00:29
especially if you’ve followed me for a long time. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will lead with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business.

00:57
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01:25
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01:53
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02:18
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast is episode 500. And can you believe that I’ve been running this podcast since 2014 with over 5 million downloads and counting. This podcast is mainly what I’ve been recognized for in the e-commerce space. And it’s been an amazing ride. Now, whenever I hit a milestone episode, I always like to do something special. And just a couple of days ago, my wife and I celebrated our 20 year wedding anniversary. Again, another crazy milestone. So I thought,

02:47
that it would only be appropriate to have my wife back on the show to talk about business, family, and life. And if you haven’t met Jennifer Chu before, she is the foundation of all the businesses that we run together. She’s a fantastic mom and probably volunteers for more school activities than almost any parent I know. And most importantly, she’s always available for both the kids and myself. Welcome back to the show, Jen. It’s weird calling you Jen. How are you doing today? I’m doing good. Thanks.

03:17
20 years is a heck of a long time. And I’ve gotten some questions from friends on Facebook and Instagram. And their main question was, what do you think has allowed us to put up with each other for over 20 years now? Well, when we got married, actually at our wedding day, you made a comment that I thought was appropriate. At first I didn’t, but the comment was,

03:44
you make all the decisions in this relationship. But I will decide which decisions are actually implemented. I don’t know if that’s actually accurate. But it’s true. I do drive a lot of the stuff. And then whether you’re on board or not, whether you’re board or not is what happens. Is that your answer? I don’t know what my answer is. Okay, you want me to give you mine first? Okay, I put up with you. No, no, no, no, no, it’s got nothing to do that. And we do fight. Yeah, right.

04:13
I think that the reason why we’ve lasted so long is because whenever we get into a fight and I know like one of us has been rude or whatnot, I know that your intentions are always good because you are the most considerate person that I’ve ever met and I don’t think that there’s like an evil bone in your body. So if you were to say something mean to me or yell at me or whatnot, I always know that it’s

04:42
Like even if you’re mean, you don’t mean it. So that’s why it works for me. Okay. Whereas like, I mean, it’s been years since I’ve dated anyone, but in the past, like I’ve always had like certain trust issues where, hmm, you know, I’m always wondering if that was malicious or not with you that never happens. Okay, I’ll take it. Okay. So do you have an answer? Are you just going to recite? I’m basically just going to agree that you’re very lucky to have me. Oh, God.

05:11
Okay, this isn’t an interview for me. It’s it’s it’s you. Alright, okay. So how about this then turn it around? For anyone out there listening? What advice would you give them to have a long and happy marriage? I think a lot of it is communication. You should also play to your strengths. I think everyone has different strengths. And we are really good about balancing strengths. So

05:38
with your spouse or your partner, you should find out what each person is strong in and then allow them to actually excel in that strength. Okay, so what would you say is your strength versus mine? I would say you’re the big idea person. Like you know, what will make growth or what will be overall good for our family, our family financially, for example, I would say my strength would be more of

06:08
Implementing. Okay, implementing. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to expand on what you just said. Because because I implement all of like the marketing and website. Absolutely. You’re more I’m a doer. You’re more of an operations person than I am. Yes, right. would agree with that. Because like I hate, you know, keeping tabs on all these little things that that happened. Yeah, I think to my fault is I think of the little things

06:35
a little too much where you see the bigger picture. And I don’t know who asked me this, but someone want to know who’s cheaper, me or you. Okay. I think we have difference of opinion. I think you’re pretty darn cheap, but I would say I’m very, very frugal too. So I will sometimes spend so much time to try to get the best deal and to try to get as cheaply as possible.

07:05
I think I will spend more money on certain things. Like I will like want to spend more money on vacations, for example, whereas you could totally go without vacation. Yes. So like in that regard, I think you’re cheaper just because it’s not important to you. Well, I do spend a lot of money on NBA games. Yes, that’s because it’s important to you. Right. So I think there’s a lot of things that are not important to you, in which case.

07:33
you will try to do as cheaply as possible. So I’ve changed my mind on vacations. And the reason why I didn’t like vacations in the past was because when our kids were super little, it was such a hassle. We had to lug these big car seats and they’d be upset at night or they wouldn’t sleep and that would just ruin like it wasn’t relaxing for me. Well, you were saying it’s not a vacation. Yes. It’s a what do you call it? A family trip. It’s a family outing. family outing. That’s right. Yes.

08:02
But now like the kids are older, like I actually enjoy the vacations. Yeah. Well, you used to not like to go to nice restaurants with the kids because the kids would just eat like, well, they wouldn’t appreciate it. They wouldn’t appreciate it. And then we would be like enjoying our meal. And then they would be like, it was almost telling them, Oh, eat your food. Like, and you’re like, you’re spending so much money on like this delicious meal and they wouldn’t enjoy it. Right. And they appreciate food. They appreciate food now a lot more.

08:31
Yeah, yeah, it’s funny things. Which phase of the childhood did you like the best? The way it is now or when they were younger or when they were in the kind of like the. I think each phase is different in its own way. I love the fact that the kids have opinions now, but that’s also something that it tries to move on. They have opinions also, but I really enjoy the time they are now because they are super excited about traveling now.

09:00
So when we went on vacation, they actually decided on stuff that they really wanted to do. And it was kind of fun to go to those activities also. I actually like this phase the best too, because they have opinions actually. It drives me crazy when I ask someone a question, they go, I don’t care. I don’t care. they still do that. They still do that. But my least favorite phase was probably the baby phase. Oh, there’s something about like they were just so cuddly when they were babies.

09:28
I really enjoyed like probably early elementary school age. Like I really enjoyed. Yes. Those are my favorite age five and on. Yeah. They were like so cute and you know, they were already potty trained. They start, you know, they could speak and they were just so fun. All right. Let’s, let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about the business since that’s what this podcast is all about. And we’ve been running it. This is our 17th year. Did you know that?

09:54
This is our 17th year running the, you don’t have to do the math. did the math. it’s 16th. 2007. Oh, okay. guess anyway, how do you think that you’ve grown or changed since running the business and quitting your job? Hmm. I’m definitely happier now because I didn’t like my previous job. Okay. I like the flexibility of it versus the old, my old job was not very flexible.

10:23
I think in terms of me changing, I don’t know. Do you think you’re a better worker in your own business versus the job or is there anything you miss about working a day job? I did like working with my my coworkers. really, I mean, even though I said I didn’t like my job, I really liked my coworkers. So if it wasn’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did. I worked with some really, really nice people.

