Michael Hyatt is the founder and chairman of Michael Hyatt & Company, located in Franklin, TN, just south of Nashville. Founded in 2011, the company is one of the world’s largest performance coaching companies. Its mission is to help leaders and their teams get the vision, alignment, and execution they need to win at work and succeed at life—something they call the Double Win.
On average, the company has grown 60 percent, year over year, for the past four years. As a result, Inc. magazine has featured it on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America. In 2020 Inc. included the company in its prestigious Best Workplaces list. It said,
Clearly, Michael Hyatt & Company has gone through extraordinary lengths to attract, develop, and maintain its workforce, and surely understands, as many of us are now realizing, that place is only part of a workplace, and that it’s your extraordinary people and teams that make the real difference.
Before founding the company, Michael spent most of his career in the book publishing industry, most recently as the chief executive officer and chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers. When he assumed that role, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. When Harper Collins bought the company in 2012, it was the largest faith-based publisher in the world, generating over $250 million in revenue a year with 750 employees.
Michael is the author of several New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling books, including
- Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (2012)
- Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want (2016)
- Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (2018)
- No Fail Meetings: 5 Steps to Orchestrate Productive Meetings—and Avoid All the Rest (2018)
- Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (2019)
- Your World-Class Assistant: Hiring, Training, and Leveraging and Executive Assistant (2019)
- The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business (2020)
- No Fail Communication: 13 Workplace Communication Problems—and How to Fix Them (2020)
- Entrepreneurs Will Save the World: Why the Best Hope for Our Economy Is You (2020)
- Win at Work and Succeed at Life: 5 Principles to Free Yourself from the Cult of Overwork (2021, forthcoming)
- The Game to Win: How to Coach Yourself and Your Team to Achieve the Results You Want (2022, forthcoming)
Michael and his oldest daughter Megan (now the CEO of Michael Hyatt & Company) are the hosts of the Lead to Win podcast. Apple Podcasts consistently ranks it in the top 100 business podcasts. More than 50,000 listeners download the podcast each week.
Michael is the creator of the Full Focus Planner, one of the most popular physical planners in the world. Built on his proven goal-achievement and productivity frameworks, the planner now has more than 200,000 customers. Recently, Forbes magazine named it “the Best Daily Planner of 2021.”
Michael is a deacon in the Orthodox Church. He’s attached to St. Ignatius Antiochian Orthodox Church in Franklin, TN, where he has served since he was ordained in 1987. He is a trustee of St. Vladimir’s Seminary and currently serves as the board’s executive chair. Previously, he served as the board chair of Ancient Faith Ministries for more than twenty years.
Michael has been married to his wife Gail for forty-two years. They have five grown daughters and nine grandchildren. In his spare time, he enjoys fishing, golfing, and playing various musical instruments.