maybe eight years ago?

Michael Hyatt:
Right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Nine years ago? We were originally, at the beginning of Michael Hyatt & Company, we were called Intentional Leadership, and then we ended up moving away from that as we were working on trademarking and really getting serious about our intellectual property. And we became Michael Hyatt & Company, and now we are becoming Full Focus, so this is our third iteration of our brand identity. But we were presented, and I say we, Dad, you were actually on sabbatical. So, back to your point about the mischief.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
You were off on a boat somewhere fishing, it was great, you had no idea, you were none wiser that any of this was happening. Meanwhile, the marketing team comes to me and presents this option of becoming Full Focus and basically said, this is what is going to help our customers and clients immediately understand who we are and what we do. They’re going to be on the fast track to getting the transformation they want, if we put everything we do, instead of having almost all these little brands, if we get this umbrella of Full Focus. And we put all of our products up under this brand and people can immediately know that we are about helping people to achieve extraordinary results, through vision alignment and execution without having to compromise their most important values.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Our mission is, we want to help people to achieve extraordinary results and succeed without having to compromise their most important values and for us, that really looks like, winning at work and succeeding at life. That’s how we define that at Michael Hyatt & Company, now Full Focus. So they present this to me, including the whole identity, including how we would think about our coaching program and our physical planner, Full Focus Planner and really, what we feel like is that’s the tip of the spear for us. So that was really the genesis of this idea for becoming Full Focus as an organization, as it all really starts there for us.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I’m like, this is so genius. This makes it so clear to our customers, so clear to our clients. We were kind of headed in this direction, where we almost had two parts of our business: the coaching part, and the planner part, and that was really becoming confusing over time, and we had thought, are we going to split these two companies in half? Are we, into two pieces? How are we going to do this? And the marketing team really figured how to keep them together in a way that made sense and was cohesive. So I’ll stop there, let you comment on it and then I’ll talk about what happens next.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, I don’t think there’s much for me to comment on, other than I will say that when we came up with Michael Hyatt & Company, it was a default name because, to be honest, we struggled with it for weeks trying to come up with some other name, couldn’t come up with anything and we just acquiesced and said, let’s just call it Michael Hyatt & Company. That’s the easy thing to do and honestly, I wasn’t initially that attached to it. I didn’t think it was that big a deal, but as the story unfolds, I had more feelings about it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
Carry on.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, and I think this goes back to a little bit of why this was important. So we completed our succession plan now more than a year ago, where you transitioned into the role of chairman and founder, and I became the CEO of the company. And as a part of that process, we really started to think about, how does this brand move from being really a personality-driven brand to being a brand that’s not dependent just on one personality? Certainly your influence will continue to be, as we’ve shared back then when that announcement came out about the succession plan, will continue to be a primary force in our development as an organization, but I think you’re at the stage of your life where you also want to see us have even bigger wings than your own personal wingspan.

Michael Hyatt:
Yes.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
We have the opportunity to affect transformation in a way that is more than what we can do just with your personality, plus there’s a certain liability to having everything vested in one person. And so part of what we really liked or what really resonated with me, I should stay with our timeline in the story here, about when Courtney, our Chief Marketing Officer presented this to me was, this is a really natural embodiment of philosophically where we were, about moving away from being a personality-driven brand, to being a brand that was all about our content and the transformational work we do, that is much more than just one person. It’s really a whole group of people doing this together. So, I was super excited to share this with you because it seems so intuitively obvious as Courtney presented this to me. You’re on sabbatical, but I’m like, we can’t wait to make this decision. We need to make this decision. There were some things in the work from product development that cause us to need to make the decision.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So I’m like, Erin, my chief of staff. I was like, “Erin, just go ahead and send the video of this meeting to my dad so he can be caught up on it, and then we’ll just, I think he’s going to love it, we’ll just be good to go.” So, I didn’t come over and present it to you, I didn’t have Courtney present it to you. And of course, in the whole meeting, by the end of the meeting, I’ve forgotten what happened at the beginning. This is a two-hour meeting. People are talking about you. Well, I don’t know what Michael would think about this and we’ve probably talked about you, not in a disrespectful way, but not in as sensitive of a way as we might have had you been in the room. This is just your legacy, no big deal. And so, you watch this video and you’re like, “Okay, you just want to strip my name off the company?” You have to tell us your perspective of that.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. It was pretty funny because I came over, and I came to the house and you sent over the video, and Marisa, who’s our director of marketing and your youngest sister, works in the company. And she said, “Dad, I think you’re going to love this,” and I said, “Give me a heads-up, preview for me. I don’t know if I want to take an hour to watch this right away.” And she said, “Nope, I’m not going to tell you a word, you just got to watch it yourself.” And so that really got my curiosity going. So I sat down with Gail, my wife, and I said, we were sitting in the den, we just turned it on and we watched it and it was fascinating because there were slides and it was a formal presentation and the team had done such a phenomenal job graphically.

