$100M in Annual Revenue – Reid Tracy, Hay House, Inc.

Reid Tracy is the president and CEO of Hay House, Inc. Reid has played a crucial role in the strategic development of authors such as Dr Wayne Dyer, Dr Christiane Northrup, Jerry, and Esther Hicks, and Anthony William’s The Medical Medium”. Reid is also directly responsible for establishing Hay House’s offices in New York, London, Sydney, and New Delhi.

Reid is also the president of the Hay Foundation which is a non-profit foundation founded by Louise Hay dedicated to the empowerment of women, children, and animals.

What were some of the jumping-off points for Reid that led to his initial success? (3:10)

• Louise Hay founded hay House when she was only 16 years old.
• Reid started working at Hay House in 1988 as a CPA and a financial director for the company. 
• In 1988 they have three books and five tapes and about $1 Million in revenue. This grew steadily by the year until they hit $100 Million in 2008.
• Louise wrote her first book in 1976, it was called Heal Your Body. She printed about 5,000 copies of the book and sent them out to Religious Science and Unity churches.
•  Within a year she sold the first 5,000 for a very small amount of money. 
• Over the next few years, she became more and more well known before writing her next book in 1984 titled ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ which turned into the backbone for Hay House and her work. 
• In 1987, Louise started Hay House so that she could publish some of her friends’ books. 
• If Louise hadn’t wanted to publish her friends’ books too, she would have never started a publishing house. 
• More and more people came to Louise to have their books published and over the next few years she happened to also go on Oprah and Donahue’s tv shows and in March 1988 She was on both of those shows in the same week. 
• Those interviews took the company from zero to a million very quickly. 

How did Reid end up transitioning into the Leadership role? (5:48)

• The company was growing quickly at that point and like a lot of companies starting out, everyone thought the initial success was very easy.
• Everyone figured that it would just continue the way it has been. Then they started adding more employees and moved their office down to the beach in Santa Monica.
• They started to release other people’s books and these books did not have the same success that Louise’s did. 
• As Financial Director, Reid was telling the president and other employees that they should control their costs better and no one really wanted to hear this from a 25-year-old kid. 
• One morning he had to tell the president of the company that Reid was not sure how he would make payroll and the president ended up telling Louise who then told a friend of hers at Max Factor.
• The guy helped start Max Factor and so he called a meeting with their 42 employees and 30 vice presidents. The man asked each employee what they could do to get the business out of its crisis. 
• Reid replied and said they should fire all of the people, including himnself.
• The Max Factor man agreed and they fired everybody in the room. Louise asked Reid if he would run the company for them. 
• Reid initially said no because he did not know enough about book publishing but he would run it with another guy named Jim who did know about book publishing. 
• So Jim and Reid ran Hay House together for a year or two and then Jim left and Reid was left to run it himself as he has done so alongside Louise for the last 26 years before she passed in 2019.

How much of Reid’s success came down to his willingness to learn and timing? (19:13)

• The biggest thing that helped them when they started Hay House was that there wasn’t a self-help section in bookstores yet. 
• In Louise’s books, you can hear her life went into either a call or an alternative message. She did not like the usual kind of categories you would find in a bookstore.
• Then a bookstore came into existence called BHorder’s Books, the standard bookstore before Border’s had about 10,000 books in it.
• Border’s then came and made stores with over 100,000 books in them. Border’s would take every single book that Hay House published into their shops. 
• Whereas other bookstores would make take three or four of their books into their stores.
• The expansion of Border’s superstores at that time had a huge impact on Hay House and many other publishers. 
• Border’s started noticing that the self-help books were selling the best in the non-fiction section of the bookstore. 
• They decided to create a huge self-improvement section that housed a lot of Hay House’s books. 
• They also started a section called New Age books which Hay house again had the most books in and ended up selling a large amount of. 
• Those two sections became huge selling points for Border’s and so that really helped Hay House start to become recognized.
• Barnes and Nobles Books then appear and along with it the exponential growth Hay House was riding on from Border’s only expanded more. 
• Eventually, somewhere in 2009, Border’s went bankrupt and that was the first year that hay House’s sales went down. 
• Hay House had to rebuild from that again but that is where the initial success came from. 

Hay House

Hay House is a publisher founded in 1984 by author Louise Hay, who is known for her books on New Thought. Hay House has its headquarters in Carlsbad, California, and is run by Reid Tracy. Hay House describes itself as a "mind-body-spirit and transformational enterprise".

Resources

Connect with Reid: FaceBook

Hay House: Website

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