The Michael James Way

Ninety seven percent of business owners in America never get past three million in revenue. Michael James was one of them. He sat at roughly $900,000 believing that if he just worked harder, the grind would eventually carry him to a hundred million dollar company.

It did not. What changed everything was building a compass.

This is Pillar 2 of 3 Million and Beyond, a four part series on what it actually takes to scale your business to three million and past it. Pillar 1 was mindset. Pillar 2 is impact, and Michael calls it the foundational piece, because it sets the direction for you and everyone on your team.

Michael breaks down what that compass is: your mission, your vision, and the four to six values your business operates from. Then he gets specific about how to use them. Your values are what you hire and fire from. If someone is not operating inside them, they do not belong on the team. And in every interview he asks the candidate what their own why is, and where they see themselves in one year, three years, and five.

He also tells the story that explains the whole pillar. He challenged everyone on his team to write their own why. One of his designers said hers was to make clients do a happy cry. Months later she walked up to him and said, "Michael, guess what? They just did a happy cry."

Once mission, vision, and values were in place alongside the mindset work from Pillar 1, Michael's company grew more than one hundred percent a year for five years straight, and people relocated from other states to be part of the team.

Next up is Pillar 3: the who.

The Michael James Way is a conversation about building things that last. Businesses, homes, bodies, families. Hosted by Michael James, founder of Michael James Remodeling.

Lisa Kessler's father used to call her a princess. He was not being sweet. She is a sixth generation Native Hawaiian whose family traces back to the Kamehameha line, and if the monarchy had continued, that is what she would have been.

That is the first five minutes. From there Lisa walks Michael through a life that does not fit in one story. Diving with the Cousteau family off Cocos Island, surrounded by hundreds of schooling sharks, until a ten foot hammerhead knocked the camera out of her hand eighty feet down. Racing triathlons on the circuit. Raising six children, including triplets and twins, with six of them under the age of seven at once. Having her twins at 45. Starting yoga in her late fifties, and Spanish lessons at 67.

What Michael wanted to know is the mindset underneath it. Her answer is simpler than you would expect. She calls herself an ordinary person who does extra. She moves every day the way most people brush their teeth, and she does it because she loves it, not because she has to.

They also get into what the shark taught her about respecting a world that is not yours, what Michael learned living in Peru for two years, why passion and burnout do not live in the same place, and what she would say to anyone sitting on the sidelines of their own life.

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The Michael James Way is a conversation about building things that last. Businesses, homes, bodies, families. Hosted by Michael James, founder of Michael James Remodeling.

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Josh "Cuddly Bear" Copeland has fought in the UFC, the PFL, and Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship. He's entered a million-dollar tournament as the eighth seed and knocked out the man who beat his best friend. He's also the guy who once opened a gym door, saw who was inside, turned around, got back in his car, and cried.

Days after his last fight, Josh sits down with Michael James to talk about the part nobody puts on a poster. Growing up in the Bible Belt believing that serving God meant life would be easy. Watching his marriage fall apart a year into a youth pastor job. Walking away from the church with bitterness in his heart. Years of getting dominated in a gym by men he couldn't touch. And this spring, a torn bicep, a heart in atrial flutter, and an ER doctor telling him he was close to heart failure.

What he thought about in that hospital bed is why this conversation exists: "I don't want to go away and just be known as Josh the Fighter."

A conversation about resilience that doesn't look heroic while it's happening, about failure and success running a parallel journey, and about a man building something called Invictus, Latin for unconquered, out of the exact places he fell short.

Hugh Evans just produced the first halftime show in World Cup history, for an audience of two billion people. At fourteen, he spent a sleepless night on a concrete slab on top of a garbage dump in Manila. This conversation is about the line between those two nights.

The co-founder and CEO of Global Citizen tells Michael how a school assembly became a 40-hour fast, how that fast sent him to the Philippines, and how one night in a slum called Smoky Mountain set the direction of his life. He talks about the year in the Himalayas, the prank call from Bono that turned out to be real, and the month Global Citizen came within thirty days of shutting down, until a $1.5 million check and a call from Neil Young changed everything.

He also opens up the World Cup halftime show itself: five headliners in eleven minutes, every camera angle planned months out, and an entire turf cover installed in three.

A conversation about scale, cost, and what it takes to keep showing up for an impossible goal for twenty years.

Download the Global Citizen app to take action daily: globalcitizen.org

Subscribe for new episodes of The Michael James Way every week.

In 2008 I lost my marriage, my business, my house, and my truck. My kids were five and three. The only thing that brought me any peace at the time was getting on my bicycle and riding.

I wasn't training for anything. I was just riding. But what I didn't realize was that I was getting good at it. I ended up racing on weekends, and a coach told me to go race Nationals and see what happened. I finished 12th in the nation. And on the drive home from Madison I remember thinking, I'm still a broken person. Nothing about my life is fixed.

So I got home, went online, and bought a one way ticket to San Francisco. That was the burning of the ships for me. I had no choice now but to ride my bike across the United States.

Forty two days. Thirty two flat tires. A hundred and fifteen degrees across Nevada. I set my own tent on fire in a stranger's front yard. I got run off the road in Colorado, broke a couple of ribs, and woke up face up in a creek with a rock on either side of my head. And before I ever left, my coach told me I was going to want to quit five times. She was dead on. It was exactly five.

In this conversation with Zack I walk through all five of them, what I did each time, and the one thing that kept me from taking the excuse when a car handed me a perfect one.

We also get into the part that matters more to me now. How I took every lesson off that bike and put it into building a company. The belief I had to give up, which was that grind alone would get me there. Why I still pay for three coaches even though I know how to hold myself accountable. And why the biggest risk in anybody's life isn't failure, it's autopilot.

Thanks to Zack Clayton for having me on. Go check out Prestige Access.