Michael Hyatt:
And what was really fun is, that they were going through all the different options. They said, “We could make this a house of brands. Where the parent company is not that big a deal and we just emphasize all these other products, but it seems like a jumble of products that don’t really fit together.” So then there was an option number two, which I don’t even remember what it was. Then there was option number three, which was to take my name off the company. And so I’m thinking to myself, okay, I haven’t been the CEO for six months, and already they’re giving me the boot. So I thought this was just about me stepping down from that role but apparently, I’ve been pushed outside. So, it was a little bit emotional.

Michael Hyatt:
I wasn’t angry with anyone, or I didn’t really, I’m making fun of it, I didn’t really have those feelings but there was a sense of loss. A sense of, “Wow, what does this really mean?” So, I remember right after that, I think right after you asked me what I thought about it and I said, “Well, I actually think I need a little bit of time to process it, in 24 hours. I need at least a day to think through this.” I think at that point you realized, maybe I shouldn’t have just sent that raw footage over without some kind of contextualization.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, it’s funny because normally I’m really good at communication, I’m really good at anticipating-

Michael Hyatt:
You are!

Megan Hyatt Miller:
… The emotional piece. I’m good at thinking through these things and how to sequence it so that we get to a place of alignment. And I was just so excited. I just completely took that for granted and didn’t even think about, I was thinking about you like my business partner, not a stakeholder in this decision from the perspective of, this is my name.

Michael Hyatt:
Right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I was thinking about what this would mean to the business, not what it would mean to you, and so in retrospect, I’m doing a giant face palm realizing, “Oh my gosh, I should have just done a whole presentation.” Anyway, all that to say, it worked out fine, but it was a little speed bump moment there for me. Good learning.

