Chris Jennings spent 30 years building his sales coaching and consulting practice, and over the next decade his younger partner will take it over while Chris phases out. While Chris isn’t going to keep working the way he has worked, he’s not going to retire into a blank calendar either. He calls what comes next his fun retirement career, and he decided its foundation would be a book.

The plan took shape in early 2020, when Chris set out to write three books. Two of them served the firm, on sales leadership and client retention, the subjects he has taught for three decades while fielding around 60 speaking requests a year through Vistage.

Written for one reader

The third book is for his next chapter. While the firm passes to his partner, this third book transfers everything he would want his kids and grandkids to know.

When Charlie Hoehn, Author.Inc's co-founder, asked him to name the one reader it was for, Chris didn't hesitate. His youngest daughter, Maddie. She's 32, married, a professional with a young child, living the kind of very full life that can quietly overtake its joys.

Chris knows what a very full life can cost. The first line of the book is his own confession. "For years, I was drowning in my own overwhelm."

The subject isn’t new territory for him. The ideas in the book were worked out over decades of living them, the ideal week he actually keeps, and the priorities he actually sorts. What was new is that this particular area of his expertise hadn’t had anything built around it. The firm ran on his sales knowledge, while the life-design knowledge just ran his life. The book gives it a public form, and with it a way to carry his consulting credibility from the lane where he earned it into the lane where he's headed.

Choosing a publishing partner

He had published his first two books through other routes, and those experiences taught him exactly what he wanted for this one. A partner. He chose Author.Inc on the word of Miles Rote, the company's other co-founder and a longtime contact whose opinion carries weight with him. "He cares a lot about this. He's all in. I'm all in."

The result is The 56-Hour Method: How to Master Your Week and Take Back Your Time.

What the book unlocked

And his third act is standing on it. The new company he created carries the book's name. The same Vistage channel that books his sales talks has now booked six retreat sessions for next year on the book's subject, and he is direct about the cause. "I would not book retreat talks without this book. There's no way."

A six-week course helping young people find career direction opens its first cohort in September. And the mentorship he sees as his calling going forward starts warmer now, because the book does the first hour of every one of those conversations for him. He calls the book an act of service, and he hopes it helps people, his daughter and grandkids included.

On working with Author.Inc, Chris says, "All day, every day, if you want a really good partner, go with Author.Inc. You probably pay a little more, but you'll get more."