10:52
I would say I probably care a little bit more. It’s my own like company versus working for a larger corporation. I think some of the stuff that we put up with in just the corporate culture was just really, really annoying to me. And I joke about it now because I just, just the amount of waste and time and money doing certain things. was just stupid to me. I think the issue with your job, honestly,

11:22
was that you didn’t work for a startup. You worked for a large, both your companies or all the companies that you worked for were large. So you probably got like a small task. Whereas almost every company that I worked for was a startup. Like EFI, I wouldn’t consider it a startup, but I was in a small team where I had ownership of a complete project. And then at Tensilica, I was, you know, it was 30 people when I started. So it felt like Bumblebee linens in a way.

11:51
I can definitely say it never felt like Bumble Bee Limits, my old job. But I wouldn’t say that I didn’t have a larger view because depending on which job it was, was a finance analyst. So as a finance analyst, I was a planning and reporting analyst actually. So I reported and planned the financials for certain business groups. And for Agilent, for example, it was actually a pretty large finance group.

12:18
So I felt like I had a good preview of what was going on in the company. So I’m wondering like, if you did actually join a startup, whether you would like that better. I actually miss my job in a way. I miss coworkers because when you when you leave and when the kids are in school, I’m at home alone here. Right. It’s kind of lonely. Yeah. Well, I must say, you know, though we have really nice customers, customer support is not something I love. So it

12:46
Working the corporate job was probably easier in that regard. So you just work with co-workers and you didn’t have to really respond to people complaining, for example. Here’s a question I’ve I’ve thought about in the past. Do you think you’ve gotten dumber since running the business? Probably. I think like that all the time, because the stuff that’s involved in running the blog, podcast, Bumblebee linens.

13:15
Honestly doesn’t require that much brainpower compared to what I used to do in the in my day job Right. So I I mean I probably got dumber But I think I think for example Like my skills in Excel have gone down for sure sure Yeah, whereas I used to be on that all the time and I was I used to have to analyze the data

13:39
So I still analyze the data, but you’ve created some really good systems. So I don’t need to analyze the data as much or as deeply as I did before, because it’s just done now. I think things that keep me on my toes is more of the stuff I do for the schools, for example. But some of that stuff is really just brainless activities also. It depends on what it is. I know for me, when I code now, it takes me a hell of long time. And just even thinking through

14:08
Maybe it’s because life’s so much easier now. Like I’ll type in something in ChatGPT instead of thinking about it. Or like if I have a question, I’ll just type into Google. And so I’m using my brain less because the answers are out there. Yeah, I mean, I can see that. I mean, I use ChatGPT also, but I use it more for personal stuff. Like, for example, if I want to write a thank you card, how do I do that in a simpler way? Because sometimes that just requires, I want to be thoughtful when I…

14:37
write a thank you card, for example, but I may not know the exact words to use. So I might use it as a launching pad. So it just makes everything so much simpler. ChadGBT, plan me a 20 year wedding anniversary surprise. Yeah. Yeah. So in an ideal world, maybe someday I want to start like some sort of SaaS company or whatever, but not until the kids go off to school. I’m curious for you though, what is the end game?

15:08
I think you’re leading. Well, I’m just curious. Because we always chat about how I could do nothing. Yeah. I could just stay at home and do nothing. Do still think that’s true? still think I can. I really do. I think I would probably maybe volunteer more in different activities, but I think I could easily just stay at home and do nothing. Well, volunteering is not doing nothing. I know, but… What would you volunteer for?

15:36
I don’t know, it depends. You already volunteer. I do volunteer, but the kids are older, so there’s less things that I would volunteer for. But I think maybe I would mentor somebody in high school. I don’t know. Let me ask you this question. How do you feel about college and the role of school going forward? Oh, I still think maybe it’s the Asian in me. still highly, highly

16:05
want our kids to go to a really good college, less so for the actual education, but more of the peer group and just being motivated. And I think it’s a softer landing spot for them to be like kind of transition into adulthood. Yeah, no, I, I, I full on agree with going to college and there’s a number of people who I’ve chatted with in business space about the importance of college. I grew socially a lot in college. I did too. I would say that

16:34
Well, I’m super introverted still but I think that in college I definitely got out of my comfort zone a lot and I made a lot of great friends but it definitely pushed me to be more social because I definitely was way way more introverted and shy in high school and when I was younger. And I’m thinking to myself I don’t use anything really that I learned in college education wise.

17:00
Even when I got my first full-time job, I didn’t really use any of that engineering knowledge, save for like one or two classes, I think. Yeah, I think I grew the most with actually jobs I had during college time. So, you know, I worked many internships and I also worked at a restaurant, for example. I think I had a lot of growth, a lot during that time. So I was also asked about like family dynamics.

17:28
And I’m curious what you have to say about this. Like, what is your role versus mine in terms of the family in the household? I think someone asked me the question too. I don’t know. I think we’re really good partnership. I think I take on a lot of the kids stuff, but so do you. But we take different, different aspects. Like you definitely are doing a lot of the kids sports and helping them like and driving them around. I think I’m more involved in the school aspect.

17:57
you know, like, for example, making sure that that they’re on track at school. So I’m probably more the tiger parent in terms of making sure that they’re getting good grades and everything. But I also feel like I manage a lot of our household finances, just the day to day activities of like everyday life. I mean, we both go grocery shopping, but I would say that I probably plan all the family vacations, for example. you know, handle all the finances.

18:26
I make sure everything’s paid for, you I guess you make the money, I spend the money. I don’t know. That’s true. But I do know one thing that I do know is that you’re always going to be frugal. Actually, one of the things I asked you earlier was why have we lasted so long? It’s because we have similar family values. Correct. We have similar spending habits. And there’s trust.

18:53
Absolutely. think if you were a spender and I was frugal, that would be a big problem. Yeah, probably. Right. And if we didn’t have the same philosophies on raising kids, I think that might be a problem. think that would be a bigger problem. Yeah. I think for example, like, even though I think you spend a lot of money on your MBA ticket, that’s like once in a lifetime. What I’m what my point is, I don’t say anything about it, because you’re so cheap in other regards, like

19:23
I know it’s important to you. Therefore, what can I say about it? Because it’s important to you. So it doesn’t bother me. So I’m looking down like this list of questions that were submitted here. Okay. People are just curious what you do day to day. It really depends on what day. it depends on Mondays are my busiest day. So Mondays I will. So let me take a step back.

19:52
Every day I drop off my son to school and then I go to work usually, especially Mondays. Mondays are my busiest day as I mentioned before. They’re explain why. Oh, okay. Uh, the weekend orders come in. usually we have a huge backlog of orders. That’s basically Friday orders, Saturday orders and Sunday orders. So Monday’s usually my busiest day. So I go in to help organize, like print the invoices, you know, run them.

