But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Klaviyo is the tool that I use to build real quality customer relationships with my e-commerce store. And because all my transactions and email correspondence is tracked in Klaviyo, I can easily build meaningful customer relationships by listening, understanding, and taking cues from my customers and delivering personalized marketing messages. So for example, with one click of a button, I can easily send a specific and targeted email to all customers with a lifetime value of over 100 bucks who purchased red handkerchiefs in the past year.

And it is for this reason why over 10,000 brands have switched over to Klaviyo. Right now they’re running this cool docuseries called Beyond Black Friday where they discuss successful marketing strategies that their customers are using that you can emulate with your business. So, head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyondbf to check it out, once again that’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com/beyondbf.

I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now what does Privy do? Well, Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all of my email capture forms. And I use Privy hand-in-hand with my email marketing provider. Now they’re a bunch of companies out there that will manage your email capture forms, but I like Privy because they specialize in e-commerce. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prices in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this. And when I implemented this form, email signups increased by 131%.

I’m also using their new cart saver pop up feature to recover abandoned carts as well. And bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ for 15% off. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve. Now onto the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my buddy James Clear back on the show. And in case you missed him last time, James is on the podcast back in Episode 202, where we broke down his strategies on how to build a blog that gets millions of visits per month. But in today’s episode, we’re going to take it up a level and discuss how to build good habits and break bad ones, tactics that James has uncovered over the years from studying the habits and routines of entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and high powered individuals. And I’m proud to say that James’s most recent book Atomic Habits has hit the New York Times bestseller list. And at one point, I think he was the number eight best-selling book on all of Amazon. And with that, welcome to the show James. How are you doing today?

James: Yeah, I’m doing well. Thanks so much for having me back. It’s good to talk to you.

Steve: Yeah. So first off congrats on the book.

James: Thank you.

Steve: I’m actually just curious what it takes to hit the New York Times bestseller list these days. Is there a strategy for doing so? Is there a way to game it?

James: So, there are two answers here. So the first answer what does it take? I can only tell you what it took for me. So, the kind of high level was I wrote two articles a week on Jamesclear.com starting in 2012. I did that for like three years and build my platform up and got an audience of I think it was around 200, 250,000 email subscribers around that point after about three years. And I leveraged the size of that platform that audience to get introduced to agents and publishers. And we put together a book proposal that took about three months and pitched it to, I think 17 or 19 publishers, I think it was 19. And I think we got meetings with seven.

So I flew to New York for a week, went and met with all these publishers with my agent. We were lucky; we had a good amount of interest. So we got bids from four and then ended up selecting our favorite one out of the bunch. And then I signed the contract to write the book in a year, became very apparent that I needed more time than that. And so, I went back and asked for an additional year and they very kindly gave it to me. So, it took me two years of writing and research. That was easily the hardest part, like the biggest and the most suffering. I felt like it was really hard to write under contract. I felt like there were a lot of expectations to produce something great. I was really worried that people wouldn’t enjoy it or that the publisher wouldn’t think it was good enough.

I handed that in actually three months late from the extended deadline, so two years and three months of writing and then we spent nine months planning to launch and marketing and prepping and doing interviews and all that stuff, getting the book on the publisher side. They were getting it type set and printed and all that type of thing. And then the book released, the three months before launch, I did 85 interviews in like 10 weeks or 12 weeks, something crazy like that, a bunch of blog posts, emails to my own audience, basically any and every favor I could call in, I was like working on that.

And that culminated with a bunch of exposure on launch day. I was on CBS This Morning and did a TV segment. So just like a ton of marketing push, in addition to trying to write like a really fantastic book. And all of that came together and we had a really great launch week and then ended up hitting the New York Times bestseller list and then we hit it again. So, the first time was we were number five in advice and how to, and then the second time and still right now, it’s number three in business. And so yeah, the book the launch has done really well but that’s what it looked like for me. So that’s the — really and I give that whole process because it was definitely not like a one week thing, I mean it was like…

Steve: Oh, yeah, I know that. I was just kind of curious how many books you actually have to sell. It’s in like the first week, right?

James: Yeah. So they have two different types of lists. The first one is calculated weekly and the second one is calculated monthly. And so we ended up hitting both, so one is based on weekly sales ones based on monthly sales. For weekly sales, it does depend on what category you’re in. So some categories like general nonfiction like memoirs, and things like that, I’m not sure what the numbers are for that. I think they’re actually a little bit lower from what I’ve heard from people, but I don’t know for sure than what you need in like advice and how to, which is the category I was in.

And this gets a little bit to your question of like is there a way to game it or not? Certainly, many people have tried, I was not really interested in doing some of those things that are I guess you would say like on the margin of like, oh, is this allowed or not? Some people, some speakers will try to do things like buy — I won’t name any names but there are people who bought like 10,000 or 20,000 copies and then have them sitting in their garage. And so they’re like they bought the book so that it would look like that number of sales came through during the first week and they could get on the list but they didn’t actually go to readers or anything like that.

So I was like really adamant about every copy we sell needs to go to an actual person, or stuff like you’ll see a lot of speakers will trade their fee for books. So, they’ll say I’ll come talk but if you do it in these three months when I’m prepping for launch then you won’t have to pay me, you can just buy 500 books instead or something like that. So people will try to do stuff like that. There’s some really weird services that you could hire. I don’t actually know if they still exist because I think the New York Times became savvy to them but for a while, people would pay like they’ll pay a service, I don’t know, 10, 20, $30,000, I don’t know how much it was, it was definitely in the tens of thousands.

And that company would have like a bunch of little — they would have people go out to different stores and buy individual copies of books or place individual orders on Amazon. Now, you were really buying like 10,000 copies through that company, but they would have their employees place them all as individual orders. So, they all looked like they were individual people buying and they would spread them out across the country and stuff. And all of that stuff is just like a lot. I mean, first of all, I just don’t know it’s a good way to spend your time or whether it’s ethical or not. But also it’s all just an effort to try to get on the list.

Now some of the bestseller lists like I think USA Today, we hit the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, the USA Today list, Publishers Weekly, the Independent Booksellers list and some of them are strictly based on sales. Like I’m pretty sure the Publishers Weekly list and the USA Today list are like whatever book sells the most copies that’s the number one book. Now the New York Times list is a little bit of a black box. I mean it’s the most elite list to be on and nobody quite knows how it works. But from what I can tell, you as a seller how many copies you need to sell, I think 10,000 is roughly the minimum kind of rule of thumb you’ll hear people throw out.

Now that doesn’t guarantee you’re going to get on because it depends on what week you’re launching and how many copies other books are selling that week. But as a rule of thumb, if you do 10,000 in a week, then that’s kind of the bear in the game. Now, just because you have that many sell does not mean that you’re going to get on the list, and the New York Times will sometimes make an editorial decision and say, this is not the kind of book that we want to have on here. Well, we think that the way you got these sales looks a little suspicious.

And so, like I’ve heard from people who, I heard from one author who sold 4,000 individual copies, and then they had one company that purchased 6,000 copies. So they thought, hey, I sold my 10, like, I should be in the running here. But I think the New York Times looks at that and they think, well, really, you sold like 4,001 because you just had like one big customer that said, yes. And so, if they’re comparing, say that person to somebody else who sold 10,000 individual orders, I think they tend to give the nod to the person who has the more individual readers.

Steve: Interesting.

James: And so, authors love to complain about it because there are a lot of authors that think they should have been on because they had certain number of sales, they didn’t know they got taken off or whatever. And whether that was true or not who knows, because nobody knows exactly what numbers The New York Times is getting each week and how many sales other books made. But once you make it, now I’m like, yeah, it’s great. I love that. I think it’s awesome. So it’s funny to be on the other side.

Steve: I felt comfortable asking that question because I knew you’re not the type of person to game the system.

James: A lot of people do it and I guess you could make an argument for it. If you were like, well, if I get on the list then and my main thing is speaking, like for me, speaking is a small portion of my business, I don’t really do that much of it. But I guess if you were like a full time one, people find ways to rationalize it. They’re like, oh, well, I’ll just buy my way in the list for 20 grand and then I’ll be able to charge more at every speaking event into the future because I can say I’m New York Times bestseller. So I think people rationalize it that way.

But for me, again separate from the ethical considerations which I think are questionable in themselves but could you really be proud of it? I don’t know. Like I mean, I just spent six years building an audience and three years writing a book and planning this launch. I mean, I put everything I possibly had into it. And it felt great to hit the list because there was so much sacrifice before it. But if I knew that I had just gotten there because I wrote a check, I feel like it would be a totally different experience.

Steve: I hear you.

James: And so in a sense, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it anyway, even if I had a good business reason, which I don’t. But even if I did, I feel like it would have taken away from it. So anyway, I’m kind of going on about it. But it’s a little bit of a black box, but I can say that it feels fantastic if it works out in your favor.

Steve: So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about habits. And what I wanted to do actually was frame our talk in the context of starting or growing a successful business because a lot of my readers and listeners, they start out strong, but they kind of fizzle out in the long run if they don’t see immediate gains. And so, what I was hoping to do actually is maybe use your book as a framework. How does one develop the proper habits to follow through on a business idea until things finally start taking off?

James: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I mean, first of all, just from a high level, I like to think about habits is what I call like the compound interest of self-improvement. And the reason I like that phrase, habits are the same way that money multiplies through compound interest, you save up a little bit, it doesn’t feel like much in the beginning. In many cases, that compound interest curve is like really flat, almost like a plateau and then the hockey stick portion is only years or decades down the line. So it doesn’t feel like much at first, but then you turn around two or five or 10 years later, and it’s like, wow, this really added up. I think habits are kind of like that as well.

The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits can multiply as you repeat them over time. And on any given day, the same way that saving 10 bucks doesn’t really feel like much, making a choice that’s like 1% better or 1% worse, a little bit improved, a little bit better habit or a little bit worse habit, it doesn’t really feel like much. What’s the difference between eating a burger and fries for lunch, or eating a salad? It’s not really a whole lot on any given day; your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night the scale doesn’t really change. But it’s only when you look back five or 10 years later and you’re like, oh wow, that choice of what I ate for lunch really does matter.

And so, this is one of the core philosophies of Atomic Habits, one of the core ideas in the book, this idea of how can we try to find ways to get 1% better each day? And if you can capture those small advantages, if you can master those little habits day in and day out, then you can end up with a really remarkable or powerful result in the long run. And I think that not only applies to our lives, but it certainly applies to our businesses. If you can just try to find a way to get a little bit of a 1% margin for improvement daily in something you do or monthly in the financial state of your business, I mean, that can really add up over the broad span of time.

Steve: And what does that look like in the context of a business? Like what is like a 1% gain or something that you might do? You can talk about your blog, or how you built up an audience for example.

James: Sure. Yeah. So I think the first thing is, you don’t need to do something more than what you’re already doing. You just need to find a way to show up more consistently than you have before. So, in other words, you don’t need to increase the intensity. I’m not saying for then, this is I’m focusing on the very beginning. Now, what’s the first thing I do? Like I’m not saying well, you need to write a radically better blog post, or you need to become massively better at sales calls, or you need to massively improve your skills at writing a sales page. What I am saying though, is let’s find a way to make it easy to show up and do those things more consistently than you’ve done before. So it’s kind of like yeah, you could do the same workout at the gym, but let’s just make sure you miss fewer workouts. So, that’s the first piece.

So in the context of my business, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday for the first three years and it was really that consistency, it was really that writing habit that set me on a different trajectory as a writer and an entrepreneur. And that was the thing that made it possible for me to build this audience and get the book deal and so on.

Steve: Okay, so I mean it’s easy to say that right? But how do you make sure you start that schedule? How do you have self-control to do that?

James: Okay, so I want to answer this in two ways, I want to come back to the self-control piece. So, the first part is I like to suggest people utilize what I call the two minute rule. So you take whatever habit you’re trying to build, whatever habit is relevant for your business whether it’s writing blog posts or making podcasts or making sales calls or whatever and scale it down to just the first two minutes. So, read 40 books a year becomes read one page, or call 20 clients every month becomes make one sales call, or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat, so whatever the habit is you scale down to just the first two minutes.

Now, sometimes it sounds silly to people because especially with like health examples, I’ll say something like there’s a reader of mine, he end up losing over 100 pounds. And one of the things he did was he went to the gym but he didn’t allow himself to stay for longer than five minutes. It feels like well, that sounds ridiculous, like going to the gym for five minutes isn’t going to get you in shape. But what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up and this is a crucial thing about any habit business related or otherwise, a habit must be established before it can be improved.

And so, if you don’t become the type of person who goes to the gym for five minutes, you don’t have a chance to be the type of person who works out for 45 minutes, four days a week, or if you don’t become the type of person who makes one sales call, you don’t have the chance to be the person who makes 20 sales calls every month, month in and month out. And so we’re trying to scale it down to that I guess we call it a gateway habit, the thing that initiates the response. And let me give you maybe another example here. So, I like to refer to these moments as decisive moments, these two minutes that kind of determine the next chunk of time or get you moving in the right direction, get a little bit of momentum.

So for me, there’s a moment every morning where I sit down at my computer and either I open up Evernote and I start working on the next article I’m going to write, or I go to ESPN and I check latest sports news. And what happens in the next hour of my day is really determined by what happens in those like 45 seconds. It’s like if I can master that decisive moment of opening up Evernote and starting to write, then I’ve got a productive hour in front of me. And I think that no matter what your business looks like, they’re going to be four, five, maybe eight or 10 of those decisive moments throughout each day. And if you can just put your energy into mastering that, then you can have a productive day, you can have a more effective time working on your business. So that’s the first lesson master those decisive moments.