Michael Hyatt:
So, basically, I told Megan that I needed to think about it for 24 hours, and I did. And I thought okay, what would this make possible? And I think that one of the things that’s troubled me in recent years is that, because we have so many products, it’s been very difficult to find a unifying theme that ties them all together and makes the customer journey clear. So people know where they start, where they go next, how they finish. And I thought this changes everything because the name itself will do a lot of the explaining. And so that with Full Focus, whether you’re using the planner product or you’re going through our business coaching program, or you’re one of the companies to whom we deliver our enterprise services, meaning workshops and all that onsite in your company, that Full Focus was that unifying theme. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, this is so obvious and so simple and so elegant. And that’s exactly what you want in a name.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Totally. Well, as our brand developed, what happened, I mentioned this a little it earlier, is that we really ended up having one part of it that was very focused on the consumer, direct to the consumer with the Full Focus Planner and then in our courses and things like that. And then we had another part which was focused on business owners and organizations through enterprise-level solutions and coaching. And so, we were really faced with, are we going to make these two separate businesses or is there a unifying principle that pulls them together? And what we realized is, the unifying principle is inherent in the Full Focus Planner, it’s the Full Focus System. It’s vision, alignment, and execution. And what our individual consumers are doing when they’re using the Full Focus Planner is they’re clarifying their vision, they’re focusing on aligning their days back to their annual vision, and then they’re focusing on executing every day, the tasks that they have that ultimately drive that vision forward.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And then at the enterprise level, that’s what’s our clients are doing and what our coaching clients are doing in small businesses. So, in that whole spectrum, that’s what they’re doing is, they’re focusing on dialing in their vision, alignment and execution to drive extraordinary results without compromising their most important values, which is a lot about our mission. And so, what we’ve realized is, the Full Focus umbrella, this Full Focus System of vision, alignment and execution is really at the heart of every single thing that we do, and that’s the link, and whether we’re providing services inside an organization, teaching for example, a whole team, how to use the Full Focus Planner and get their daily vision, alignment, and execution, or whether we’re teaching an organization how to drive vision, alignment, and execution at the highest level, it’s really all the same thing, just a different application, different audiences using some different tools.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And so, I’m really excited about this because I think it helps to just make that clear and helps most importantly, to make it a fast, straight shot for our perspective customers and clients to find the tools and transformation that they need through our products.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay. Let’s talk about the mechanics of the brand transformation, because there’s some details there. What did this require from, a design standpoint, a positioning standpoint-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Michael Hyatt:
… And all the rest. Obviously, the name changed, but that’s the easiest part of it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
The rest of it is, we’ve spent literally months and months doing all the work. So, talk a little bit about what was required.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, it’s been really fun, actually. We have an amazing branding and creative team. Our creative director, Amy Fucci, was the primary mastermind behind the design direction of the new brand. She came up in that presentation with all the original branding and all of that, that was presented to us there, which is amazing. But since then, of course, she’s had to design a new website. She’s had to create all the marketing collateral. There’s lots of brandings throughout all of our products that has now been updated and will now be rolled out, that all aligns with each other, so it all looks like it goes together. There is a whole style guide that she created because it’s one thing to create the vision for the brand direction. It’s another thing to make sure it’s being used properly, so it gets consistently applied inside and outside the organization.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So she made this style guide that basically is the rule book for how to use our branding in a way that’s consistent and excellent. So, those were some of the things that we did, in our office, for example, we’ve got to update logos, we’ve got to update our core value posters, because all the design for all of those things have changed. So there’s all these little practical things and then there’s big things like website, marketing, collateral, etc., style guides that are much more on a large scale.

Michael Hyatt:
So, we’re actually recording this about a week before this rolls out, but by the time folks listen to this, this should all be live, right? So if they go to-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Should all be live.

Michael Hyatt:
… If they go to fullfocus.co, that’s the new home address, but mh.fullfocus.co will still resolve back to that same address, but fullfocus.co is the new website.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yep. So one of the things we should probably say, because people are wondering, they may go to that site and if they haven’t been listening maybe very carefully, you’re doing something else, you’re picking up the kids from school or you’re on your morning commute, you may not have caught this. So, there’s not been any major change or succession plan that happened a year ago when you moved into the founder and chairman seat, and I took over as the CEO. That’s still in effect. We haven’t sold the business, you’re not retiring, you’re not in bad health. We should just get all that stuff out of the way, because that’s, we don’t want the rumor bill to get going. This is a strategic branding decision that’s not motivated by external factors.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. I would just say that, this makes possible from our perspective, a bigger, better future that we’re super excited about. So, this is nothing else other than a marketing decision, actually a positioning decision and a strategic brand decision.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So one of the things that I love about the design that Amy has come up with, for example, for the website, is that it allowed us to really be intentional about incorporating racial diversity in our imaging, which is something we’ve been intentional about doing all along the way, but you’re going to see people of different genders, ages, races, et cetera, now in ways that at our homepage and all the other places that are important and that we really matters to us. That’s something we’ve been intentionally pursuing inside the organization, but it’s also something that we want to be intentional about projecting outside the organization. So, when people come to our website, they’re like, hey, that looks like a solution for me. They see themselves in the imaging on our website and so forth or socials and that kind of thing. So, that’s one of the things I really love about what Amy’s done. It’s just more representative of the 2.0 version of who we are and who we’re becoming, and that gets me excited.

Michael Hyatt:
Me too. And so I got really excited when I started seeing the website and when I started seeing the attire that we had. We circulated to the team t-shirts and pullovers and different things with the logo on it and all that. But it just was a way of our team embodying what we were becoming and feeling at home with it, and transferring the ownership. And so I feel like, this is no longer just my company, this is our company-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael Hyatt:
… And the name says that. And I love that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Me too.