20:21
embroidery like run the embroidery program so that we can start stitching it out. I make sure that we’re stocked on like inventory and I guess what’s the word? I’m sorry. I’m blinking. make sure Amazon stocked. Yeah, I just basically making sure everything’s on track. Nothing’s falling behind on Mondays. I typically will leave every day, maybe around. Well, I go to lunch and maybe around two o’clock and then

20:50
I usually take maybe Friday off. This is the… Actually, I take that back. This is for the most part for the majority of the time, but during Christmas time, I’m there all the time. So during Christmas time, say from early November to end of December, I’m there all the time. So when Steve says that I only work 20 hours a week, that’s true for the majority of the year, but it’s up for Christmas time. Except for starting Black Friday on, it’s like…

21:19
crazy. Well, actually, November, November, November, basically November on November to when we close in December. I’m there all the time. How many times you would you say that we have lunch together in a week? At least once, maybe twice. Right. And then we always have dinner for the most part for the most part. Yeah. Well, it depends on the kids schedule. Right. So a lot of the times we may not have the same schedule because one of us has to take

21:47
one of the kids to practice, for example, or there’s a volleyball game at the high school. Yeah. Yeah. Volleyball, in case anyone’s listening, like if you decide to do club volleyball, it is all consuming. Like every other weekend, I’d say we’re traveling somewhere for a volleyball tournament and then they practice three or four times a week. And it’s almost year round and it’s almost year round. It’s it’s nuts. Yeah. And since we have two kids in club volleyball, yeah, it’s and of course they don’t

22:16
they don’t overlap. So the schedules never seem to overlap. So we’re constantly driving them to club volleyball practices. This is a question that I never really asked you. I don’t think. Where do you see yourself in the business five years down the line? Like, do you plan on running Bumblebee for a while? I mean, no, I know I have my plan, but what do you know? I probably hope.

22:45
I hope not to be there in five years. Instead, what’s the plan then? Me sitting at home doing nothing. I’m joking. I’m joking. Okay. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy. I think, you know, we’ve had this plan and it’s granted a lot of my issue. I have a hard time letting go. that’s how you want to massing. Like, do you find anything fulfilling about running in public right now?

23:15
Right now, not so much. I’m more excited about what the kids are doing in five years time. So hopefully, you know, in the next two or three years, my daughter is going to go to high, sorry, go to college. And then my son will be going into high school. So I’m way more invested in where they’re going to end up in college. And that’s where my focus is, you know, so hopefully in five years time, they’re both in college. Yeah.

23:43
And at that point, I don’t know what I would do. So I mean, maybe I’ll go back and volunteer more doing other things. Or I don’t know if I will want to stay and do Bumblebee forever. Not forever. I mean, I guess we could sell it, although then I would need some sort of business as the foundation. To be honest, I don’t know if we will ever really sell it. I think we just ease me completely out and have someone else run it.

24:12
Yeah, it’d have to be someone who cares though. You know, there’s a lot of things on my list that we’re not doing. I know, I know. Because I know, I know you don’t want to do it. I can’t do it. I don’t feel like I can do it. But I think everyone pretty much knows that. And we’ve talked about this. knows. No, I think a lot of people know that, you know, at least I’ve had this conversation with multiple people. There’s a lot of things that we could do to grow our business even bigger. But

24:39
we purposely have kept things smaller so that it’s manageable within my timeframe. And also so that we’re not driving ourselves crazy because the kids are, you know, only with us for say five more years. So before they go off to college or move until we’re empty nesters, let’s just say. Yeah. So my answer to that question I just asked you was I do find it fulfilling because it gives me a reason to research all these cool things.

25:09
No, I know it’s totally fulfilling for you. But your question to me was if I find it fulfilling. Well, OK, so what what fulfills you? Let’s say the kids are gone. The kids aren’t a factor right now. Let’s say they’re already in college. What fulfills you? I I honestly don’t know. I think, you know, my focus has always been the kids and the family. So maybe who knows in five years time, maybe I’ll get more into, you know, the business. But what would you be into,

25:38
I know. think maybe I would volunteer and be a mentor to high school kids, or maybe I would go back to and teach entrepreneurship to kids. I’m not entirely sure, to be honest with you. I’ve never really thought that far ahead because my focus has always been on let’s get the kids into a good college so that they’re set for for life or not for life. mean, you know, they’re set. All right. So let’s let’s talk about

26:08
I don’t actually remember the early days, but if you could go back in time when we first started and let’s say we started all over knowing what we know today, what would you have done differently? Anything? Huh? Um, okay. Let me, let me rephrase this real quick. Back in the day, did you have fun when we first started this thing? No, you didn’t really. I, I, I joke. It depends on what, what time frame period in the very, very beginning when we were building this, was

26:36
exciting because it was like we were building something so I could leave, right? And I was really excited about being able to stay at home and do stuff. I never thought the business was going to grow as big as it has, like who knew, right? So, you know, I feel like we’ve built our business pretty well and I feel like it’s scaled up pretty well. So I don’t know if you feel that same way, but you know,

27:03
I’m very happy with our life. I’m like extremely thankful for our life. So I wouldn’t have necessarily done anything super differently. I think if we had to like in hindsight, I’m like, wish we bought another house, like multiple houses earlier on. But I think it was the best decision for us to move the business out of the house. Like that was a huge, big growth, right? And trusting people earlier on. I don’t know. Would you have moved it out earlier?

27:34
I don’t think we could have. So for people listening, we actually ran out of our garage for a couple of years. Four years. Was it that long? Really? I think so. Yeah. We had this like nice indexing system. Like the garage was in rows. We had racks. Yeah. I wish we had pictures of all that. So we didn’t take any pictures. I know. I don’t know why we didn’t think about taking pictures. I mean, even in our, when we were looking for a house to buy, do you remember how we were picking houses on where can we store the business? Yes, I remember that.

28:04
I mean, there was like, we picked this house because we are family room was kind of closed off so we fully live in one space and then have the business in another space. Do you remember that? Yeah, no, of course I remember. We almost bought this one house, which I thought was the ugliest house in the world. it was super ugly, but it had such a nice setup for the business. Yeah. So for all of you guys listening, you probably heard me say this before, but based on my wife’s personality, like

28:32
we optimize based on sleeping at night and in control. So for example, we actually just bought our warehouse earlier this year. I’m actually about to film that YouTube video giving you guys a tour because I think it’s, I think it’s time that we gave you a tour of the new house. But up until then the rents were getting jacked up and then you either pay the higher rent, which was increasing at like 30 % a year, or you move.

28:59
Right. Whenever your lease comes up, moving is a big pain in the butt. Correct. And now that pressure is all off. But we were looking for a very long time. So it wasn’t like we just all of a sudden decided, it’s kind of looking for that long. I was looking, you were looking for, was looking for a very long time. just wasn’t any warehouses in the size range that we want. was relatively affordable within a certain driving distance from where we wanted to be. But I was looking because I was seeing the writing on the wall where all the rent kept on going up and up and we were running out of space.