The second piece comes back to your question about self-control. And this is I think the common narrative for habits, for productivity, for effectiveness is you just need to want it more, you need to try harder, you need grit and perseverance. You need to work smarter. You need to make sure that you try to optimize things. And certainly working hard is valuable and it’s an important skill. But if you look at some of the research on self-control, and I cover this more in chapter seven of Atomic Habits, a lot of the research will show that the people who exhibit the highest self-control who you look at from the outside and you’re like, wow, they must have a lot of willpower, actually, the thing that distinguishes them from most other folks is that they operate, live and work in an environment that has fewer temptations, so they are able to exhibit more willpower simply because they’re being tempted less.

And I think that that is the lesson to take away from this is what’s the best way to improve my willpower? What’s the best way to make it more likely that I’ll show up and do the right thing each day? It’s not to push harder, or to just try harder or to say work more. The solution, the best lever to pull is to redesign your environment so that you’re tempted less. Put the objects that prompt your good behaviors in more obvious locations, reduce the friction of taking a good task, and put the objects that derail you or distract you in less obvious locations and reduce or increase the friction of doing something unproductive. And we can talk more about that.

Steve: It’s funny because I’m just thinking about all this in the context of raising my kids right now. And we were kind of picking and choosing our kids’ friends based on like both their personality and their work ethic because we want our kids to hang out with those other kids who are trying really hard hoping that it’ll just kind of rub off on them really. It means, it’s the environment that they’re in.

James: That’s actually a brilliant strategy because children are master imitators which anybody who has a two year old can tell you that, right? Like you say a cuss word and then they pick it up instantly, even if you don’t want them to, or they imitate whatever you do. But as children age, they continue to imitate but they tend to stop imitating their parents as much and start imitating their peers much more. And so there’s a great book called The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris that talks about the influence of peer groups on how children grow up.

And parents have a significant influence too, but that influence is largely genetic, it’s largely passed down through the genes. But the way that parents can influence, one of the best levers they can use to influence their children is by choosing what city you live in, where you go to school, what extracurricular you’re a part of, in other words, choosing what other kids they get exposed to. And so, your strategy there of trying to pick their friends by what their friends’ habits are is a smart one. We pick up all kinds of habits from the people around us, and often we want to do the things that our peers are doing. And so that’s a good way for parents to subtly shape or at least influence in a little way the habits of their kids. You can’t control it totally, but that’s actually probably more effective than trying to force them to do something you want.

Steve: But you’re not always going to be in the ideal environment, right. So there’s got to be a little bit more to this.

James: Yeah, absolutely. So in the book, I offer four different strategies for building good habits and breaking bad ones. And I’ll just go over real quickly here. There are tons of examples in the book of course, but we can go over a few of them as they relate to business in this conversation. But before I do, I’ll just say that not all four of these will always be working for you. And so, you can really look at them as like a toolbox or a set of strategies that you can rely on. And when one thing isn’t working in your favor, maybe you pull on the other three levers, and that’s enough to get you to do the more productive or more effective action.

Steve: Let me cut just a little bit. One common thing, at least that I have a problem with is procrastination.

James: Yeah. So, let me give you all — let me give these four and I’ll give you some examples related to procrastination. And procrastination is a really broad topic, right? Like, there’s a million ways you could procrastinate, but I’ll just go over some common ones. So, the four stages that I like to break a habit into, and again, this is all in detail in the book. But just real quickly, I break a habit…

Steve: Better to hear it from you the man himself.

James: Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, so cue, craving, response, reward, these are the four stages. So, there’s some kind of cue that precedes the habit, which is like a prompt that gets you to pay attention to what’s going on, something that’s happening in your environment. There’s a cue that picks up your attention. I’ll give you an example in a second. Second, there’s a craving there’s some kind of interest rotation of that cue, what it means. And based on what you think it means, you take a particular action. So that’s the response, which is the third stage. And then finally, your action delivers some kind of result. There’s some type of reward or consequence that comes after that.

So for example, let’s say you walk into the kitchen and you see a loaf of bread on the counter, it’s in the morning, so the loaf of bread, visual cue, so that’s first stage. Your prediction is, oh, I want to make some toast or that would be tasty. And so you take out a piece of bread, put in the toaster, that’s the response, pops up a minute later, you get the toast, you get to eat it. That’s the reward. Okay so cue, craving response, reward. No you can just as easily imagine that at a different time say, 10 minutes later after you’ve eaten breakfast, you walk back into the kitchen and you see that loaf of bread.

And now the cue has a different meaning, your state has changed, you’re full instead of hungry, and so you interpret that cue in a different way. Now your craving is not there, it’s not existing, interpreted as so there’s the bread but I’m not hungry now. And so you don’t take the same response. So, this type of thing is happening all day long. We’re taking in cues; we’re making predictions about what to do next, or taking action, and then getting some kind of outcome or result. So, from those four stages, we can have a step for each stage for making it easier to build good habits and harder to fall into bad ones. So, I call these the Four Laws of behavior change.

And the first law is to make it obvious. So you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious and available and visible. The second laws to make it attractive, the more attractive a habit is, the more likely you’ll fall into it and perform it. The third law is make it easy. So the more easy, frictionless, convenient a behavior is, the more likely you are to do it. And the fourth law related to reward is make it satisfying. The more satisfying and enjoyable an experience is, the more you want to repeat it again in the future. And if you want to — so those four make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying explain how to build a good habit.

And if you want to break a bad habit, you just invert them. So rather than make the cues obvious, you want to make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. And so, let’s go through a couple of examples of what this looks like for procrastination since you mentioned that.

Steve: Real quick though, making something attractive, the thing here is a lot of what’s involved in creating a business kind of sucks, right? It’s boring. So I’m kind of curious, maybe once you address the procrastination question, how do you make something that’s really mundane and boring, attractive?

James: Yeah, it’s a great question. Well, so I’ll just answer that right now then we come back to procrastination is a larger topic. So, make it attractive, there are a couple of different things that influenced this. So first of all, let me answer and I’ll give you a quick tactic before I talk about the kind of the overarching thought here. So, quick tactic for making something more attractive, you can use the strategy that’s called temptation bundling. And so, the idea is you stack something you want to do, something you enjoy doing with the thing that you know you need to do.

So, one of the examples I give in the book, there’s this guy, he was an engineering student, and he knew that he needed to be exercising more but he also knew that he liked watching Netflix and probably liked it too much. And so, he linked up his computer to a stationary bike so that Netflix would pause if the bike was not running. So happy cycling the whole time if you want to watch a 30 minute show or something. And that’s a good way of forcing yourself to do the unattractive thing or making the unattractive thing which in this case was cycling more attractive because it meant hey, now I get to watch Netflix.

And you can do that with a bunch of things like if you are really bad with your email inbox and you feel like you never focus on that. I heard of a woman who she only gets a pedicure if she works on overdue emails while she’s getting it. So like reward yourself by doing the thing you don’t want to do. Another one, Katie Milkman, who’s the researcher at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, she was the one who came up with this name temptation bundling. And she realized that she really wanted to read The Hunger Games. She got like really obsessed with the book series when it came out. And so she made a rule for herself where she was only allowed to read The Hunger Games while she was on the treadmill at the gym.

And so, those kinds of strategies are ways to make the unattractive thing more attractive. And you can do that in different ways. Like the one that’s real, I think some habits that are really good; this is really good for what I would call habits of avoidance, so things like don’t drink alcohol for 30 days, or don’t spend money on Amazon, or don’t go out to eat and stay at home and make a meal instead. And habits like that are inherently difficult, because you’re just resisting temptation. It’s like all you’re doing is not doing something and so that doesn’t feel good. You just have to sit with this craving. But you can flip it on its head a little bit.

And so one of my readers, he and his wife, they wanted to eat out less and save money by cooking more. And so normally they’re just resisting the temptation to go to dinner to go out to eat at the restaurant. But instead, what they did was they set up a little savings account and they labeled it trip to Europe. And then anytime they stayed home and cooked dinner instead of going out to the restaurant, they would transfer $50 over to the savings account. And so, they still had to put the work in of cooking the meal, but they got the immediate enjoyment of seeing the savings account grow. And that’s really the ultimate lesson that I’m sharing here with this temptation bundling strategy is how can you give yourself a little bit of an immediate enjoyment from something else while you’re doing the difficult thing.

And so, there obviously this depends on what is enjoyable to you. But like from a business standpoint, there was someone that I worked with who he hated taking these meetings, these calls, and he really just didn’t like being inside all day, he didn’t like being hunched over to his desk. And so he changed it so that he only took meetings while going on a walk through the park that was near his office. And so taking a meeting meant he got to go outside and go for a walk. And it can be in large or small ways, but anytime you get an immediate bit of satisfaction and enjoyment with it, suddenly the unattractive thing becomes a little more attractive.

Steve: I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now, this course is free and can be obtained at Mywifequitherjob.com/free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again that’s my Mywifequitherjob.com/free. Now back to the show.

I’m just looking back in my childhood right now and I think my mom did this to me. I really hated piano, I hated it. But she would take me to ice cream after every single piano lesson. And after a while, I started looking forward to them just for the ice cream.

James: Yeah, playing piano meant getting ice cream.

Steve: Yes.

James: It’s like reframed what that cue or what that habit meant in your mind. That’s really smart.

Steve: My parents were good.

James: Yeah, so that’s one way to think about how to make it attractive. But there’s a broader conversation here, which I think is really important for entrepreneurs, certainly it was very important in my business kind of narrative and story, which is that the social environment really changes what habits are attractive to us and which ones are unattractive. Like when I was a kid, and I don’t know that any kid grows up thinking, wow, I’d really like to think more about email funnels and like workflows thing.

No kid is thinking that, but now it’s kind of exciting and interesting to me. And part of that is because my skills have improved. But another big part of it is that I get rewarded for having a big email list, and not just like financially with the business, but also people will praise you for it or congratulate you on it or ask you, how did you do that? That’s interesting, how did you grow that? And all those social signals increase the attractiveness of thinking about the conversion rate and how I design forms and how can I improve this a little bit more.

And so, my point is the thing that we’re rewarded for, the thing that we get little markers of social status for or respect from others for naturally becomes more attractive and that is dependent on not only on your results, but also on the group or tribe that you’re a part of. Like I could be around a bunch of people, like people I went to some of my friends from college or things like that, they don’t think about email list, they don’t know about it, they don’t care about it. And so, in that group, I can throw out a number and they’re like, well great, I guess that’s good for you but it doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t have any status associated with it.

And so, it would be less attractive for me to work on those things when I’m hanging around that group. We hang out for other reasons, but it’s not as important there because I’m not as rewarded for it. And so…

Steve: So that kind of just circles back to your environment point that you made earlier.

James: Yes. But earlier, when I was giving examples, I was talking mostly about the physical environment. And this, I would say is mostly about the social environment, and both are crucial factors for building better habits. So, let me come back to the procrastination question you asked and I’ll give some physical environment examples. But just to wrap up the social environment idea, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American, or what it means to be French, or Australian. And some of them are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street, or a member of your local CrossFit gym, or a volunteer at the local school.

And all of those tribes, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act as a member of that tribe. And you can see this in people’s habits all over, all day long. So, you walk onto an elevator and you’re in this little tribe of like three people. And the expectation is you turn around to face the front, if you face the back of the elevator it’s a little weird, it’s not what people are expecting. Or you go to a job interview and maybe there are four people interviewing you, and you’re sitting there and the expectation is you’re going to wear a suit and a tie or a dress or something nice. Now, it doesn’t have to be that way, you could face the back of the elevator, or you could wear a bathing suit to a job interview. But we don’t do that, because it violates the shared expectations of the group.

And so, the point here is that when habits go with the grain of the tribe that you’re in, they’re very attractive. And when they go against the grain of the tribe that you’re in, they’re very unattractive. And so one way to kind of hack your habits or to increase the odds that you’ll do the thing you want to do is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior, because if its normal in that group, then it will become attractive for you to do it because doing so helps you fit in. And this was huge for me as an entrepreneur because I did not have any entrepreneurs in my family and really didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurs either. I kind of vaguely knew that some people run businesses but I didn’t have anybody to look to.

And so, for the first like three to six months that I started out, I just emailed a ton of people well over 100 that were already doing the kind of thing that I wanted to do, but they were already full time. And I just asked if they wanted to chat on Skype. And most of them said no, but I would say like, maybe 30 or so said yes. And so, by the time I got six months in, now I had a few dozen people that if I had a problem, or if I was dealing with — had an idea, I could go to them with the questions I had. And I could also see what like what are they doing normally, what are their habits daily? And I didn’t have to consciously ask that question, right? You just kind of soak it up as you’re part of a tribe, as you’re part of a group, you see what everybody else around you is doing. And then you start to imitate and do those things because that’s the normal thing to do there.

You see this all the time, people jumping like across the gym, and then they start to eat paleo and they buy a certain type of knee sleeves and a certain brand of workout shoes, and they’re picking up all these other habits that they never really thought about doing but that’s just what people do in that particular tribe.

Steve: Yeah, in the context of business then, that’s why it’s key to go to conferences and events where you can meet other likeminded entrepreneurs. At least that’s how I started taking off in my business. It started when I started going to events.