Nick Jaworski:
If it’s interesting to you two or not, when I heard rumblings that there was a name change coming, I had a meeting with Joel. And I was like, “I know you probably can’t tell me what’s happening, but what’s happening?” And Joel said, he didn’t tell me. He just said, “It’s not, you could probably guess what it is.” And I did. And I think to me, that’s the indication of how clean the transition is. I had no access to any of the anythings. And I was like, I bet it’s Full Focus. And then, now that it turned out to be Full Focus, it feels like a really nice Cinderella glass slipper moment where it really works out. And I didn’t go, “what?” I went, “It’s Full Focus and it makes total sense.” So I hope that every-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I love that.

Nick Jaworski:
… I have not seen it yet, everybody, so, I’m going to go be checking it the same as you.

Michael Hyatt:
I love that. I think those are the best names when it becomes obvious to even your customers and your contractors and your vendors and everybody else, everybody just goes, oh, well, of course. And that’s where I got to after the 24 hours of thinking about it. I said to Gail, I said, “Well, of course. This makes total sense, this is the natural evolution, this is exactly what it should be, and I can’t wait.” Of course, then being the quick start that I am, it’s like, “What? We got to wait six months or eight months? How about next week?”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
As it turns out, this is a pretty big undertaking. You know what’s funny Nick, about you saying that, is that one of the other reasons I forgot until you even mentioned that, that we felt like this was a necessary change, is we had already intentionally moved away from being a personality-driven business. And we had this big brand identity with the Full Focus Planner in the marketplace and increasingly people were coming to Michael Hyatt & Company through the Full Focus Planner or other means, where they weren’t coming through their association or knowledge of Michael Hyatt the person, and as a result they were like, “Michael Hyatt & Company, who’s that?” They know the planner, they don’t know Michael Hyatt. And they have to be in a while to even be exposed to you, Dad, as a person, and so it was actually becoming confusing as that brand presence grew and grew externally to try to reconcile the two things. So, to your point, it does just make sense.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
This is something that, Dad, you just said, you are a quick start and you wanted it done yesterday, and I am right there with you. It’s so exciting, it’s like, oh my gosh, it’s like, when you’ve decided you’re going to build a new house and, can we live in it tomorrow? No, you have to wait for it to be built. And similarly, we thought we were going to roll this out in the fall. And what we realized was we needed more time in the oven. There were so many components as a business, that’s not a new business, we’re an established business. There were so many things to bring into alignment from a branding perspective and to really do it well, and to have enough time for the proper communication plan with our current customers and clients and team, and all the different parts of that cascading communication plan that we really had to make the hard decision, the patient decision to sit on our hands and wait, so that we could roll it out properly and give it the time and attention that it deserves.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So here we are in February of 2022 doing that. But that was hard. We were hoping to do it in the fall of 2021 and we chose to wait. I’m really glad we did, now that we’re here.

Michael Hyatt:
One of the motivating factors for me was something I learned from Donald Miller’s StoryBrand concept. And that is that, a big mistake that a lot of business owners make is trying to make themself the hero, instead of making the customer the hero. And so, by putting my name on the company, it all pointed back to me like I was the hero. I don’t want to be the hero. I want to be, to use the StoryBrand language, the guide. I want to be the person that comes alongside the hero, which is our customer, whether it’s a corporation or a small business or an individual consumer, I want to be, along with my team collectively, we are the guides, that help you along the journey, help you get the transformation that you want, but we ourselves don’t want to be the hero, and I think the name change reflects that.

Michael Hyatt:
So I just want to encourage you guys to stop by. It’s open house this week, you can stop by at fullfocus.co, or you can go to the old URL, mh.fullfocus.co, but you might as well get used to the new name. But check it out. We’d love to hear what you think. And as we wrap up, Megan, do you got any final thoughts?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I feel so put on the spot. This is backwards. Well, I think this is a great story about just a business that keeps growing. We keep growing, we keep learning, we keep working hard to bring the things that we’re developing for you, our audience, to you in a way that’s more accessible and, we hope you agree with us. We hope you like it as much as we do, and we’re really excited to hear what you think.

Michael Hyatt:
Thanks, Megan. Thank you guys for joining us. We look forward to talking to you next time. Until then, Lead to Win.