29:30
and our landlords were horrible. You know what’s funny is that I know you really well and I know that you’re super competitive. I’m not competitive. Okay, remember that time we did the steps test? Yes, we all have fit bits. then Jen decided to Well, you know, so it was the competition between my sister and my cousin and me. Right. So we had a competition on who could have the most steps in one day. I was very, very competitive that day.

29:59
And I actually went to Great America, which is an amusement park by us. And so my sister and I, I’m not very athletic, so they didn’t really take me seriously as a big competitor. So that day, while the kids were on rides, I just circled the park, like around and around. I would stay in line with them and then as soon as they got on the ride, would then walk. And then later that day,

30:29
If you don’t sync up your Fitbit to the Fitbit app, it wouldn’t count your steps. And so I purposely kept my phone away from my Fitbit so my sister and my cousin could not know how many steps I had. So they thought I was having a really low day. They’re like, oh, she’s not taking it seriously. So at the end of the day, at the last 15 minutes, I synced it so then I would show this huge increase.

30:58
Not only, okay, for people listening, my wife does not like to work out. So this whole step thing, like you walked all around good America and then you came home and you did the treadmill. I the treadmill for several hours. Yeah. I did 30,000 steps. you did like 35,000 steps. Anyway, that the point of this question had nothing to do with that, but you’re competitive yet when it comes to business, I don’t feel like you’re that competitive. No. Right. Like I see our competitors sometimes I just want to rock them.

31:27
Well, I see our competitors and I make notes on what I think we should do but I don’t implement that. Right. You go Steve, go implement that. Yes, I do. All right. Okay. Let me ask you this then. What keeps you motivated and inspired to continue on this journey? Our kids. Okay. But then when they’re gone, you’re not going to, when they’re off to college, you’re not going to be, and then it’s just me. Yes.

31:57
I don’t know. mean, I, to be honest with you, I don’t think that far ahead. I just think of, you know, the time that they’re with us. And that’s where I’m really just focused on. So I haven’t really thought really far beyond. It’s funny, because I’m like the I wouldn’t say I’m the opposite, but I think I know you’re you’re always very fortunate. have to plan ahead otherwise. Yes, I know. You’re for you’re very forward thinking.

32:26
I think I’m going be running this stuff for the rest of. Oh, I know you are. And I hope to be just sitting here. I don’t think you can pull that off. I know. I know. I feel like it’s a, I joke, but I think in general, like I, you’re definitely, I can see you doing this the rest of your life. I hope to not be that way. All right. Okay. Let’s say, let’s say the kids are off to college beyond.

32:55
financial success because presumably you want money so we can go traveling and do all this stuff, right? Right. Right. Okay. So what do you hope to achieve? mean, that requires money. So what do you hope to achieve after? I’m actually curious myself because I don’t even know the answer to this. Okay, let me me rephrase this question. If you saw me and I was at home just playing games all day and not doing anything, which is kind of like the life that you want after the kids go to school, wouldn’t you lose respect for me a little bit? No, you wouldn’t.

33:25
So if I just came home and you bought bonds and played games all day and everything else went to to crap. Well, if it would if everything went to crap, then we would have issues. OK. Right. But I don’t think I would lose respect for you. would be like, oh, he’s enjoying himself. Oh, OK. So you’re saying that I know I can never do that. I feel like if if we’re financially set. Like we don’t spend a lot, right? Right.

33:53
So if we’re financially set and you’re happy, which I doubt you would be happy playing games all the time. That’s true. wouldn’t. So if you were happy, I would be okay with it. I mean, that’s what retirement is for. Cause we don’t spend so crazy, you know, that we would have to worry about money. think if we had to worry about money, you would work your butt off. I would definitely work my butt off. I don’t think we would ever put ourselves in a case where we would be really worried. Yeah, that’s probably true. Okay.

34:23
The thing is, feel like really, I mean, we don’t have a lot of financial issues, but if push comes to shove and we needed me to work, I would work and do that. Yeah, it probably wouldn’t get to that point. OK, let’s switch gears because I want to this is our 500th episode. want to kind of reflect on our journey. What are some of the memorable things in your mind that you remember about either running the business or certain milestones that we’ve hit?

34:53
over the years. think so the warehouse getting the warehouse was really exciting. warehouse? Yeah, the first warehouse. I wasn’t that excited about that. Oh, really? I was worried. Moving the business out of the house? Yeah, I was worried about that. Really? Yeah, because it was it was like $4,000 a month or however it was. wasn’t that much. The first one was not that much. Yeah. But I was excited because

35:19
I felt like we could do so much more. I mean, I was working nonstop then. I felt like I was definitely working more because if you remember correctly, I would be like when it was at our house, I would print our invoices all the time and then I would check back and print more invoices. Yeah, but you to do that. I know, but it was like, I was like, oh, I’ll just get ahead and I will pack now. So tomorrow will be less work. But I felt like I was constantly doing that. So I felt like I worked more.

35:48
when it was out of our house, even though we had little babies, you know, at the time, I felt like I worked a lot because I was trying to get ahead. So moving it out of the house was really, really good for us. For you, for me, for me, it created additional worries because all of a sudden we’d have to pay rent on something where even if the business slowed down, we’d still have to pay that lease. Right. Yeah. So that made my life more stressful. Well, you are more stressed, but I think for us, it was great. I think, let’s see, the today show is

36:17
definitely memorable. Yep. I think anytime we got into magazine was pretty exciting. Did buying our warehouse was exciting. Getting our first employee was great. I think you know what stands out in my mind? What? The first time we got our first book order, I was just going to say that you were the first book shipment was really exciting. It was scary because you’re like, where, where’s this all going to go? I remember that person ordered a whole bunch of stuff and I was like,

36:48
Wow. This person must have. Oh, you know, you know what I’m talking about? So I was thinking more of us getting our first bulk shipment over seat from oversight. Oh, no, I was talking about our first order. Yeah, our first bulk order. I remember that lady actually. Yeah. Poor thing. It was this lady. Super, super nice. I took the call and she ordered it wasn’t even that large of an order. I think he was like, it was our largest order to date. It was at the time at the time. Yes.

37:17
So I think it was like 10 dozen. It was like several hundred dollars or something like that. Yeah. It was like at the time I think it was ten dollars, a ten dozen napkins plus placemats, plus towels, plus cocktail napkins. And I took the order over the phone and we used to pack. We used to pack. Do you remember we used to pack our packages, but we didn’t go through the product. Plus we just shoved everything in the. We just shoved everything in the box.

37:47
And we didn’t really go through the product that carefully. And so I remember, and at that time we didn’t have an inspector, like we weren’t getting our products inspected. We just kind of just like, I just recounted that I opened the package and recounted and just shoved in a box. didn’t even, we didn’t even package it nicely. And then the lady was so nice. didn’t complain because I had a huge conversation about this was our business and I was doing it out of our house. And, but I’m like,

38:16
You told her all that stuff? Yes, at the time, you know, we just had such a lovely conversation and the lady was so nice that she didn’t say how bad the product she didn’t complain. I kid you not. I still cringe at probably what we shipped her because it was probably really, really bad at the time. You know what else I think about? So early on in my engineering career, I got an offer at Nvidia. Yes.