James: 100%, and so I did those Skype calls. Then I went to my first conference about six months in. And what was really nice for me in that case was that I already knew like maybe 10 people from those Skype chats and those emails that were going to be there. And so I didn’t go in cold. I had like a couple people I can hang out with or talk to at least, which was nice. And then of course, I met a bunch of other people from those conferences. So, I did some conferences for the first two or three years, and then the last couple of years I’ve started to host my own events which are small usually like eight people or so. But it’s a really great high touch way to see, soak up all of that kind of implicit knowledge that everybody else has about what they do and why they do it and all that type of thing.

But the overarching point there is, no matter what habit you’re trying to build, the habits that are normal within your tribe will be attracted to you, because they help you fit in, they help you belong. And we all have a deep desire to belong.

Steve: So James, I don’t mean to skip around, but this question just kind of popped into my mind also. One thing that I see among people who are just kind of starting out in business is they’re looking for quick wins. And oftentimes, the payoff is like many years later, but it’s painful for those many years, right? You got to get used to what I call like the suck. So how — if you’re not getting immediate gratification, how do you train yourself to kind of persist?

James: Yeah, that’s such a great question. And it’s really it’s not just business, I mean, it’s central to all habits, right? There’s kind of this plateau in the beginning. So the analogy that I like to use, the metaphor that I like to bring up is the story of an ice cube. So, say you’re in a room and the room is cold, it’s like 25 degrees, ice cube sitting on the table and you can see your breath and slowly the temperature starts to increase 26, 27, 28, 29, still this ice cube is sitting there like nothing’s changed 30, 31, and then all of a sudden you get to 32 degrees and you hit this phase transition, the ice cube begins to melt.

There is one degree shift, no different than all the other one degree shifts that came before it but suddenly something new happens. And I think that in many cases, the process of achieving a change or building a business, it’s like that because you’re stuck on this plateau of latent potential early on, you’re putting work in, your banking reps and effort and time and energy and you don’t really have anything to show for it. The ice cube still hasn’t melted. But if you’re willing to stick with it, then you hit this phase transition. And so the question that you had is like, well, how do you get through that period?

I think first of all, just knowing that it happens is helpful. It helps reset your expectations a little bit, because a lot of the time we think that progress should be linear, that we put a little bit of work in and we get a little bit of results. So if we put a lot of work in, we’ll get a lot of results. But actually, it’s not this like 45 degree angle linear progression. It’s more like that hockey stick or compound curve that I mentioned before, where you’re kind of stuck on this plateau for a while, and all the greatest gains are delayed. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing though, I think that this is one of the reasons that small habits really matter, perhaps the deeper purpose why they matter, which is they reinforce a particular type of identity, they reinforce being a certain kind of person. And so, like in the book, I use this phrase, the goal is not to run a marathon; the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book, the goal is to become a writer. And I think we could say that about entrepreneurship as well. Like the goal is not to build a business, the goal is to become an entrepreneur, to be that kind of person, to be a creator, or to be financially independent or to have that identity.

And I think the way to foster that identity is through small wins, through small habits on a daily basis. And so in a sense, every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person you want to become. It’s like you’re these little habits, or how you embody up being a particular type of person, or having a particular type of identity. So, every day that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who’s clean and organized, or each time that you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer, or every time you make a sales call, you embody the identity of someone who is good at selling. And so, on any given day, those little actions don’t count for very much, but each time you do them, it’s like casting a vote, building up a little mound of evidence that this is who I am.

And I think that ultimately, true behavior changes identity change because it’s like it’s one thing to say I want this, I want a million dollar business, I want to have a best-selling book, I want to have a popular blog, but it’s something very different to say I am this, I am an author, I am a blogger, I am an entrepreneur. Because once you believe that about yourself, you really aren’t even pursuing behavior change anymore. You’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you already believe that you are. And so, I think the way to get through those, to get through the suck as you call it, to get through those periods where it’s really difficult and you don’t have the results that you want is to focus on fostering that identity.

Even if you’re not happy with how your body looks, and you still want to lose weight and all you could do after a long day of travel was five pushups before you collapsed on the bed, well, maybe that’s not the result you want. Maybe you’re still in the suck from that standpoint, but you did those five pushups and at least you’re the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. At least you’re the type of person who foster that identity. And I think that on the hard days in business, that’s what I try to remind myself of like how can I show up and cast a vote for the desired identity even if the results are still long in the future.

Steve: So, it means you just try to show up, even if showing up in this particular case isn’t spending a lot of time or whatever, you’re just out of habit working on your business, even if it’s not a whole lot at that given moment?

James: You’re trying to cast a vote for being the type of person that you want to be, rather than worrying about what the results are in that moment. And I think that there are all kinds of ways that you can show up in small ways, and I think we all either have done this or know someone who does this where you waste time on frivolous things. You just like putter around and do a bunch of little things that don’t make much difference and that’s different than what I’m talking about, that feels like a waste of time. But what I’m talking about is taking a small action that reinforces your desired identity, the long term identity of you or your business that you want to foster and the type of person you want to become.

Steve: It sounds like step one is to actually figure out what that is right?

James: I think so. And that’s what I talk about in chapter two of the book. I think it’s a very central question to ask yourself. Now, the good news is, I don’t think it needs to be that hard. I think most people know, they may not — questions like what identity do you want? Or what are your values? Those are like big questions and sometimes they’re hard to answer. But I think most people do know what kind of results they want. So you can just say, well, do you want to — maybe you want to lose 40 pounds in six months, or maybe you want to double your income this year, or something like that.

And once you get a pretty clear picture of the result that you want, then you can sort of reverse engineer it and ask yourself, well, who is the type of person that could lose 40 pounds? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. Or who’s the type of person that could double their income? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who creates one new product each month or something like that. And once you reverse engineer the outcome, and ask yourself that question, who is the type of person that could achieve that, then you become a little more clear on what that identity might be.

Steve: Like if I want to become a New York Times bestselling author, I would probably follow in your footsteps and then set aside time to write two days a week and be consistent about that for three years, for example?

James: That’s a great example of scaling it down. It is like, who is the type of person that could write a New York Times bestseller? Well, it might be the type of person that has a really big email list, like hundreds of thousands of people that they could tell about the book when it comes out. Okay, well, who is the type of person that could have an email list of 500,000 people? Well, maybe it’s the type of person that writes every week. And so then that becomes the identity that you’re trying to build. I just want to be the type of person who writes every week.

And that line of questioning I think leads you more — it leads you a little bit away — what it does is it clarifies the fact that your outcomes in life are a lagging measure of your habits, right? The number of email subscribers I have is a lagging measure of my writing habit, and your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits, your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits, you’re really just trying to figure out who, how do I need to show up each day to get that long term outcome that I’m looking for?

Steve: Right. And then adopting the little detailed habits of that individual to get what you want, or in the case of writing a book, the writing part is just one little habit, and all these little habits that you do if we were to delve deeper into your life James, all that add up to where you are today.

James: Right. And the things that we were talking about earlier, like optimizing your environment, or choosing the right tribe, or tweaking little elements of that, the two minute rule and scaling it down, all of those are strategies for building those habits that surround that core identity of I want to be the type of person who writes every week.

Steve: Right. James, I think that’s actually a good point to conclude this interview because we’ve already been chatting for quite a while. Where can people find more about your book? Where can they get it?

James: Yeah, thanks so much for chatting, I enjoyed the conversation. So, the book is called Atomic Habits and you can get it at Atomichabits.com. And on that page, I have a couple like bonus downloads and stuff too. There’s a guide on how to apply the ideas to parenting, a guide on how to apply the ideas to business. There’s a cheat sheet for kind of the core ideas in the book and just kind of like a one pager you can look at and review a template for tracking your habits. Anyway, so all of that is at Atomichabits.com.

Steve: What’s funny about this is just our little chat today has kind of reinforced my parenting style a little bit because I’ve been pushing my kids hard because I want to get into the habit of feeling like they’re smart and at the top of their class. And I talked to certain people and they think I’m crazy, but maybe that just means I need to change my environment a little bit.

James: Nice. Well, congratulations. I’m glad that habits are on top of mind and important for you. I think there’s something all parents should think about deeply and really all people. I mean, they impact all of our lives.

Steve: And just for the benefit of listeners here, I’ve actually read James’ book and it’s excellent. And I was just kind of playing dumb in the interview today because I want to highlight some of the key points that resonated with me. But thanks a lot James for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time.

James: Wonderful. Thanks Steve.

Steve: All right. Take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now when it comes to being successful in business, consistency is the key and the concepts that James talked about in this episode will allow you to make your business part of your routine. For more information about this episode, go to Mywifequitherjob.com/episode248.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any primer that is closely tied to your ecommerce store. Now, if you want to give it a try, it is free. So, head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to Mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s Mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.Mywifequitherjob.com.

Steve: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and dig deep into what strategies they used to grow their businesses. Now today I have my friend Paul Jarvis on the show. And Paul’s an author, designer podcaster, who has worked with famous clients like Danielle Laporte, Microsoft, Marie Forleo and Mercedes Benz. Now, Paul is a stud, but none of that stuff matters today because we’re going to talk about business, happiness, and satisfaction today. And just giving you guys a heads up, this interview really spoke to me unlike any other.

But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Privy who is a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool Wheel of Fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prizes in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this and when I implemented this form email signups increased by 131%. And just recently, I added Facebook Messenger into the mix as well which you can read about on my blog.

Now you can also use Privy to reduce cart abandonment with cart saver pop ups and abandoned email sequences as well at one super low price that is much cheaper than using a full blown email marketing solution. So bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers and recover lost sales. So, head on over to Privy.com/Steve and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ For 15% off. Once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to give a shout out to Klaviyo who is also a sponsor of the show. Always blessed to have them as a sponsor because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store, and I depend on them for over 30% of my revenues. Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you could try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, now on to the show.

Intro: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: And then we’ll be silent for five seconds and then I’ll just give you a quick intro and then we’ll see where the interview goes.

Paul: Perfect.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Paul Jarvis on the show. Now Paul is someone who my buddy Sol Orwell introduced to me completely out of the blue. And to be quite honest, I was actually thinking about brushing off the intro at first, but since Sol is a good friend, I took the intro and I’m so glad that I did because I feel like I hit the jackpot. Now before I tell you exactly why, here is a brief bio for Paul. Paul is an author, designer, podcaster, a course, and software creator. His works have been talked about by Ashton Kutcher and Arianna Huffington. He’s worked with clients like Danielle Laporte, Microsoft, Marie Forleo and Mercedes.

Now Paul is obviously a stud in this regard. But I actually interview lots of studs on this podcast. But the reason this interview is special to me is because his latest book Company of One has had a profound effect on me. And in fact, I rarely gush about business books, but because Company of One spoke directly to me and my own philosophies, I’m actually going to recommend it to everyone I meet from now on. And with that, welcome the show Paul, how are you doing today?

Paul: Hey, I’m great. What a great intro, good match.

Steve: Well, the book which I just finished this morning, for the listeners by the way was excellent. If I had more time and I didn’t have two kids, I would have just read it straight through.

Paul: So you’re probably fresher with the content of the book than I am at this point because I finished writing it over a year. Publishing is such a long, long game, right? So I finished writing it so long ago that I’m going to have to reread it again soon just to brush up on it as well.

Steve: Well, I’ll make corrections over the course of the interview. Well, that’s funny; I would imagine you have to read it like 100 times, right, when you’re publishing a book or?

Paul: Oh, yeah, so that’s the thing I had to, obviously it takes a while to write. But I have to go over it quite a few times with the copy editor, the editor, and then the copy editor. And then when I record the audio version of the book I’m going to get very familiar with it again, but there is actually quite a gap because the book is finished and goes to print for limited run for advanced copies, like the one you got probably about eight months before it comes out. So there’s a gap where I don’t have to do any reading of the book again, and we’re kind of in that gap right now.

Steve: Well, it’s fresh in my mind. And Paul, just for the benefit of the listeners who don’t know who you are, looking over your history, you’ve done a lot of different things. So can you kind of give my audience an overview of your background and what kind of led you to this point in life?

Paul: Sure. So I guess the main things that I do are design and writing. So I started designing in the 90s, I’ve actually worked for myself, or almost went for — it’ll be 20 years in this coming February.

Steve: Wow.

Paul: It seems like a long time.

Steve: It does yeah.

Paul: So one I feel so old, but two, that’s like a really long time. So in the beginning, I was doing web design for clients, a lot of like fortune 100 companies. For a while, I was doing a lot of pro athletes’ websites like Shaquille O’Neal. He’s just random, doing a bunch of proactive websites for people in like the NFL, NBA, NHL, that sort of thing. And then I kind of moved from that because that wasn’t very interesting, and working with agents of athletes, oh no isn’t great. But I decided, hey, this internet thing is pretty cool. I’ve been doing websites for a while. There’s these people who are making money on the internet making businesses on their own. And so I kind of gravitated towards working with online entrepreneurs like Marie Forleo, Daniela Port, Chris Carr, those sorts of people, and they’re really smart.

And so I started designing websites for them. I was learning a lot about business. And then probably about six, five, six years ago, I decided to create my first products. And they were books. And from there, I’ve now sell a bunch of software products, a bunch of courses, a bunch of podcasts, I don’t actually do any client work anymore for design. All the product stuff has taken up all of my time. It does well for me financially, it gives me the space, and like today, I spent the entire day bike riding. I’m glad this call is at 5 pm tonight as it was a nice day outside. I was just biking with my wife in the woods for the entire day.

Steve: Nice.

Paul: Got fun. So yeah, I guess it’s kind of — I think that’s kind of where I’m at from start to finish.

Steve: Yeah. So Paul, before we move on, I kind of want to set the stage about the topic of today’s podcast by kind of telling a personal story before we talk about Company of One.