Michael James is the founder of Michael James Remodeling, a luxury home remodeling company in Georgia, and the host of The Michael James Way. His book on the ride is in editing now.

Michael James hired a coach before he rode a bicycle across the United States. Early on she told him something he did not believe and almost quit over: you are going to have five times you are going to want to quit.

She was right. And every owner scaling past a million dollars hits the same five.

This is Pillar 1 of 3 Million and Beyond, a four part series on what it actually takes to scale from one million to three million and past it: mindset, impact, culture, and tools. Pillar 1 is mindset, and it starts with your why, because your why is the only thing that bridges the gap on the day you want to walk away.

Then the part nobody wants to hear. The grind that got you to a million is the exact thing keeping you from three. Scale does not come from carrying more weight. It comes from duplicating yourself in other people, and you cannot do that while your ego is still telling you nobody can do it the way you can.

Michael closes with a golf lesson that explains all of it. The harder he swung, the worse the ball flew. The more he let everything come into alignment, the further it went with less effort. Your business works the same way. Stop making revenue the goal. Make alignment the goal, and the revenue follows.

Also in this one: why a ceiling is really the floor of your next level, and what to change the moment your business stops feeling aligned.

The Michael James Way is a conversation about building things that last. Businesses, homes, bodies, families. Hosted by Michael James, founder of Michael James Remodeling.

Michael has told the story of riding his bicycle across the United States dozens of times. He had never asked his kids what that summer was like for them.

In this episode Brianna and Jasper James answer the questions their dad has been avoiding for almost 20 years. What the divorce felt like at seven and nine. What it was like to lose the house, move into a friend's basement, and sleep on an air mattress and a couch for three years. Whether they knew he was broke. Whether they were embarrassed.

Their answer stopped him cold. They do not remember the air mattress. They remember the bedtime stories, the basketball, the duct taped remote control airplane that nose dived into a tree on Christmas, and a dad who was there.

Also in this one: the six month rule Michael set before introducing anyone he was dating to his kids, the phone that ended up in the fireplace, why he hid acorns in their backpacks, and the moment on a boat when he realized Brianna had been listening the whole time.

The Michael James Way is a conversation about building things that last. Businesses, homes, bodies, families. Hosted by Michael James, founder of Michael James Remodeling.

Two years ago a client got on a Zoom call with us, and we could not hit her deadline. She was pregnant, she needed a bathroom finished by a date we could not promise, and she hired somebody else. Last month she signed a contract with us for a kitchen close to two hundred thousand dollars.

In this episode I break down why we never wrote her off, and why the client who cannot afford you today is very often the client who calls you first when they can. If all somebody can afford right now is a Honda Civic, that is not a reason for the Porsche dealer to stop talking to them. Water the seed and that Honda Civic client becomes a Porsche client.

I also get into the part almost nobody connects to sales. Last year our revenue dropped fifty percent over eight months. I panicked, I went back to being the guy who does everything himself, I started micromanaging, and I eroded the culture I spent years building. Team members were ready to quit. I did not want to come in on Monday morning either.

What turned it around was not a new sales script. It was gratitude. Within thirty days of making that shift we closed 1.3 million dollars in work, and the best proof was a Google review that came in from a project I personally visited exactly one time. My team earned that. A grateful team gives birth to a grateful client.

What you will get out of this:

Why the follow up you are not making is worth more than the lead you are chasing

How to serve a client who is not your ideal client yet, without discounting

The Honda Civic to Porsche framework for long horizon client value

What happens to your culture when the owner takes back control out of fear

How to spot fear as false evidence appearing real before it costs you months

The gratitude shift that produced 1.3 million dollars in thirty days

If you are running a company between zero and three million in revenue, this is the episode I wish somebody had made me watch.

Michael James is the founder of Michael James Remodeling. The Michael James Way is where he opens the books on what it actually takes to build, scale and lead a company you still want to walk into on Monday.

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In 2016 my life looked perfect from the outside, wife, kids, white picket fence. Inside, it was falling apart. So I booked a one-way flight to San Francisco and rode a bicycle 3,500 miles across the United States to figure out who I was.

42 days. A tent I set on fire. A 50-foot fall into a ravine outside Telluride with what I'm pretty sure were broken ribs. A relationship with my father that I'd written off, restored one phone call at a time. And on the second-to-last day, when I had nothing left, a 200-mile day built ten miles at a time. When I got home I asked one question: if I can do that in my personal life, what can I do in business? I'd been remodeling homes for 17 years and I was stuck at $900,000 a year. I thought hard work was the whole equation. It's about half of it.

This episode is the other half, and today Michael James Remodeling does over $5 million a year building luxury remodels in Atlanta. This is my conversation with Ryan Pineda on The Wealthy Way, and it's the most complete version of the story I've told anywhere.

At 6,500 feet, Michael said something that reframed the entire show: "The reason why I'm up high is because there's safety in altitude."

This is the first episode of Podcast in a Plane, five cameras mounted to a single-engine aircraft, one conversation, no cuts to a studio. But the plane isn't the point. Somewhere over north Georgia, a conversation about camera mounts turned into the clearest explanation of scaling a business we've recorded: why altitude buys you reaction time, why noise at ground level makes you respond with emotion instead of information, and why an aircraft without the right instruments can only climb so high no matter how good the pilot is.

Michael also talks about the book he wrote twice and threw away. Three hundred pages, a manuscript two inches thick, and his own verdict on it: "Although it was my story, it wasn't my voice." What finally unlocked it wasn't better writing. It was a microphone.

And underneath all of it, the reason any of this exists: "If I could just have one life changed, then it's well worth it. Well worth all of the cameras, all of the expense, everything we've done — to make a difference in one person's life."

Then his plumber sent him a text.

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