38:44
I think to leave and it was that Nvidia’s all-time low stock price. It was like 11 or 12 bucks. Yes, and this is back in the year 2000. I want to say or 1999 or 2000. I it had to be later than that. Was it 2001? It was early on because I think we’re already married. think we were married. Yeah, we were already married. oh no, we were already married. It was before it was after we were married. Okay, so 2003 or 2004. Okay. Anyways, this is it was a good offer.

39:13
And I was gonna take it. Yes. And there was like a lot of stock, which would be worth a ton of money today. But no, I decided to stay at the company out of loyalty. Yes. And I think about myself, I wouldn’t have had to me to take that offer. Yes. You did want me to take that? did. I didn’t know that. Yes. Why didn’t you say anything? Because you loved your co workers so much. I wasn’t gonna tell you. I didn’t want it like

39:41
Influence you like you were happy with your job At your old company, so I wasn’t going to say anything I was pushing for Nvidia because it was such a offer and then it’s I think about it now and I’m like I was doing the math. I think we’d be So much richer. I think we probably three three to four X richer Yes, I think our lifestyle would be different

40:07
It would, I’d be still be working every day. You’d still be working. You’d be at home. I’d be at home doing nothing. And then I wouldn’t have any of this stuff that we have. I would be working. Nvidia has a reputation for working people really hard. So I probably wouldn’t be at home as much. Correct. It would be merely me doing everything. Yeah. So I guess I’m happy I didn’t take it because it led to this. I’m happy that

40:33
You wanted to quit your job. I’m happy that you hated your job. Yeah, I guess it all works out. It all worked out. Even though I was really skeptical the whole time. It’s skeptical about? I didn’t think that we were going to make that much money that first. Oh, no, I didn’t think. Do you remember our goal? was $5,000 a month. Our goal was $5,000 a month. Yeah. And we would have been thrilled. I would have been thrilled with that. All let me ask you You were the one that was like, okay, we have to have a higher goal. At least replace your salary.

41:04
Well, initially wasn’t even to replace my goals were always like driving you nuts. Yeah. All right. So how should we wrap this up? Okay. Let’s let’s try to be a little bit more inspirational because we were talking about how you didn’t want to do this and how well people out there listening for you know, I am extremely thankful for the lifestyle that we have. I feel like if I didn’t have this, if we didn’t have the business, we wouldn’t have this lifestyle. Either

41:34
we would be both working like crazy or our priorities would probably be different. In what way? What I mean by that is like if I, if we didn’t have the business, I think our focus would still be the family, but I probably would either be working and I wouldn’t be able to have such a flexible time or you would be working like crazy and you wouldn’t be around as much for the family.

42:04
So would that have been okay with you? No, of course not. I love the fact that we’re here for the kids as much as we are. Both of us. I don’t think they realize how unusual it is. They don’t. Right. They don’t. We like to tell them and remind them, but I don’t think they really realize it because I mean, even if they look at their friends’ parents, like, I don’t think they realize how much we do. Yeah. All right. Any words of advice for people listening out there?

42:34
I get you know, I get a lot of people who want to start a family and then they reach out to me going, hey, you know, I want I want your lifestyle or they already have kids. And they say, hey, I want to do this. I’m tired. I want to be at home with the kids. What would you tell these people? I think a lot of it is take action. Because if you keep on delaying it, you’re never going to do it. You just need to take some step to make it happen. Even if it’s a small step, because I see a lot of your students

43:05
that are really excited to start something. But if you ask them, they get caught up in all these little details that they don’t actually take any forward movement. Let me ask you a different question. And I’ve always wondered if I wasn’t around and you know how I handle all the tech stuff and whatnot, right? Would you still have gone this route or would you have gone a different route? What do mean? Econ versus something else? I would still do econ. You would still do e-commerce? Yeah.

43:35
Okay. But I probably be on Shopify. Shopify wasn’t around when we got started. Oh, I know. But I mean, just saying. It was hard when we got started. Yes, was nothing available. What I’m saying is, so I thought you said, wait, ask me the question again. We’re gonna start a business all over again. And you were the one who was spearheading whole thing while I was off working. I’m just curious, would you still because we had other business ideas at the time, right? You’ve still got e commerce or I know it’s hard to answer that question. But

44:04
part of the, like you didn’t worry about anything technical, right? So I’m curious, like, I would I would stick to eBay or something. Oh, you would stick to eBay. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. We did, we did do a lot of eBay. Okay. So in the very beginning, I probably would have just kept with eBay. Yeah. Anyway, the reason why I’m asking that question is because people listening are sometimes afraid of the tech and I know you’re not really, you’re tech savvy for sure, but I wouldn’t say you’re a technical person. Correct.

44:34
I do think that we definitely have a leg up because you do know a lot of the technical stuff, but I also think there’s a lot of different e-commerce sites that people can use nowadays that would make it easier for everyday people. They wouldn’t do what we’ve done. They would pay money for it. They would pay money. But I do think, you know, sometimes when you talk about your students and, you know, it’s very obvious some people are not technical. Yeah.

45:03
I think some people should just go with the easier solution versus try to save the money. I almost always think that people should go with the easier solution, right? Because even if you’re confident about tech, like you see me, but my personality is like, I’ll struggle with a problem for weeks. And that’s all I think about until I find the solution. Well, yeah, lot of you also wouldn’t pay for a subscription. That’s true. Yes. Like you rather own everything. Like you would rather pay money.

45:33
a one-time fee, then have a reoccurring subscription. Right. And statistically, I actually enjoy this maintenance stuff. You do? Yeah. You get excited. I mean, you’re actually the most excited during that time. Even though it’s a pain in the ass to do certain things, you get excited. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess you just got to figure out what you’re excited about. But what would your answer be? What, if we were to do e-comm back in the day? Yeah. Of course, e-comm. It’d be something technical.

46:03
Okay. Or like maybe we wouldn’t have worked together. Maybe I would have just started like a SaaS company or something. I don’t know. I don’t think you would have been interested in doing a SaaS company back Back then SaaS wasn’t around. wasn’t popular. Yeah. That’s true. Yeah. I don’t know. It’s all behind us now. I mean, we chose e-comm. I think, I still think that e-comm is the right decision for a lot of people who want to make money sooner rather than later. Or service business. Or service business. And

46:33
If you have a runway, content has been fantastic for us. You’re not really that involved in the content side of stuff, but content is is the lowest maintenance, I think. Yeah. It just takes forever. Well, yeah. I mean, I, be honest with you, like when you first decided to do the blog, I was like, don’t understand it. Right. But now, I mean, now I do. But back then I was like, people would be interested in seeing what you write about. Like that was

47:03
I guess I’m like your mom in that regard, you know? Yeah. I actually, remember the, the, the milestone on the blog. made $46 in one day. Yes. You were super excited. super, was like, Oh, this keeps up. Yeah. This can cover the mortgage. Yeah. Yeah. Good times. Good times. Anyway. Uh, okay. So let’s wrap this up. Uh, if you guys are listening, we, it’s clear that we didn’t plan this episode.