Paul: Great.

Steve: Now, you don’t know this about me. But for the past decade, I’ve been super focused on growing my two main businesses, which is Bumblebee Linens, and My Wife Quit Her Job like pedal the metal growth, right? And business has been good. And today I run two legit seven figure businesses. But here’s what hit me like a ton of bricks last year, growing these businesses further has not equivalently furthered my happiness and my wife and I don’t spend nearly as much money as we actually make. But even still, every year, we set a new arbitrary goal and then try to meet it and it’s getting really stressful. Every new product launch, every new sales channel that you want to add, it just adds to the stress.

And man over the holiday season since we run an e-commerce store, when the customers are coming in, it’s a mad rush to orders and it’s just not as fun anymore. And the money is good but it’s just not always a comfortable situation. But my wife and I made a pact last year to artificially limit our growth to a certain percentage. And we’ve actually been much happier since the pressure is gone and we’re just kind of enjoying just running the business more now. And here’s the thing though, I hang out with a lot of successful entrepreneurs. And I would say 90% of them are just so growth focused that I almost feel like an outlier now. And I felt that way actually, until I picked up your book this past week. So with that long winded tale Paul, what is Company of One?

Paul: Yeah, so many good things in there. I also don’t spend nearly as much as I make. And in the beginning in my 20s, I was like, I want to make a million dollars a year at whatever cost. And so I started to work on that. And after a couple, only like a few months, I was like, this is like, I’m making great money, but I’m also working like 16, 18 hour days, I have no weekends. It was just — I realized like why do I want this? And I couldn’t — like honestly, there wasn’t a good reason. So I was like, okay, how about I just work towards making enough money. So I put some money away, I can cover all of my costs. And that’s kind of — so Company of One is really just the idea that it’s okay if we question growth, because there’s no other, I don’t know of any other business books, or podcasts or blogs that say that growth isn’t always the best thing ever, right?

Steve: Yeah totally.

Paul: Everything is always like growth hacking and 10xing. And it’s like, but why? I feel like I’m the weird guy in the back of the room, putting up my hand like asking, but why, why, why? Why do we need this? And what I found through writing the book and interviewing dozens and dozens of people, poring through really, really boring research papers and business studies, is that the business doesn’t match up with logic always. Obviously, sometimes growth is bad. And I’m not even against growth in business. I’m just about questioning at first, does this make sense? Is this going to make my business better or worse? Is this going to make my happiness better or worse? Is this going to make my revenue better or worse, because sometimes more revenue doesn’t equal more profits, right?

Sometimes you end up spending more than you’re making, even when you’re making more. And there was a study done by I think it was a Copan Group and Inc Magazine, where they looked at like the Inc 5,000 list, the list that everybody’s like, oh, this is the best list ever. And the study found that, I think it was like five to seven years after, they looked at the 5,000 companies five to eight years later. And most of them had gone out of business for reasons not because of any other reason, other than the fact that they grew too fast, they took on too much investment that they couldn’t pay their investors back, they hired too many people, and they couldn’t keep that growth rate going. Because the problem with growth is that you always want more.

So if you’re making 5% more this month versus last month, you want to do 6% the next month or 7% and eventually gets to a place where it’s ridiculous. It just does not make sense. So that’s kind of where the book — the book, I think, is really an examination of what if we don’t look to growth for the answer? What if we look to better for the answer, because bigger isn’t always better, but better is always better, I think.

Steve: Can we kind of talk about your own personal views of happiness. You said a couple things there, like how do you know how much is enough? And then what is your own personal definition of happiness? Like, how do you look at your work?

Paul: So enough for me is covering my basis like for my family, for that kind of thing. It’s funny, there’s a study that a bunch of bloggers are talking about right now, that figured out the exact income where making more money doesn’t make you more happy. And I was like, that’s how much I pay myself a year. I was like, I’m right.

Steve: What is that amount by the way, do you know?

Paul: 75.

Steve: Oh 75, okay, yeah, right.

Paul: So I pay myself that and I my pay my wife as well. And so technically, our income is more than that. But individually, it’s exactly where we’re right on the money for that. And the study found that making, say you made 50,000, you’re happier if you make 75. But if you make 100, you’re no more happier and sometimes less happier than if you make 75 versus 100. And I’ve kind of the same like my business makes more than I need. I live a pretty minimal life. I still do a lot of fun things. But it’s like I don’t need that many things to be happy, especially the things that make me the happiest aren’t things that cost a lot of money like going for a bike ride today, it doesn’t really — like our bikes, mountain bikes are kind of expensive, but you buy those once and you maintain them and they’re good for quite a while.

So for me, figuring out what enough is is more important than figuring out how to grow bigger and bigger, like month over month, year over year and I can’t remember what the second part of the question was.

Steve: Yeah, I know. And just to like, for a long time I thought I was alone in this regard. Do you happen to know any popular entrepreneurs that are actually following this philosophy other than like you and me?

Paul: Yeah. So Sean D’Souza on Psychotactics.com, you actually mentioned that putting a limit on growth, he does this; he doesn’t want to make more than 5,000 dollars a year. So he limits that. So he has like a certain number of spots open up in his courses, or he takes on a certain number of clients. So he doesn’t make more than that, because he’s found if he makes more than that, he has to work more than that. And then he’s not as happy, he can’t, I think he helps tutor his two nieces, and that sort of thing. So like, he likes his life the way that it is. And if he makes more than that, it doesn’t make any sense. And that’s business revenue not per — I don’t know how much he pays himself, but for his business making 500k a year is enough. And that’s the limit that he sets on it.

There’s — oh man, in the book there’s tons of examples as well. [Inaudible 00:14:42] is an illustrator. And he would rather find good paying clients than all of the clients because he wants to sit — he lives in California, like you. And he wants to sit in his studio in his backpack yard and draw, and his two daughters come and they draw as well with their dad in the afternoons after school. And it sounds kind of like an idyllic life to me.

Steve: It does. I mean, but it’s so hard, though. And so the next topic I kind of want to ask you about is, let’s say you are kind of running a successful company, it’s growing, it’s doing great, how do you come to this conclusion whether growth is beneficial or not? What are some questions that you should ask yourself?

Paul: Yeah, I think I come at it very much from a nerdy perspective. My background is like web and software. So I always try to think of, for anything concerning growth, I try to think of what the maintenance costs are. And what I mean by that is — and this relates to everything, not just software. But I’ll start with software then relate it to everything. So for software, if you add a new feature, that could be great, it could be something that all your users are asking for. But it could mean that now you have to charge more, because it costs that much development time to build it. It could mean you need to hire more support staff, because this feature that everybody said they wanted is a feature that requires a lot more support, because some users may not get it.

So, I always try to think of the maintenance costs of that. And that’s actually why I sell the products that I sell, because they require — like writing a book has no tech support. So, I don’t have to do a whole lot other than the marketing and the promotion and I like that kind of stuff anyways, but the book can exist as a product that’s making me money every single month that I don’t have to do — like it’s not taking me eight hours a day to maintain, right?

Steve: Paul by the way, how do you make money? I actually don’t even know.

Paul: So number one is courses. I sell three courses right now. Number two is probably books like advances from publishers. Number three is probably software and then podcasting. Those are the main ones.

Steve: Okay. And then for your courses, is there some amount of support involved with those?

Paul: Yes and no. So the way that I look at courses, so I approach courses like satisfy everything relates to software for me. But I approach courses like software. So I’ll release a very small alpha version to just a few of like the people in my audience who would just buy everything from me. So I’ll give a few people access. And I want to see with their access, where they have questions, especially in on-boarding. So when somebody buys the course, what happens next and what questions do they have? And so whenever I’m building a course, I always try to look at how I can pre answer questions that people might have, but won’t have once I answer them.

So I’ll do things like introduction videos, and all the introduction video will be is talking about all the things that the alpha users, the beta users, or the first people in the first run of the course had questions about. So every time I get a support request or a question for a course I note it. And then when I start to see patterns in that, I’ll make a video or I’ll make a blog post, or I’ll record some audio for it. So I try to answer things in volume. Same with software, I make videos for all the software products that I have for support, because I want people to be able to get the answers they need without having to talk to me. And then if they do have to talk to me, I’m like, okay, good. This is a new question. I can note this in my spreadsheet. And if I start to notice a pattern, I can make a video or a blog post or something like that for it.

And then the only other thing for my courses is there’s a slack group for each of them. And that really, it’s like 10, 15 minutes a day. I like the P — I really liked my audience. So I like the people in my courses. And so I really like interacting with them. And so that really doesn’t take up a whole lot of time, like I’ll login about 10, 15 minutes every other day or so, maybe sometimes every day but it’s not a whole lot of work.

Steve: So what is your formula, then? Your own personal formula, I guess, since everyone’s going to be different for this threshold of support, and how to fix your happiness?

Paul: Yeah, so I always look at what I’ve currently got on the go, because I do have a lot on the go of like three courses, a bunch of podcasts, a bunch of software, books. And so I look at, well, how much time do I want to spend working in a day and it’s usually no more than six hours because I don’t feel I’m productive past that. But I also feel like there’s so many other things in my life that I like doing that I wouldn’t have time for those things if I had to work, like if I was in my 20s when I was working like 16 hours, just ridiculous hours. I didn’t have time to go to the gym, or go out or do yoga, or like make fancy meals. And so I look at what space do I have to add, and I look at is there anything not working that I can remove?

So I like to do this even with like household items. So if my wife or I want to buy something, we’re like, okay, we’re bringing something into the house, maybe there’s something that we can get rid of in the house so we don’t end up with a house full of stuff. So I kind of look at my business the same way where it’s like, okay, if I really want to make this piece of software, what’s it going to cost in terms of maintenance time? But is this even going to fit because I don’t think a lot of people think about that, like they have — a lot of entrepreneurs have lots of great ideas are always wanting to make new things or different things, but they don’t think about how much time it’s going to take to do those things. And everybody is like, oh, I can get stuff done really fast.

And everything takes longer than you think it does. And we’re all awful at multitasking. So I always try to figure out like, okay, what the balance is, because I think there is a balance. And it’s hard sometimes to find that balance.

Steve: So it sounds like you want to work six hours per day. And then you just kind of do some rough calculation to see if you can take on something and if you can’t, you’ll throw away something perhaps.

Paul: Yes.

Steve: Right okay.

Paul: And that’s why I’ve sunseted a bunch of software products, probably about four courses. And I’ve just taken them and some of them could have been making some money. I was selling WordPress themes for a while that were making decent money but they required so much support that I couldn’t do anything else. So I got rid of them because it wasn’t worth it to me. There’s other things that I can do that could make the same amount of money with less work and maintenance on my end.

Steve: Interesting. So that means you must be pretty good at time management because I always have problems too like whenever I start a project, I’m really poor at estimating how much time it’s going to take me.

Paul: Yeah, it’s tough. Especially I think the pedigree that I have of doing client work was really, really helpful because the reason that I got hired, like when I was hired by Microsoft or Mercedes Benz, they weren’t hiring an agency that I owned or worked at, they were just hiring Paul Jarvis to do just design work. And so, the way that I could get clients like that was to always be 100% accurate with my time management skills. So if I said, I need to get this thing done for you in two weeks, you would have it in two weeks, no questions asked. I would not ever miss a deadline. And that’s how I built such a name for myself in the client work design world that kind of carried over to products where I figured like, okay, in my mind, I’m the client, I can’t let my client down even though the client is me.

And so I’d be like, okay, I have to get this thing done in this amount of time. I know approximately how long things take. And typically I padded because life always gets in the way of productivity, or especially like whenever you’re in the flow, something will happen. So if I know writing a piece of software is going to take writing like a feature of software is going to take me eight hours, I don’t put an eight hour chunk in my calendar. I’m like, okay, it’s probably going to be about 16. So eight hours of actual work. And then another eight hours of interruptions or phone calls, or maybe the power goes out, or maybe my pet needs to go to the vet or something like that. So I always kind of double the actual time I think it’s going to take because it always works out for some reason that bring in is always the actual amount of time it takes.

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So Paul, like one of the tenets of your book that I could really relate to, was paying more attention to your existing customers, as opposed to putting all of your research on new customers. And just a quick aside here, like with my store, I found that B2B customers were converting a lot higher meaning like, once you got one of them, they ended up purchasing on a regular basis. Whereas I was spending all sorts of money on ads to get these new customers and oftentimes, these new customers were just like single purchases and done. And so, can you just talk about some examples, maybe whether with some of the people that you talked about in your book, or for yourself, where actually paying more attention to your existing customers actually paid off?

Paul: Yeah, so the first thing is that it it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than to work at building more business with existing customers. And there was a study done, it was like five to eight times more for acquisition versus retention, which is mind boggling. And that was for big business and I mean for a business like mine where it is like literally just me at my home office, it’s just like I really enjoy talking to the people in my audience. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that you can kind of build the audience that you want to have, you’re not stuck with the audience you get. You can actively work at building a cool, interesting audience.

Steve: Give me some examples of how you do that.

Paul: So trying to trying to write for writers specifically, so trying to write in a way that’s going to resonate with a certain type of person, as opposed to trying to write in a way that appeals to everybody. So like, I swear in my writing, and I know that put certain people off and I know that the people that it puts off are the type of people who get angry at the products that I sell anyways, so it’s I swear naturally, so there’s swearing in my writing sometimes, not all the time, not a potty mouth, but like just things like that, or telling stories about my pet rats as business parables.