47:32
We don’t have a script or anything. just kind of chatting. We chat a lot, but there are always some questions that I don’t get a chance to ask my wife just in everyday conversation. So it’s actually nice that we’re recording this podcast so I can actually ask some of these questions. I didn’t get the answers that I expected to get. Like which one? Well, like what do you plan on doing five years? I don’t want to do this business anymore. I think you kind of knew that though. I think we’re going to always have the business to be honest with you. Really? You don’t think we’re going to sell it?

48:01
No, I don’t think so. I think you enjoy and you need it for the content, your content. I think we might phase me out completely by hiring someone. Yeah. But I don’t think we would sell it. Yeah. I mean, the store is really a content goldmine. Right. All right. Well, that’s, that’s it for episode 500. I hope you guys didn’t think we rambled too much. I think we did. If you have any questions for my wife, like if any of you guys out there are having kids or whatnot and

48:31
and you want to talk to the less technical half, I guess, of this team, the ones who’s more operations focused and whatnot, feel free to send me an email and I’ll make sure that my wife gets it. Hope you enjoyed that episode. I still can’t believe that I recorded 500 shows and that my wife has put up with me for over 20 years. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 500.

48:59
And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequarterjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and ascending the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
of this podcast is right around the corner and I have a special episode planned. But before we begin, I want to you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, mine is a curriculum based conference where you will lead with practical and actionable strategies

00:57
specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k,

01:25
or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th. And right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death.

01:55
Plus, you can still get my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. Go to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:20
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m really excited to have Ezra Firestone back on the show. And in case you don’t know who he is, Ezra runs a number of seven and eight figure e-commerce stores, a Shopify SaaS company called Zipify, and an e-commerce education company over at Smart Marketer. Now, Ezra actually recently spoke at my conference, The Seller Summit, about Facebook chat bots, and as expected, his talk was very well received. But what’s funny is that Ezra and I have known each other for many years, but we’d never really had an extended conversation.

02:50
until the speaker’s mastermind for my event. And after spending eight straight hours in a closed room with the guy, I started liking him even more. And he is a wise man well beyond his years, and he’s very personable as well. So today, Ezra and I are gonna talk about some of the challenges that he’s faced this past year with Boom, his e-commerce business, and whatever else we plan on talking about today. And with that, welcome to show. Ezra, how you doing today,

03:15
My wife quit her job podcast. Hey man, super happy to be here. And I just want to add to that that I hadn’t done one of those, you know, speaker masterminds where you kind of get in, you get together with a group of folks and you sit down for, like you said, you know, eight hours and you really just each person kind of goes through like what they’re struggling with and what’s going on and what they could use help with. And it was like such a cool format. I’m really sold on on that, you know, going forward. I really liked it.

03:43
Yeah, mean everyone was really open which I really loved and you know one of the attendees there like she was tearing up and I think I feel like we I know he you know who I’m talking about but I think we really helped her out a lot. Yeah, yeah, we had a couple breakdowns man. know, I think when when people get the space to actually kind of open up about what’s really going on it can be cathartic and healing and it’s you know, there’s not a lot of safe spaces, especially in the business world where there’s so much sort of

04:12
Posturing it was cool. was a cool thing you set up. So thanks for doing that Yeah, absolutely. And you know even I found out that you have problems, too It’s amazing. I have problems. Yeah, I know I mean listen I think that what’s interesting about like the struggles is in general when you’re experiencing sort of pain or struggle or Discomfort. I mean at the very same time usually some things are going well, too, and it seems to be this sort of like being able to hold

04:41
at the same time, both things that are going well and things that aren’t and how you navigate that intensity over time seems to be how well you do at business because I can tell you for sure, there’s always something that’s like not doing that great in one of my brands, know, or something that’s scary or Shopify is gonna, you know, kick out the replacement checkouts or whatever the catastrophe or chaos is at the moment, it seems to be constant, you know, and so I really do think it’s about how you react to it.

05:09
Absolutely, and it’s actually comforting to know that other entrepreneurs are facing similar issues. It just makes you feel better. Yeah, totally. Ezra, last time you were on the podcast was four years ago. Four years. Four years ago? Yeah, you were one of my first guests. I was just kind of looking back at the at the analyst. Wow, I’d like to go back and see what we talked about then. That’s kind of fun. I have no idea. I didn’t listen to it. I just looked it up.

05:33
I know during our mastermind we covered a number of different things, but can you just quickly catch the audience up about all your various businesses real quick? It’s really hard to keep track because you got to Yeah, you know, well, I think one of my most fun and sort of most popular success stories has really happened in the last four years, you know. 2010 to 2014, I was attempting to launch this brand Boom by Cindy Joseph and using content marketing and all kinds of stuff.

05:59
2014 was our real like first multi six-figure year and then 2015 we did we 10x went from 300,000 to 3 million and then 2016 we went from 3 million to 17 million and then 17 18 19 are have now all been in that You know 20 million ish range and so that’s been a really big ride and also is kind of like you know my team over the last four years has gone from

06:26
When I would have done that podcast with you, I probably had 16 members and now I have 103. So there’s been like a lot of expansion and my journey as an entrepreneur in that time has been going from the driver to the navigator. And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in this sort of driver role and it ultimately is what limits their growth where, you know, if you’re on the road taking the turns, you can’t be above the road looking at the mountains that are coming in the distance. It’s very hard.

06:54
to both navigate and drive and where a lot of people get stuck. There’s a number of kind of sticking points that I’ve identified on my journey of growth in my companies, but one of them is technology, right? A lot of us do it yourself entrepreneurs who started from the ground with no money doing it ourselves. We’re doing the Facebook and the Klaviyo and the analytics and the Shopify. Like we’re really bogged down in the technological infrastructure of the business. So that’s one area that people get stuck. And then one of the other lessons, I mean, I know this doesn’t

07:22
Directly answer your question, but now I’m off on a tangent is I think that so yeah a lot of stuff’s been going on a lot of growth I’ve got three main companies smart marketer. I do you know blogging and educational courses on how to grow ecommerce businesses zippify apps I build add-ons to Shopify stores that you know support you in your growth as a Shopify merchant and then boom is a cosmetic retailer for women over 50, but what I was gonna say was that one of the

07:50
Actually, I totally lost my train of thought now. Sorry. I have no idea what I was waiting for. Like the revelation here. It was it was going to be really good. Oh, I do remember now, which is, you know, one of the things that everyone is so focused on is growth. Everybody wants to get bigger and grow and be. It’s like there’s this sort of obsession with growth. And I understand it on one level. But I also think that it’s a bit misguided and ultimately leads often.