And some people are like, that’s so weird. Or the welcome email to my newsletter, the Sunday dispatches talks about how I was so excited that — a spoiler alert if anybody signs up for it now. But it talks about how I’m so excited that you signed up for my list, I went out, and I got your name tattooed on my inner left arm. And every time I raise my arm, I’ll think about the day that you sign up for my list. Some people hate tattoos, which is fine, but like I’m tattooed from my neck to my toes. So this is kind of on brand for me. But it’s fine that I put off certain people because it draws the people that are actually going to buy from me or stay customers a lot better.

I show people who I actually am as often as possible, which is very, very scary to do. But it also helps because the person that I am in the three things that I do like the podcast, or the writing of the newsletters, that’s the person who’s in the paid products, like even in my software products, there’s some silly jokes in the micro copy or in the videos. So I think that it’s okay to do that to really hone in on the audience that you want. Because like I think the last time I checked, more than half the people who bought one thing from me have bought more than one thing from me.

So like, I really like to have lifetime customers who buy all of the things because I think that builds kind of a relationship. And like these people, I know these people by name, because they email me, I see them when I get a Stripe receipt, or a PayPal receipt, and I talk to them on Slack. So I get to know them. And the more I get to know my customers, the more I can figure out what they need, what they need help with, what they value, and then I can make better products that are focused for that type of person. And then for them, it’s just like I don’t even need to read the sales page. I’m just clicking buy. And that’s a good position to be in for both myself and for them, because they’re getting things basically custom tailored to them.

Steve: So how do you balance I guess this more personal behavior with the need to reach out to colder customers? Like, let’s say you’re giving advice to a business that’s deciding whether to scale or focus more on their existing customers, how do you strike that balance?

Paul: Yeah, I mean, I would probably look at the data to see how — so I talked to somebody in Company of One. And she was working at a magazine and magazines are very much subscription based, right. And they were trying to figure out how to get more subscribers because they needed to increase their revenue. And not a single person in the company was thinking about how we can reduce the churn from existing people canceling their monthly subscription. And it’s like you already have this pool of people, if you decrease your churn rate by a certain percentage, it’s the same as increasing your profit by a certain percentage.

But it’s easier because those people bought the magazine because they liked something about it. So maybe you talk to them and find out what they like, or what’s no longer resonating with them because they’ve already given you money, they’ve already shown that something about your business or your product is valuable enough for them to open up their wallets to you. It just seems easier to me in a lot of cases, not all the time. But in a lot of cases, to look at the existing customers, because they’re the ones who’ve already found — they’re the ones who are already paying attention. They’re the ones who are already coming to dinner at your business, basically.

Steve: I mean, in your book, you talk a lot about doing things that don’t quite scale for your existing customers. And can you just kind of provide some examples of how you’ve done that to kind of make your existing customers true fans of your product?

Paul: Yeah, so the best example of that is for a book I wrote probably about four years ago. I was trying to figure out what specifically to write about. So I sent an email to my mailing list, which was probably around, I don’t know, 10 to 15,000 people at the time. And I was like, hey, I want to get to know you. I want to get to know what you’re working on, what you’re struggling with. Let’s hop on a Skype call for 10 minutes. And I put a link to like my calendar or my booking thingy. And I think I got like 40 or 50 people book calls with me and I was like, okay, I should probably turn this off now. That’s a lot. But so I spent a couple of weeks talking to subscribers just about themselves, their business, that sort of thing.

And in the beginning, I was floundering with like, okay, what do I want to write about, what should the next book be about? And I was like, oh, maybe it should be this, maybe it should be that. And then after I’d spoken to dozens of people on my mailing list, I was like, it’s absolutely clear, based on the patterns in what people are talking about, I know exactly what my audience is struggling with now. And you can’t — it’s really hard to scale like actual conversations on the phone. But it’s really, really useful. I can give one more example too. It’s is not me but it’s my friends who started another company called Crew. They are a freelance matchmaker service.

So companies are like, I want to hire a designer developer, and they would go to Crew, and there’s already a vetted pool of designers and developers. They had a MailChimp mailing list in a spreadsheet to start, and they were like manually looking through it. And it wasn’t until they had a decent amount of revenue, that they actually built the software to run it. But they started out with a mailing list in a spreadsheet, and they grew it into — they sold for millions of dollars last year.

So things can start without — I think people are so obsessed with scale that you can go back to doing things that don’t scale. And it actually works fine. And a lot of times, you can do things that don’t scale until you can no longer do them. And then it might make sense to scale, or it might make sense to automate at that point. But in the beginning, I think getting to know your customers on a personal level is more important than having like a 36 email sequence if you’re just starting out, right. Maybe just get to know people and their businesses, then make this crazy automation sequence with segments and funnels and automation and all of that so yeah.

Steve: That’s actually a good segue. Like, let’s say, I’m working a full time job right now and I want to start something, how do you go about starting a company of one? Like, what’s some advice that you have, like, should I quit my job right away and go full bore? Like, what’s your advice there?

Paul: Yeah, I probably wouldn’t do that.

Steve: Neither would I actually.

Paul: Yeah, like, it’s funny, because a lot of people who aren’t entrepreneurs think that entrepreneurs are inherently risky. But then I look at my friends who are entrepreneurs, and I look at myself, and like, I’m so risk averse, it’s not even funny. So I’ve worked for myself since I was a teenager. So it’s really hard. But the way that I can relate to this is that I had a very successful client service business and I wanted to move into products. So products kind of became my side job. But I didn’t want to do products unless they were making as much or more money as the client services. So from day one, I kept the income stream separate. So I had my bucket of how much I was making doing client work, and my bucket of how much I was making doing products. And I started doing it on the evenings and weekends.

Like my first book, which is a vegan cookbook, which I never went any further into that niche or audience but it was a good first start. And I basically tried to start that, and this is really that Company of One model is I tried to start as quickly as I could for as little money as possible, and then doing it in gaps. So at that time, I was like, okay, I’m working at the time; this was after I was doing 16 hour days. So I was only doing like, eight hour days. And I was like, okay, I’m working eight hours, I’m sleeping eight hours. And that’s a non negotiable for me to sleep. So I think that’s important. People who hustle really hard really give up on sleep and I don’t think that’s a wise idea.

And then I was like, okay, so I can block my day in thirds, eight hours of sleep, eight hours of full time job work. And then I have eight hours of other. So obviously, I have some life commitments like things like eating, but I can take that time, maybe I can watch less TV. And for about 10 years, my wife and I didn’t even have a television or Netflix or cable, or anything like that. And we really just worked on those sorts of things. So I started my product business, very small. I traded so many things to get that book done. I spent I think zero dollars to publish that book other than…

Steve: Interesting, you didn’t have an editor or?

Paul: I did, but I traded her for web design work.

Steve: Oh, I see. I worked at a five star restaurant and my plates and bowls are ugly, they just look like normal plates and bowls. So I got all these because it was a cookbook. So it had to have nice food photography. I traded the photographer; she could eat all the food I made if she helped me do the photos. So I did everything for basically zero dollars because I wanted to see what can I do with — and the thing is, creativity thrives on constraints. And a lot of people like if I had all of the money and all the resources in the world, I don’t think I could have created as cool of a cookbook. I mean, it’s not even that great of a book. But if I had all the resources, I don’t know if I would have ended up with a better product.

I think the fact that it was so interesting and weird how I basically created a book and wrote a book that was professional quality for zero dollars actually made it a better book. So I think creativity can thrive on constraints. And I started like I made a decent amount of money with that book. And then I started spending money on my second book. So I actually paid my editor because she already had a website at that point. I couldn’t just trade her again. And then yeah, so I started to reinvest, so I’d only reinvest money in products from money that I already made from products. So in the beginning, I was working a couple hours on it a day, and then a bit more. And then I could scale back my client work, and then scale up my product work until eventually the client work scaled down to zero and the product work to 100.

Steve: You know, one of my favorite quotes in your book, and it wasn’t a quote that you necessarily wrote but it was part of a story was that overhead equals death. And I actually had this philosophy with my businesses that I want to keep it lean. So in case like, revenue goes to zero, I can spend like 50 bucks a month and still maintain it forever, or some really low amount of money and or even like I’m really — so I’m so anti SaaS that if I can write the code in like a week or so, I’ll sit down and write the code so that I don’t have to pay a monthly fee. So that’s as far as I go. I don’t know if that kind of correlates to your book, or the point that you’re trying to make. But that overhead equals death really resonated with me.

Paul: Yeah, that’s definitely one of my favorite stories in the book. And I’m kind of the same way, like I would rather figure out how to run my business on — because I think a lot of people don’t look at the lower number, like the expenses of a business, they only focus on the profit, and that the higher number, the above number in the business. And it’s like, if I can run my business for as little as possible, I don’t need more customers to make more money. I can have the same amount of money coming in, but I can end up with more of it if I just spend less. So I’m the same. I’m relentless with spending money. I’m like it’s funny, nowadays it’s trendy to be a minimalist, but before that, it was just cheap.

Steve: So for me, at least my thought process is like let’s say I wanted to take a month off, I don’t want like all this overhead keeping me up at night. Like, let’s say, I had a whole bunch of employees, I got to pay them no matter what. Or have to pay these SaaS apps, no matter what, whether I’m doing work or not. And so the less I guess monthly recurring expenses I have, the more peace of mind I can have at night when I sleep.

Paul: Exactly. Yeah, it’s exactly the same for me where I don’t want more responsibility than I need in my business. And that’s one of the main reasons why I don’t want to hire employees, because I would feel responsible for them. Like if they have kids in college, I would feel responsible for their salary. And I’m okay with responsibility; I’ve run a business that has endured for two decades. But I don’t want more than I have to have. Because then that feels stressful to me and that impedes on my happiness a little bit more than I want it to.

Steve: This is like a therapy session for me by the way Paul. So the last topic I did want to touch upon was, you talk a lot about relationship wealth and how that’s helped you over the years. Can you talk about what that is exactly?

Paul: Yeah, so social capital is almost like a bank account. If you think about it, kind of like that, where I think a good example is if you go to somebody’s website, and they’re like buy now, like you just clicked on it from Google and there’s just like, buy now, buy now, buy now. And it’s like I want to learn a bit first about this. Like, there’s no capital built, there’s no trust built. And I think that if we take a step back, and we look at, like all of my customers, I would rather have some kind of relationship with, like a long term relationship with where they’re supporting my business, I’m supporting them than just like quick sales, like high retention or high churn kind of thing, where like maybe I’m selling — and I’ve talked to some people who sell like way more courses than I do, but their refund rate is like 30%.

And for me, like, first that would crush my ego. My ego was far too fragile to refund a third of the people who buy anything from me. And I think I can probably count on both my hands how many refunds I’ve had to give in for things that I sell, because I don’t want that to happen because I really try to work hard with my existing audience and pay attention to them. But I think that’s yeah, it’s difficult for sure.

Steve: So, for some reason when I was reading the book, I took your relationship wealth to talk about like the colleagues that you’ve met who have actually helped you along with your business.

Paul: Yeah.

Steve: And you didn’t really go into specifics in the book, actually. But how did those relationships actually help you get to where you are now?

Paul: Yeah, so I’ve kind of been of the mindset that I really like interesting people. Interesting people are interesting; I think that makes perfect sense. And so I would always kind of approach relate like I look at the emails that show up in my — like today, for example, I probably got like five pitches from people I don’t know, deleted every single one of them, I do not care. But I look at the people who connect with me on Twitter, or that sort of thing where they’re just like interesting people doing interesting things, and I just want to talk to them. So the person that I teach one of my courses with, her name is Kaylee Moore, she contacted me about a year and a half ago. And she was a student of one of my courses, creative class at the time.

And she was like, hey, I would love to get together for a virtual coffee with you for 10 minutes to talk about what you’re working on, what I’m working on. I have nothing to sell you. I just think you’re interesting. And let’s have a talk. And I wasn’t sure. Her and I now work together. And she’s my partner in creative class because we got to know each other, we figured, oh, we can both kind of balance each other skill sets out. It makes sense to work together. But in the beginning, there was no — I think a lot of people look at relationships now, especially online relationships, where it’s like, what can I get out of this person? Other people can smell your intentions and can see your intentions even if you think you’re trying to hide them.

So a good example is even the person that connected you and I, Sol Orwell, I think that he is like a master connector. He is like really he knows everybody. But he doesn’t know people. I’ve talked to him on the phone a bunch of times and like, neither of us have a business that could benefit from each other’s businesses. He’s just doing really interesting things, knows interesting people, I probably the same. And so when — he’s on my mailing list as well. And he saw that my Company of One is coming out soon. And he was like, hey, let me know who I can connect you with to like be on their podcast or to interview you or that sort of thing. And I was like, that’s awesome. Like, I didn’t have to ask for that. My first email to Sol wasn’t, hey, I’ve seen that you’ve been on some great podcasts, can you introduce me? He would have deleted that email, right.

So I just look at, like, all of the things that have come in my life and to my business from personal relationships weren’t because I wanted something from the other person. It’s that I like the other person and they like me, because there’s a relationship there. So I think that that’s really important. And then I look at, like, the growth hacker emails I get, which are the exact opposite of that, like, I’m a big fan of your show, I think I’d be a great guest. And like, my show has never had a guest on it in the length of the show. Like, it’s pretty obvious that you’re not a big fan of the show. So it’s just like, just, I don’t know, just get to know people. And people can be really, really interesting. And you don’t have to get something from them. But maybe in the future, if you’ve given a value to them, or you’re just friends with them, then maybe something cool will happen. Maybe it won’t and either way that that’s fine.

Steve: I mean that’s totally been my experience as well. And in fact, my business partner now is someone I met at a conference just kind of randomly.

Paul: Nice.

Steve: And it’s been many years now and it’s been a great relationship.

Paul: Cool.

Steve: But hey, Paul, we’ve been chatting for quite a while. This is actually been quite a good therapy session for me, because for the longest time, I thought I was alone in that just constantly trying to grow, grow, grow, grow, has had really been adding to the stress. And all these goals, for me, at least have been kind of arbitrary, right? Like I want to grow X amount next year, and I don’t spend a lot of money. I don’t buy anything really. I go on a vacation every now and then. But that’s about it. So it just makes life a lot happier when you can just cut back and think about what really makes you happy.

Paul: Yeah, it’s true, like, good question. I find that questioning things in general, like business life, whatever, it’s just a good idea to think like how does this benefit me? Or how would this not benefit me? Instead of just like blindly following like things you read on the internet.

Steve: I mean, the ego is a problem though, right?

Paul: Hundred percent?

Steve: I mean, I belong to this entrepreneurship program as part of Stanford, and everyone in there is they’re running these funded companies. And a bunch of my friends there have had exits, like nine and 10 figure exits. And man, it is really like, I go in there, and I’m selling handkerchiefs or selling courses and it’s just kind of intimidating. I don’t know.

Paul: No, it’s true. And I mean, I was talking to Jason Fried the guy who runs Basecamp, I interviewed him in the book. And he’s like at dinner parties, like you saying that you work at a company that’s like a couple of employees versus saying, like, oh, I work at a company with like 10,000 employees, it doesn’t — but then like, who are you trying to impress? What does it matter? And I mean, even like looking at Basecamp is a ridiculous example, because their profit per employee is way higher than any fortune 100 company. They make so much money comparatively to the number of employees that they have that is actually better than a lot of these massive companies. But just like the dinner party conversation, like, oh what do you do? I work for myself. And people automatically think like, oh, you like you sit in your underwear on the couch?

Steve: Exactly yeah.

Paul: No, dude. Like, I make money but I also have a life that I really enjoy. And I don’t need to hire people to sound good at dinner parties because I wouldn’t want to go to dinner parties where that was the only metric.

Steve: So Paul, where can people find you online? When does your book come out? I think it’ll be out by the time this interview goes out actually, but where can people find it?

Paul: Yeah, so the book is called Company of One. It’s available at every major retailer from Amazon to Target. It’s in or will be in pretty much all bookstores. It comes out on January 15th, but it is available for pre order on October 15th. And then the way that it works is the more books I sell between October 15th and January 15th, the higher it ranks because all sales count on the first day. So if this sounds like a book you want to read, then maybe buy it in that time. If this is coming out after that, then just get it if you like it, but…

Steve: I highly recommend the book. When I was reading it, I was nodding the entire time because it really resonated with me just the whole focus on happiness. I started my businesses originally, so I could spend more time with the kids. And over the years, I had kind of lost track of that. And it was just last year when I was having a rough year that it just kind of all hit me like is all this growth making me happy or not? And then your book basically just reinforced all of that for me.

Paul: I’m glad to hear that. Thank you.

Steve: So Paul thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time.

Paul: Thanks Steve.

Steve: All right, take care.

Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, I really loved Paul’s book and I highly recommend it to all business owners. And the link to the book Company of One will be in the show notes. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode239.

And once again I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Klaviyo is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants and you can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So, head on over to Mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again that’s Mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

I also want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode because Privy is the email capture provider that I use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop ups for any primer that is closely tied to your ecommerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

Now, I talk about how I use all these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email, and I’ll send you the course right away, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Intro: You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrapped business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they used to grow their businesses. Now today I have my friend Selena Soo on the show, and you’ve probably heard of her already if you follow guys like Remit Sethi, Derek Halpern, Andrew Warner, or Pat Flynn. Now Selena is a publicity and marketing strategist, and today we’re going to be talking about what it takes to become a well known industry leader where customers come to you rather than the other way around.

But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Klaviyo who is a sponsor of the show. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my ecommerce store and I depend on them for over 35% of my revenues. Now Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores, and here is why it is so powerful.

Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who’s purchased a red handkerchief in the last week, easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special auto-responder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there is full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you could try them for free at mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

I also want to give a shout out to Privy who is also a sponsor of the show. Privy is the tool that I use to build my email list for both my blog and my online store. Now what does Privy do? Well, Privy is an email list growth platform and they manage all of my email capture forms. And I use Privy hand-in-hand with my email marketing provider. Right now I’m using Privy to display a cool wheel of fortune pop up. Basically a user gives their email for a chance to win valuable prices in our store. And customers love the gamification aspect of this. And when I implemented this form email signups increased by 131%.

I’m also using their new cart saver pop up feature to recover abandoned carts as well. And bottom line, Privy allows me to turn visitors into email subscribers, which I then feed to my email provider to close the sale. So head on over to Privy.com/Steve and try it for free. And if you decide you need some of the more advanced features, use coupon code MWQHJ for 15% off. Once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve. Now onto the show.

Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host, Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Selena Soo on the show. Now, some of you have probably heard of her before because Selena is fairly well known in the online business and entrepreneurship space. And we actually both have mutual friends in Remit Sethi, Derek Halpern, Jordan Harbinger, Andrew Warner, and Pat Flynn. Anyways, unlike most podcast guests, I’ve actually never met Selena before and our introduction was through someone who I do not know at all, a man by the name of Ahmet [ph], and apparently Selena and I were chatting before this recording and she doesn’t know him either. So it was really a kind of random introduction.

But she’s actually been someone on my list of people to reach out to and I’m actually very happy that Ahmet did me a favor. In case you do not know her, Selena is a publicity and marketing strategist who helps authors and coaches become well known leaders in their space. She’s worked with a bunch of big names like Farnoosh Torabi, Kimra Luna, and she’s helped countless others Remit and Pat. And in this interview, we’re going to learn exactly what it takes to become an industry leader. And with that, welcome the show Selena, how are you doing today?

Selena: I’m doing so well. Thank you for having me.

Steve: So Selena, given that we are total strangers, how would you describe what you do and what led you down this path?

Selena: Yeah, sure. So I would say my biggest passion is elevating experts and entrepreneurs who are doing amazing work and making sure that the whole world knows about them. And the way that I came to this is in my mid 20s, I had a quarter life crisis and I just felt terrible every single day and I wanted to stop feeling like shit, basically. And I was asking friends, like, what do I do? Where do I go? Do you know anyone who can help me? And I discovered this woman’s life coaching group. And it was really powerful.

And in that group, I got exposed to different thought leaders and authors, people like Marianne Williamson, Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra, and people who were showing you that you could really create your own life that you’re in control of your own thoughts. And that you can overcome all these things that you’re struggling with, whether it’s a career issue, a life purpose issue, or you are in a toxic relationship, or it’s a health issue. And I realized that for myself, and for so many others, we’re not just looking for more information, we’re really looking for inspiration. And I was so inspired by these role models, because these individuals are people that I looked up to, and that they really embodied this message of possibility.

You have mentioned, I think Remit Sethi at one point, and he is someone who was actually a huge role model and support for me in launching my own business. But as I just started discovering these people, and falling in love with their work, and their stories, and even seeing a piece of myself in them, and seeing hope, I was like, I want everyone to know about them because a lot of my peers had no idea who these people were. And I felt like this is the most important thing, personal development, loving your life, being able to pursue your dreams. And so, I really want to help get these people out into the mainstream, and so that more people would know about them.

Steve: Interesting. So was that how you ended up meeting like Remit and Derek for example? Were you promoting their stuff? Okay.

Selena: No, well, that’s an interesting story. So Remit was and still is my favorite blogger. And I would read everything that he wrote. I was such a nerd. Like, there was this one piece that he wrote, and I forwarded it to like 30 friends being like, oh my gosh, this is so amazing. You have to read it. And I think a bunch of people didn’t even respond, like so into his stuff. And one day, I was walking home from my summer internship, I was in graduate school, and I saw him on the street, and I was on the phone with my mom. And I was like, I got to go mom. And he was outside his apartment building. He was looking like, I don’t think he – maybe he had his glasses on, I think he had slippers on, he was letting his parents into a car.

And I just knew, in my mind, I was like, I don’t know if I ever see him again. So let me just approach him. And I approached him and I introduced myself. I was like, are, you are Remit Sethi? And he’s like, yes. And I was like; I’m a huge fan of your work. I read your book. And we started talking, and the thing that we have to remember, sometimes we’re like, how could I ever talk to someone who is such a big deal in online world? And the thing is, everyone’s favorite topic is themselves, it’s the easiest topic for them to talk about. So I had so much to say to him about his book, about his blog, and about the impact that it had in my life.

And so we started to get to know each other. He was like, are you on my list for local New York meetups. I’m like, actually I am. And as he started doing meetups, I would attend those meetups, and actually, that’s how I met Derek Halpern. I remember he saw me talking to Derek, and we were like, laughing and everything. And he was like, oh, so you guys know each other. I was like, no, I just met him like five minutes ago. But the thing is, with Derek, I was also a huge follower of his work, and I had so much to say to him. And so, that’s kind of how I started to develop those relationships.

And over time, there have been ways I’ve showed my support to Remit like, as an example, as we became friends and I was in business school, he sent me an email saying, hey, I’m redoing my website, if you have five minutes would love for you to like, or a couple of minutes, take a look at this new mock up for the homepage. And there were a few different versions. And I was in my ironically, entrepreneurship class, and I left the classroom and I went to the library, and I gathered just people and friends and I got, I organized like a mini focus group.

And I spent like five hours between asking people for their opinions, and listening and doing that market research, and then writing up all my ideas and I shot him an email later that evening. And he was expecting probably like five minutes, or no response, or I don’t know what, and I gave him five hours. And he was just really blown away by the depth of my insights, and how I really showed up for him and went above and beyond, and he shared it with his team. And that’s just like one example.

Steve: So hold on, let me just introduce, let me just interrupt you real quick because you said a lot of stuff there. And like, my first question was, first of all, when you’re approaching someone who’s famous or semi famous up, how did you become memorable in Remit’s eyes that one day when you approached him in the car, or was that just like a first introduction?

Selena: Yeah, I mean, so the way that I became memorable, the way I became an interesting person to him was being interested in him. So, I was a huge follower and fan of his work. And when someone’s full time profession is helping other people and they want to know that they’re making a difference, it’s very different to — so it’s like, even when they send out emails, it’s like they’re wondering, are people going to respond, are people resonating with this? So to meet people in real life who are like, oh my gosh, your work has changed my life, that’s what they live for. That’s why they do what they do.

And I think I also stood out because now Remit has a much bigger audience. I met him several years ago and his audience then was definitely majority like Matt [ph], and he jokes like a young geeky guy. And so I’m like just like women and like know all his stuff and I just had like this — it was just like I didn’t fit his profile, a little bit intrigued. And yeah, I think also my enthusiasm went a really long way.

Steve: Okay and it sounds like you helped him greatly which immediately got you on his radar so to speak when you did that whole entire case study on his website design.

Selena: Yeah, absolutely. But even before that, one thing that some of your listeners Steve may be thinking it’s like well, I don’t live in New York City, I’m not going to be like walking down Main Street and bumping into like my favorite influencer. And it’s not really like I want people to kind of see the bigger picture here. The thing is, in life we can’t wait for opportunities, we have to create our own opportunities. And for so many of us, oftentimes there are opportunities in front of us, maybe we’re going to a conference and our favorite author, speaker, influencer, course creator is there, but we’re too afraid to go out to them. Or maybe a friend of ours is connected to someone who has interviewed them on a podcast, or who is their star student or something. But we never have the courage to ask them, oh, do you have any ideas of how to get in front of this person?

So all of us, we all have opportunities. And I think that what made the difference here, like, the very first step is I seized the opportunity and I went for it. And so that’s really, that’s one of the first things I want to make sure everyone takes away from this.

Steve: So given that you do this for a living, let’s say I was a client of yours, what would you say is the most important way to grow a business and just get more exposure for your business? Like, what do you coach people to do?

Selena: Yeah, I mean, the first thing is always strategy. So I mean, I guess there’s two areas I’m really well known for. I mean, the overall area that I’m well known for is helping people get well known, right, getting visibility, becoming thought leaders and influencers. But when you break that down, there’s two main areas. So one is getting publicity, and the other is connecting with influencers. So I really believe that publicity is one of the absolute fastest ways to grow your business. You could have a lot of success and get hundreds, thousands of people on your webinar and you tell your parents like, oh, I had this really successful webinar, I had like 700 people live on it, and your parents are going to be like, what’s a webinar?

But if you’re like, oh, I got this feature article on Forbes or Business Insider has been talking about how I am the go to person on this topic, they’re going to be like, oh my god, they’re going to tell their relative, family, your high school friends are going to see on Facebook. Oh my god, you posted this, people kind of the Woodworks. So there is something unique about publicity.

Steve: It’s funny you say that, because with my mom for the longest time, she didn’t understand what I did. And then I told her some of the numbers. She’s like, why are people paying for that? And it was only after I got in Entrepreneur or Forbes, I can’t remember which one it was, she was like, oh, my God, what you’re doing is like real? Like, good lord mum.

Selena: Yes. I know. And it’s definitely not the actual most significant, the most significant thing is the results you get in your business and for your students and clients. But it’s something that is sort of universally understood. And so when you’re thinking about building your brand, and thinking about marketing, publicity really should be in the mix somewhere. And when I have people think about publicity, I have them think about their goals and their business model. So for example, for some people, a goal of theirs might be I want to publish a book and I want to have thousands and tens of thousands people buy the book. Others are like, I don’t need a ton of clients, but I’m looking to get like high ticket clients for like a $10,000 coaching program, whatever it is, and I just need like 10 people at a time, right.