08:19
to the demise of very good companies because, you know, with growth comes a whole lot of problems. You know, you have to fund more inventory, you’ve got more overhead, there’s more stress and pressure and intensity on you as the entrepreneur who’s the one who’s responsible for the whole operation. And you know, what I am trying to do is first and foremost, enjoy my life and have fun. And I want my team to enjoy their lives and have fun doing what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean we don’t work hard, but I want it to be enjoyable. And you you don’t…

08:49
know how long you have, which could lead into, know something you wanted to talk about, a big traumatic experience I had over the last 12 months, but you don’t know how long you have. So if you’re not enjoying yourself, making time for your hobbies, making time for your social life, making time for your relationships and intimate connections, and you know, really enjoying and putting energy into your business in a sustainable way, not 16 hours a day, then what’s the point? And then I want to make really, really good things that serve the world that are truly great products. And then third, I want to be profitable.

09:18
And I frankly don’t care how big it gets and I don’t care how profitable I am. If I’m having a good time making good stuff and it’s making money and paying my team and paying my bills, I’m happy. And I think that this fascination with growth is actually somewhat misguided. And what you really should be looking at is how can I have a lot of fun, make things that are truly good and then have that be profitable at any level is you’ve won the game. You know, a lot of people get really big and then they’re shackled to these operations that they’re slaving away at that make them miserable, that take them away from their, you know, it’s just like,

09:48
It can get out of hand. just came to this revelation probably two years ago because trying to grow your company fast actually ruins marriages also. So my wife, we were, we were setting these goals and we were stressing out over it because we weren’t hitting them. Um, and then we were getting into fights over and over again. And so we kind of came to an agreement that we were just grow the company, whatever happens, happens grow gradually because fast growth really is painful. You’re right. It is, it is much better since.

10:18
Sorry, go ahead. No, was just gonna say, just our relations have been much better since we kind of came to that agreement regarding our e-commerce business. Yeah, smart. mean, and it’s, you know, it’s like there is this, I call it eternal vigilance, which is the skill set that I think is needed in order to run a business yourself that’s on the internet where you are the entrepreneur who’s responsible for it and also maintain a healthy balance.

10:47
between your outside life and your work because it’s available to you at all times. It’s not like you go to the office and you leave the office and okay, now that’s gone. Like no, the opportunity to continue the mental game of what can I do to improve my business is available to you at all times. And if you’re not careful and you don’t actually set boundaries, real clear boundaries, and then show up to those on a daily basis the same way you have to show up to a diet or a workout program or a relationship, then…

11:15
You’re gonna it’s just gonna fill it’s gonna be the backdrop of your entire life it’s gonna fill every waking moment and a lot of people get caught in that trap and ultimately burn out or Find themselves no longer interested because they’ve just they treated it as a sprint rather than a marathon I think the ability to set work-life boundaries where it’s like, okay from you know 7 30 a.m. Or whenever I wake up to 10 a.m I’m moving my body doing a meditation having breakfast with my family enjoying myself whatever and then 10 a.m. I start work and then

11:43
5 p.m. I’m done and then at 5 p.m. I go on I Engage in my social life and I do my hobbies and I spend time with my family I set it down if you can’t pick it up and set it down deliberately and I’m not saying that there’s not times where you’re in launch mode and you’re just working for weeks at a time sure but I just mean in general as a rule of thumb if you don’t have the ability to Pick up and set down the operation in that way It’s gonna be very very hard for you over time is what I’ve learned But you can’t really do that effectively without a team. So when did you actually make that transition?

12:13
Yeah, I think I think you can I think you can set your your your energetic Boundaries where you are creating space in your life for your personal life your social life your physical body Things of that nature I think you can do that even when you’re a solopreneur and my journey was I was basically a solopreneur where I was me doing it everything myself I mean the whole thing and you know when you and I got started the game was

12:40
American drop shippers and search engine optimization and like Yahoo stores, you know, it was a little bit simpler of a game, but that’s what it was, you know, and I played that myself from round about 2005 until I hired my first team member in 2009 to do customer support. And then I basically still did everything myself and just had one team member all the way through 2012 when I sold that my drop shipping businesses.

13:09
That was the wig business. that was the costume wig business. But yeah, then basically after in 2012 when I started blogging and also selling services, I hired my cousin. I said, hey man, listen, I will pay you 12 bucks an hour to learn how to code. And then once you know how to code, I’ll pay you 20 bucks an hour and you can be a coder for me. And so as of 2012, basically, you know, from 2012 to 2014, I probably hired two or three people a year. And then 2014 to now, I’ve just kind of gone buck wild.

13:39
Yeah, because you got your hands in a lot of pots, so to speak. So it be impossible if you were doing the implementation, right? Yeah, I’m doing a lot of the sort of ideation of reading the market and figuring out what’s going to be well received of checking what people do and giving feedback. I don’t do a lot of actual and it’s hard sometimes. I’m like, what am I even doing around here? You know, but it is, you know, it’s important for someone to hold the container in the vision and, you know, be

14:07
crossing all the T’s and dotting the I’s, sort of checking everything. Yeah. So switching gears a little bit, can we talk about some of the challenges that you faced recently with Boom in the last year or so? Yeah, I mean, I can get into that if you want. I could just go on a run unless you have a specific question. Well, I’ll interrupt you. Why don’t you tell everyone what happened first in case they don’t know? And then, OK. Well, the ultimate sort of hex that everyone has laid on them in society is that you’re going to die one day.

14:34
And that sort of awareness of your impending death is, you know, something that causes midlife crisis crises. It’s something that is used to sell you every for everything under the sun. You know what I mean? Anti-age and health stuff. And like it’s it’s it’s something that we all have to confront as human beings that one day this ride is going to be over if we’re like everyone else or who knows what happens. But but existence as we know it now may not be around. And

15:04
What I had happen to me, just introducing that topic, the idea of death and how scary that is, is my business partner, who was also the ambassador slash face of my company on every product page, every email was coming from her, I mean that whole thing sort of suddenly passed away really abruptly on like, you know, we knew she was sick and then basically seven days later she was gone. so that- I didn’t realize it was that quick.