So those are very different goals. And based on your different publicity goals, there’s going to be different types of publicity and media outlets that you should focus on. So one example I can just share quickly is like I mean, I’m a huge fan of podcasts. And I think it makes a lot of sense for people who are experts and especially people that have online courses or high end coaching because with a podcast interview someone feels like they really get to know you. They’re listening in to like that coffee table conversation, you can go really deep. And when you hear someone speak in 30 minutes to even an hour, you feel like you know them and you’re more comfortable taking the next step or as are some other forms of media like TV which is a massive credibility booster and can be really good for specific purposes.

If you’re looking to sell like a $10,000 program of some nature, the average person watching TV might not be the right person, but the person who’s invested an hour and follows as expert could be someone who is much, much more qualified, So all about the strategy with a publicity piece and then also I’ll just quickly touch on the second piece is the influencer piece. That is really key and it’s similar to publicity in the sense that a lot of us tend to hire based on recommendation, and so if we know a top influencer is endorsing someone, we’re like, oh yeah, I want to work with them. It’s kind of funny. So my personal trainer actually is the personal trainer of Remit Sethi, Derek Halpern, and for whatever reason I mean I don’t know, I guess it’s just how my brain works, I was looking for someone and they recommended him to me. And I’m like, oh well, he works all of them, I want to work with him too.

And in my own business people are like, oh wow, like she’s been endorsed and she’s helped like Danielle LaPorte and she’s helped Kimra Luna and Marie Forleo endorses her work, I trust her. So similar to publicity, that is kind of like one of those instant credibility markers and then but influencer relationships go a lot deeper than publicity. And I think that those two combined are really, really powerful ways to grow your business and really to grow your reputation.

Steve: So Selena, so from the perspective of my listeners, let’s say they have a specific skill, and they want to be able to make money with it. So let’s say, it’s some medium to high end coaching service that they want to start but they are a nobody right now. They don’t have any content, they don’t have anything, how would you advise that they get started?

Selena: Yeah, I mean, the most important thing when you are getting started, and even at the higher levels is mindset. Because the thing is, if you don’t believe in yourself, or you feel bad about selling or charging, or you’re not sure about your worth, then you’re going to self sabotage. Also, I’ve had situations where I’ve had it early on, I had a nightmare client. And there was something on my offering that was off and I just like I felt so bad about myself that even though people wanted to work with me, and they wanted to give me money so badly, I just kind of turned all away, I was like, I was too busy. So you’ve got to get yourself in a good mental space and a good mindset.

And I would — the way that I built my business, and what I recommend people considering is just start helping people, because as you start helping people, even if it’s pro bono, or it could be a small project where you say, hey, I would love to help you with this project for free for like a one month period, or for six sessions, or four sessions, or a three hour deep dive, whatever you want to do, say, if I do an exceptional job, I would be so grateful to get a testimonial from you, and if you have happen to think of anyone who could benefit from my services, let me know, or let them know.

So that’s, I mean, I didn’t do it so explicitly in that way. I was just because I was in school at the time, I didn’t really, I wasn’t focused on making side income, but I just started being helpful to people and I identified people, I’m like, oh, wow, I can connect you to this person. And let me introduce this reporter. Let me help you make this connection. Oh, like, you need feedback on this. Like, I would love to give you feedback. I just went above and beyond. And it really for me, it’s a lifestyle and that’s really what I encourage everyone to consider is when you show up every day as a giver and you create all this goodwill, people are going to want to give back to you and it really builds your reputation. So for me, right away when I started my business, Marie Forleo, Danielle LaPorte, all these people, they wanted to give me testimonials.

Steve: So was that a gradual thing? Like, when you met them, did you do a lot of pro bono work for them?

Selena: Yeah, so I can explain how it worked because it’s evolved over time. So initially, like for example, with Danielle LaPorte, I just kind of like helped her for free. I knew her several years before I even started my business and I had offered to connect her to people at different media publications. I’m just a helpful person. And over time, like more recently, I was like in charge of like influencer marketing for her White Hot Truth book campaign. And so it’s something started off as pro bono and then there was payment later. There have been other times where people have wanted to pay me whereas I like let me just help you for free.

So, every situation kind of varies, but I will say that I put like a lot of just like, I just help people. Like with Remit, I’ve never asked him for payment. And personally, I don’t really want payment from him, I just want to help him but he also helps me so much. I mean, I’ve taken his courses but beyond that, now, he’s somewhat have an inner real bind, I can just text him and be like, hey, can we talk, and like I’ll do that maybe like once a year. I’m not going to take advantage, and he’s there for me. So, yes, I absolutely did a lot of pro bono work in the beginning. And then there were also people that I charged, but my number one goal wasn’t like, how can I make the most money out of these people? I was thinking really it is — and this is still my philosophy, when it comes to people you really admire, it is an honor to be a part of their world, to want to give back to them. That is a gift in of itself.

So that was — and I think that is a reason why a lot of these influencers really opened up to me, because a lot of times, you can feel when someone’s got an agenda. And you’re a bad person for having agenda. I mean, I’m very quickly can connect the dots between people, ideas, and opportunities. And I know if I add a ton of value, they might help me. Ultimately they might not, but it’s not a big deal. So it’s fine to see the connections that could be made. But I think that when there is this feeling of desperation and expectation, then people feel very scared to let you in. But I think I’ve always had this kind of very giving attitude and I’m laid back about like, I don’t really need anything from it, but I’m also like a go getter like their biggest advocate and supporter and people feel that. And then they appreciate me and then many of them end up wanting to support me.

So going back to like your listeners, what I would recommend they do is to create an influencer list. And so this is like the first step. I mean, the first step with everything, we got to figure out the strategy. So my definition of an influencer is someone who can help you reach your goals faster. So identify what are your top goals, and let’s get more specific than just grow your business. Is it to get — land five high end clients this month, or generate X amount of revenue? And when you think about your influencers, these are people who have already achieved your goal, or maybe they’re a couple of steps ahead of us, so they kind of know the path ahead, and they’re very familiar with the current situation around it. Or maybe they are people who connect you to other people who can help you reach your goal faster.

So make that list, and you can definitely have like some aspirational people on that list. But I also would encourage you to think about who’s kind of in your own backyard? Who do you already know, that you’re not tapping into because all of us have people in our world who care about us and believe in us already. And oftentimes, we’re not asking them for help, or asking them if they might be willing to make an introduction or brainstorm ideas with us. And so, you want to identify your list of influencers and connect with them and think about how can you be an incredibly useful, helpful, valuable person in their life?

And simultaneously think about maybe how can I just help people, perhaps do a pro bono project here and there and start building up that goodwill and getting those results so that when I have calls later with people who are prospects of my business, who would be paying clients, I can say, yeah, I worked with someone for a month, and these are the results we got in a one month period. I’ve done this with three other people, and I’m so confident I can do this for you too.

Steve: So it sounds like you worked your way up, right. So you had this list of influencers and you were doing this pro bono work to build up your portfolio, and then perhaps at some point, you’ll approach this influencer with a strong foundation of work.

Selena: Yeah, well…

Steve: I’m just trying to understand how you operate yeah.

Selena: No, I love it because I want to make sure it’s really clear to people. So with the influencers, I would say, these are the people that you can offer the pro bono work to, but not like indefinitely, it could be a project or a series of things you do for them. And after time, some of them will be like, can I just hire you, I would love for you to lead up this in my company, or take on this bigger project. Or they might be like, you know what, you’re so awesome. I should put you in front of my students, you should be a guest in my group program, or, hey, let me connect you to a colleague who could really use your services. With these influencers, the most important thing is building a relationship; it’s not the short term revenue you can make from them. If you can really help them and they want you in an ongoing way, they will pay you, they will be, you know what I mean?

Steve: Yeah.

Selena: Or you just say like, hey, I’ve loved helping you and I would love to continue to help you, but I want to explore the possibility of us working together in a deeper way, could we explore what that could look like? And compensation or whatever, that’s not my main goal. My main goal is to support you but I want to figure out a way that can be a win-win, where I’m being compensated, we have a long term relationship where I can create these results in your business.

Steve: So Selena, I’ve been offered pro bono work many times in the past, and I’ve always just turned it down because in my mind, at least, I’m like, okay, great. I have to think about what I want this person to do. It just might be another complication in my life. And I don’t know what the skill set is. So how do you overcome that?

Selena: Oh, I mean, I’m so glad you brought that up because I mean, I’ve gotten the same invitations too. I mean, the problem is, like, if you have to think about what you have to give them and you don’t know, and like can I trust this person? I mean, it’s not going to work out. So, like, with me when I reached out to people, I mean, a lot of times also, as I start to develop a network of friends and influencers, they’re introducing me to other people. So like Remit Sethi and Danielle LaPorte pretty much simultaneously introduced me to Marie Forleo. So there’s definitely like a high level of trust there. But when you email someone, introduce me with like can I help you, and then there’s like no link to your website, or LinkedIn or anything or with your skills.

So you need to sell the person on why they should accept an opportunity to work with you because free work is not really free, they still have to coordinate with you, maybe put team members in touch with you. I mean, if you do a bad job, there’s consequences. So it’s not actually free. So, you want to connect with people in a way where you’re highlighting your expertise, and you already have ideas to bring to the table. I mean, for me, with the publicity work I do and the influencer work, a lot of it is, it is very clear, it’s like, hey, I would like to introduce you to this person. I feel like it would be interesting for you to connect, because of XYZ reason. I’ve known so and so for the past couple of years, I think that it would be a really cool connection, would you be interested, right? So it’s like very straightforward. And I’ve also got a website and things like that.

Steve: So let me ask you this, would you recommend you have all those things in place before you approach an influencer for pro bono work?

Selena: I would — I don’t think you need a website per se. But I would say you need to have something about you online. Because if they Google you, and there’s nothing, it’s like, is this a real person? Are they legit? So what I would recommend at minimum is maybe like say LinkedIn. And then in the summary section, you kind of share what you do, your expertise, and include a link to it in your email. So as they’re looking for more information, they can see, oh, okay, this person is a professional, this is their experience or expertise, this is the work they’ve done before, oh, we’ve got mutual contacts, okay, this is like a real person, this is not fake, it feels like there’s more trust there.

Steve: So it sounds like — and I might be paraphrasing here, the foundation for your methodology is to just build relationships and kind of gradually work your way up to larger and larger influencers to kind of promote your business in the grand scheme of things. It’s all about relationships, right.

Selena: Yeah. Oh, 100%. It’s all about building deep and meaningful relationships. And the other thing I want to clarify is, I’m not saying just spend all day doing pro bono work because it’s very hard to build a business if you’re not making money. I actually believe in being really thoughtful and selective about who you invest in because for me, when I’m looking to build a really meaningful relationship, especially in the beginning, and I had a lot more time in the beginning, because you’re starting off any clients, so I had more time, but you need to go above and beyond, because that’s the only way that someone’s going to notice you. But you can only go above and beyond for so many people, right?

So that means you should be really thoughtful and selective and not from like, I mean, I guess you should be aware of, okay, how could this potentially be beneficial to me in the future, but really thinking about who, where, I mean, I like to think of it as where they’re the most synergies where I could invest a lot and create amazing results and value and there could possibly be [inaudible 00:27:54] or also like, if the kind of person like, I don’t believe in developing relationships with people just because they’re “famous or influential” if they’re not a good person, you don’t like them, got a bad reputation, what I mean? Like that personal connection is really important too.

So, be thoughtful, and choose about who you’re going to develop relationships with, and go deep, but then don’t just all put on one person, because then it’s like you get this intimacy of desperation where it’s like, oh, everything is banking on this one person potentially being helpful to you in the future. I would say, be developing like three to four meaningful relationships at a time, while also doing other things to grow your business. It should not be your only strategy. But especially early on, this is something that you do want to think about.

And when I think about even now, now that I have a thriving multi seven figure business, I mean, I’m still helping people all the time for free. But I don’t even think about it, because that’s what we do for friends and people that we care about, like, oh, hey, can I make this introduction for you. Oh, tell me about your business, oh, like would you be interested in a couple of ideas? Or can I give you access to this resource I have. So it really is kind of a way of living and it is an art and figuring out what’s the right balance, but I think there is a lot of room for us to always be givers, while also simultaneously being focused on our own business goals.

Steve: So let me ask you this. So let’s say you did not meet Remit by chance that day, what would have been your strategy to just kind of gain mindshare in his eyes? And how do you approach people? I think I read on your blog that you’re an introvert. How do you overcome that as well?

Selena: Yeah, I mean, that’s a big thing. And a lot of people in my community, they’re drawn to me because they have that introverted side. I mean, I think everyone on some level can feel shy or it’s like a spectrum introversion, extroversion. I think for me, and for everyone I know, it’s really about not putting the focus on you. It’s more about putting the focus on the person you’re looking to connect with. I’d approach for me as an example and thought like, oh my God, what is he going to think of me? Oh, how do I look like, what am I going to say? And like, I hope I don’t mess up. And that is the dialogue in my head and I’m like hi, then I would probably mess it up. But I was more like kind of in the moment, like, oh, there he is. And it was all about like him; the focus was on him, not on me.

And I think it’s one of those things when you let your kind of like your passion speak louder than your fears. And for me, I just had this real passion to connect with him, to express gratitude and also be a helpful person, so that always kind of leaves leads. But I mean, I’ll be honest, there have been times and there are still times when I’m in front of some big influencers, and I get nervous, and maybe I feel like I kind of messed it up, or I don’t know, like if I came off in the right way. But the thing is, like, out of, a couple of time, but then there are like dozens and hundreds of connections, where at this point it’s just like, it’s been a great connection.

And I remember actually, I was at an event, actually Remit’s event, and someone came up and spoke to me, and we had a nice conversation. And later I saw her again, we were paired up for an activity, interestingly enough, and she was like, oh, my gosh, I’ve been feeling bad the whole day because you said that you shouldn’t XYZ, I don’t remember what I said. It’s like I did that and I just feel like I left a lot of really bad impression. And I was like, oh, I didn’t even remember that. I didn’t even think of that. I just thought you were awesome. So a lot of times, we’re so in our head, and we make up these stories about why we’re not worthy, or oh my God, we put this pressure on ourselves. And that is really a way that we kind of screw things up. I don’t know if I answered your original question, because I kind of got into this other place. But what was the original question? I can back up the bow.

Steve: No, no, no, let’s actually kind of go with what you just were saying. And in fact, I want to take the opposite approach, what are some ways not to approach influencers or people that you want to get to know? What are some common mistakes because you were just talking about that a little bit at the end?

Selena: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, I would say there’s kind of two typical mistakes when you’re approaching people. So one is like, and I get it like being so scared and shell shocked that you’re just kind of standing there and saying nothing. Maybe there’s a group of people, and you’re just standing there, and, or you see someone and you’re like, oh my God, I’m too scared, and you just run the other direction. So there’s that, there’s like the total avoidance, and then there’s like the — I don’t want to say over enthusiasm, because I think enthusiasm is important. But it’s like saying too much.

So, for example, and Steve, I mean, I’m guessing that you can relate to this, when you become a well known person, an expert, you’ll get emails from your audience, which is like one of the most exciting things. But sometimes, I’ve been in situations where you get emails, and they’re like 13 paragraph emails. And it’s really like a one way monologue, and there’s like several different questions. And it’s just like, it’s really a lot.

Steve: I feel bad replying to those too actually because I don’t have time to write a novel back.

Selena: Right. So then you feel guilty, right, because you’re like, oh, I respond with a sentence, and they’re going to think I’m rude. And actually, that happened before I responded briefly and someone got really upset at me. And I wrote back to her, and just kind of explained why I wasn’t able to respond at length like she had. But people don’t realize that you’re actually making someone feel bad by sending them a novel. But really the psychology of what’s happening is we feel like we’ve got that one shot to make a big impression and we want to prove ourselves. And so we over share, we tell them everything, when really when you think about a friendship because that’s what you’re going for ultimately, or like a meaningful relationship, when you talk to a friend, there’s back and forth kind of someone says something, the next person says the other thing. And it’s not like you have to put everything out there, like this is your only chance.

And I remember being once I was at an event with Lewis Howes, and there was someone who approached him. And it was like this five minute long monologue where she was talking about herself. And I’ve done this before too actually with a magazine editor. I remember, I got like, I won this charity auction, I got an hour with her and I spoke mostly about myself. And yeah, I mean, I think we do that because we are nervous. But it prevents us from building that back and forth really meaningful connection. So I would just say, that is one of the mistakes. I mean, instead of just like one way talking, think about what are some questions that I can ask the person. And there’s a lot that you could share about yourself, and maybe what are like two or three points, I just want to make sure to get across, and then really let the conversation be more organic.

Steve: I can tell you my MO, and you can tell me if I do the right thing or not. But what I usually do is when I talk to someone who’s like a big name celebrity in some certain aspect; I don’t talk about that at all. I don’t talk about anything that they’re good at. Instead, I try to talk about other things that are very common, family, kids, and whatnot, and I try to find something where I’m an expert and they’re not that they might be interested in, and then I just steer the conversation that way. And I never end up talking about what they’re good at.

Selena: Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, that’s a really good one. I mean, I think that yeah, that is really beneficial because with different people that I’ve met, including my students and clients to other people, when they’ve got a skill that I can benefit from, I’m very interested and oftentimes, I’ll just like, I’ll hire them and be like, hey, can you help me with whatever it is, with decluttering, with getting better sleep and all of that. So yeah, I think that is an important part of building the relationship not, I mean, yes, I think it can be valuable to show appreciation for someone’s work. But then I think it’s also very valuable to also show what you’re an expert and what you bring to the table, because that person wants to be like, oh tell me more about what you do. That’s awesome.

Steve: And I try not to fan boy too much because I think if you fan boy too much, it instantly puts you on a rung below whoever that is that that you’re targeting.

Selena: Yeah.

Steve: I don’t know if these are like, I’m obviously not an expert at this. I’m just telling you what I think sometimes and how I operate. And I’m just curious like whether that gels with what you teach?

Selena: Well, we should talk about that because that’s so interesting. I’m loving your perspective. So one of my favorite sayings that I heard that I share with a lot of people is the moment you put someone on a pedestal is the moment they start looking down on you. And what I mean by that is, when you put someone on the pedestal to think, oh my god, they’re so amazing, they’re so successful, they’re like the best person in the world. And like, where am I? I’m at the bottom; I’ve got nothing to offer them. Who am I to think I could talk to them, I’m going to be wasting their time, why would they want to talk to me when there are other people.

And you create that dynamic where they’re everything, and you’re essentially in your mind nothing, then the relationship is going to be screwed up. You approach them that way, they just, they feel it, and it affects what comes out of your mouth, and your energy, and how you follow up and all of that. As human beings, we’re all equal. And I mean, it is important to recognize, okay, like maybe they’re a busy person, maybe they have more time constraints or whatever, and they’ve got this expertise, I appreciate. But it’s not about thinking that you’re nothing, and they’re everything. I think that the fastest way to level the playing field is to show the value that you have to offer. And the way that you show it is by sharing your expertise and finding a way to potentially give back to them. So, I think we’re talking about a similar thing here.

Steve: I think it all comes back to the original thing that you were talking about earlier in the interview, which is mindset, right? You have to go in with confidence. Even if you all aren’t as skillful as the person you’re talking to, you have to at least project confidence. And then that way that person wants to talk to you.

Selena: Right. And then the other thing is it doesn’t have to be confidence about something directly related to what you are known for, as a business owner, entrepreneur in your job. It could be like for example, there was someone I met recently, and she has seven kids, and she’s a successful entrepreneur, and she’s really good at managing her time. And I’m not looking to have kids myself; I’m like, oh my God. Like, sometimes it’s enough to just take care of myself and my cat. Like, I don’t know how you manage to run a successful business with seven kids. I want to hear your time management secrets, how do you delegate? How do you outsource?

Or just people’s personal character even, or how they handle stressful and difficult situations. There’s so many ways that we can create those meaningful connections. And there’s different ways that people can learn from each other beyond the number one main thing that you’re known for, as a business owner, or a professional.

Steve: Absolutely. So it let’s — so we got five minutes left, let’s try to kind of sum everything up, right. So original question I posed to you was, let’s say, I have some sort of skill and I want to develop some sort of high end clientele, maybe, perhaps. And so the first thing that you suggested was to perhaps just get some sort of body of work right, that you can show off, it sounds like.

Selena: Right, yeah.

Steve: And then after that, make a list of influencers that you might want to meet, perhaps that you can help out pro bono whatnot, and then develop relationships that way, and then perhaps grow your business by referrals. Is that kind of…

Selena: Yeah, exactly. That is the fastest way, it’s developing that body of work, and publicity can be part of that body of work. When people are goggling you, they’re like, oh, he did this interview, or he wrote this article, not just on their blog, but on other well known websites, that’s your body of work. And combined with building meaningful relationships, and getting people results and having case studies, and tangible things that you can help people create in their lives, and then they refer people to you, and you’ve built your reputation. Yes, I think that is a really smart, and one of the fastest ways to build your business early on, for sure.

Steve: How do you get press mentions? What’s your strategy there?

Selena: Yeah, so there’s a couple of different steps. But one is getting really clear on what you want to be an expert in. It should ideally be connected to your goals and your business model. And then it’s about coming up with a really good story idea. So oftentimes, that people are like, oh, I want someone to just write about me, and my business. But it’s not about you, it’s about the readers. So what valuable advice do you have? How can you really serve the audience? So, some things that you can think about are where do people get stuck in your work? Or what’s the number one question people ask you, or what’s the fastest way that you can help people achieve XYZ goal?

I have like dozens and dozens of prompts and ideas of how people identify their story ideas, but basically, what people are most definitely wanting to know from you is usually something that is the basis of a good story idea. And then there’s also just kind of people like things that are interesting, or sensational, or surprising. They love rags to riches stories, they love hearing about big results, and things like that. So, getting clear on your story ideas, and then sending an email pitch.

Steve: How do you know who to pitch?

Selena: How do you who to pitch? It depends. So like, let’s say, if it’s a podcast, usually, it’s the podcast host that you would pitch and sometimes they will have forms on their website, like a contact form, and they’re like, please follow this form specifically. Other times, there will be an email, you should jump through hoops. Sometimes there won’t be an email, but you’re on the podcaster’s email list, and you have a sense of the email format or at least you have a hello or info at email, or maybe you know someone who has been on that podcast, or someone who is connected to that person. So there’s a lot of different ways you can go about to get the information and then definitely depending on the media outlet. Like for TV you may want to call at the TV station, and then get the information for who would cover like type of story. But the thing is, it’s all accessible. It just involves a little bit of outreach.

Steve: What’s your view on hiring PR agencies?

Selena: Yeah, I think it’s not the best idea if you are early stage business owner, because it can be very expensive. And I think that even if you hire an agency, you need to understand how it works before you just hand over $5,000 a month, or $10,000 a month, or whatever it is. And the thing is, nobody is going to care more than you. And you’re going to have the best ideas; you know your story the best. So if you have a little bit of education, so that you can understand like what is it that is going to get you into the media and how you’re going to leverage to the media, that’s important. Because the other thing is a lot of PR agents, they’re not thinking about the business, they’re just like, oh, let me get you a mention.

But you could get a random mention on a blog, or even do a podcast and nothing could happen to your business, if you don’t know how to set it up right, if you don’t know how to leverage it, if you don’t know how to create the relationships, there’s all the other things you need to be thinking about. I mean, I actually have publicity programs on this. And if someone is interested, feel free to reach out to me. But the thing is, I also take the perspective of a business owner, because I’m a business owner myself, and like all of us, I don’t have a lot of time. And if I’m going to invest my time into something, I need to see the return, it needs to be strategic, it has to directly grow my business. So there’s this whole other piece to it. And if you just outsource it without being educated yourself and having a strategy, there’s a very high chance you are going to be wasting your money.

Steve: Let me ask you a different question here just to kind of close things up. Let’s say I run an ecommerce store and I don’t want to be the face of the business, does that strategy greatly detract from your methods?

Selena: Well, you don’t need to be the face of the business but someone’s going to have to do the interviews, right. And there’s going to need to be certain calls to action, whether it’s on podcast, or even certain messaging that you want to get across. I mean, I think that hiring a PR person can be a really good idea. I mean, I’m in the industry and I’ve had clients before, but I think that the best PR relationships are collaborative relationships where you’re not just outsourcing and delegating and have no involvement and you’re just crossing your fingers, but that you are also kind of leading the way and overseeing and making sure you’re getting the results you want. So I think it is still important to have some base level knowledge about your PR strategy versus just trusting someone else.

Steve: Okay, so it sounds like you recommend having at least one person who’s willing to be more public I guess?

Selena: Yeah, there should be someone absolutely, mm-hmm.

Steve: Okay, hey well Selena we’ve been chatting for 40 minutes believe it or not and thanks a lot for your time. Where can people find you and the various courses that you offer?

Selena: Yeah, so they can go to my website, they can go to SelenaSoo.com. I do have a page about the programs I have. I have a lot of launch based programs. I do have some evergreen things that are coming out. So I mean, you can also feel free to email me. You can email Hello@SelenaSoo.com and my team will pass that along to me. I’m happy to point you in the right direction. And I mean, I love helping people and making sure they’re getting the support they need. So feel free to reach out to me. And then also on my website, I have a video if you’d like to check that out. That goes deeper into how I build relationships, some of the top influencers and some of my best tips to building connections that go beyond what we discussed in this podcast.

Steve: Absolutely. Well, just kind of as an aside, my businesses did not really take off until I started attending conferences and meeting other people. And that holds true for both my blog as well as my ecommerce store. So, we talked a lot about relationships in today’s podcast, and it’s really hard to apply a $1 value to it, but I just know that things did not start happening until I started building these relationships.

Selena: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Steve: So, Selena thanks a lot for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Selena: Yeah, thanks for your time.

Steve: Well, that’s a wrap and I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Selena Soo. Now as I look back on the success of my own businesses, a huge part of it had to do with networking and establishing myself as an authority. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode238.

And once again, I want to thank Privy for sponsoring this episode. Privy is the email capture provider that I personally use to turn visitors into email subscribers. They offer email capture, exit intent, and site targeting tools to make it super simple as well. And I like Privy because it’s so powerful and you can basically trigger custom pop-ups for any primer that is closely tied to your ecommerce store. If you want to give it a try, it is free. So, head on over to Privy.com/Steve, once again, that’s P-R-I-V-Y.com/Steve.

I also want to thank Klaviyo which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, once again, that’s mywifequitherjob.com/K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

Now I talk about how I use all these tools on my blog, and if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.Mywifequitherjob.com.