15:32
Yeah, well what happened was she’d had one bout with cancer two years prior, so three years ago, and she’d gotten really close to the door, you know, she’d gotten really close and then she made a full recovery. mean, she was a hundred percent back, I mean, fully. And then generally when these things come back, they don’t come back better. So we thought it was like totally clear, all good. And then boom, we found out about a year ago to the day almost, hey,

16:01
this thing is back and then within seven days she had passed. So, you know, that was really traumatic for me on a mental, emotional, spiritual level in that Cindy was a very close friend of mine. She was like a groomsman in my wedding. You know, I moved to New York, or grooms person, grooms woman, whoever. I moved to New York when I was 17 to play poker for a living after getting out of high school and I moved in with her and she kind of like…

16:28
You know, lived with her for a few years before kind of going on my own in the city. So she kind of like was a jumping step between teenage years to young adult years for me. And yeah, so we were like really, really close friends. And so, you know, that was tough. She was a much like a second mother figure in a lot of ways for me. And then also, you know, just from the practical side of it, like sort of setting that down, the practical side of.

16:53
The business operations were rough too in that I mean she wasn’t very involved from an operational perspective I had been running the company forever and she actually hadn’t been on a video or audio For two years because when she first got sick we realized hey, you know Maybe it’s a it’d be good to diversify the representation of our brand rather than it just being from one person’s voice make it about the experience of all women so we had actually started that process, but there were things like

17:20
The community of women who were our customers were very used to hearing from her given that all of our emails were coming from her. She was doing all of the product demonstrations. All of our Facebook front end ads were leading with her story and her doing product demos. Our team, which is 30 people or something at Boom, was very worried that we were going to go under or fire them. I mean it was just chaos. We had to very quick, we had to announce her death.

17:45
You know publicly because she was a public figure and it was starting to get picked up by news outlets and that proved to be an issue with you know her family it was just like it was and it was mad it was the most intense period in my business career by a pretty far long shot and Is that when you came to this revelation of having more fun with your business and not you always yeah, I’ve always been in the

18:14
You know one of my mantras in life is fun is the goal and love is the way like I think that that I’ve always been I think that success is a very popular but less fulfilling game than having fun and I’m really into success and wealth creation and all this stuff that Society will tell you is the way to go, but I’m not in it to the detriment of my pleasure in my life because you know I have I was raised by a bunch of hippies and so I kind of had that I grew up on a commune

18:42
mindset that you It that we that you can only give from your own surplus and so if you want to be You know my tagline in business. It’s serve the world unselfishly and profit and if you want to be of service Which is my goal I really do then you must first and foremost Take care of yourself because you cannot pour from an empty cup So I’ve always had this goal of enjoying myself taking care of myself making sure that I am

19:09
energetically sound that I can show up and give and so I’ve always kind of been on that path and yeah, I mean that you know when when someone close to you dies it is very intense and you’ve you you reassess Everything like what am I doing? Why am I doing it? What is the point of all this? Like, you know, you really go through that intense sort of introspection about Your behaviors and actions and what is motivating them? Are they motivated by ego? Are they motivated by the desire to?

19:37
Please people are that like what am I what am I actually doing here? See I went through all that man and and on the practical side of it You know the the announcement of her death to our community the rewriting of all the email sequences the modifying of all of our front-end Facebook ads that the Removing Cindy from all of our product. I mean it was like the reassuring my team that we weren’t gonna go under you know I mean the whole thing was was very Emotionally draining and I felt that like it’s now

20:05
August she passed in July of last year and I feel like from July to like January was triage and then the first three months of this year was like, okay, things are kind of like getting back to normal and then now like the last three months I feel like I fully like sort of digested as much as you can. mean, mourning is a whole thing and trauma is a thing and who knows I’m not educated enough in the area of, you know, trauma to understand. I don’t know what lingering effects that stuff causes, but

20:35
I feel pretty sound from it. And we’re having our best year ever from That’s what I was going to say. You had your best year ever and it continues to grow. I follow you and I know you’ve used Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing, all that stuff over the years. I was just curious, what has been your primary source of growth in the past year despite all of this trauma? Well, I think the diversification of having our…

21:04
Front-end Lee sort of lead in customer generating strategies not being a hundred percent focused around Cindy has opened us up to be Well received by perhaps women that maybe weren’t resonating with her because now we lead with a variety of women We’ve also discovered that there’s some reverse ageism in our market where you know women in their 60s Don’t want to have a woman in her 40s or 50s telling them about aging so we’ve kind of been able to mix up who is presenting on behalf of our company and that seems to have worked and also

21:34
You know through the process of reassessing every area of the company product cost of goods advertising email strategy, you know repeat just we kind of went through every and one thing that I don’t know that I ever told you was you know before Cindy with the first time she got sick I went to her and I said hey listen, you know, like Do you really want to be doing this? Like how you know you got sick and and and you really almost died and so

22:04
I just want to you know have the conversation of I mean I know I do all the operations in the business but like I want to have the conversation of like Are you interested in continuing this ride or should we sell this company now? Because it’s worth a lot and you know You could then be set for life and take care of your kids and all that and maybe it’s time to end this ride like you know a death scare as I said has you evaluate everything and she said you know what so we got on board about that and we got really close we got all the way through the process of

22:32
due diligence, a buyer, the whole thing, and the deal was about to happen and she passed away. And then those people backed out. And then I wasn’t thinking about selling the company after she passed. I was just trying to maintain stasis. But I also think that the process of going through, and I would recommend the Quiet Light brokerage podcast, your podcast, e-commerce fuel podcast, to listen to folks who’ve almost sold their businesses and hear the things that you do when you go through a due diligence process and you sort of kick every tire.

22:59
I think having done that exercise of, we’re going to sell this thing, understanding all the things that affect valuation, profitability, things of that nature that I didn’t have a lot of attention on before, even though I had sold the business, and then having a year of operating after that, I think that also was a big factor in why we’re growing. But yeah, mean, our Facebook ads performed extremely well January, February, and March. We’ve introduced a bunch of new products, which has been really great. think one of the keys to scale

23:27
once you have a company that’s been around a while is to introduce three or four new products a year that you can cross sell to your past customers, buyers, and subscribers. So I feel like we’ve done a lot of stuff right. Can we talk about more specifically what your process of kind of reevaluating all the different aspects of the business were? Yeah, I mean, so when you’re looking at selling a company, there’s a number of factors that go into the valuation that you’ll receive.

23:54
One of them is repeat business, right? So what’s your return rate? So if your return rate is, you know, 50 % instead of 30 % or 20%, you’ll end up with a higher valuation. One of them is profitability. So how much profit do you actually generate? Your multiple will usually be a percentage of profit. And, you know, one of them is diversification of visibility and customer source. So like we did a bunch of things. We

24:22
renegotiated with all of our suppliers. We switched suppliers in certain cases. We changed out our packaging. Like we did things to increase our margins on the products that we were selling. We raised our prices and we ran a price raise sale, which was the best sale we’ve ever done. We made half a million dollars in two days just by telling our community, hey, our prices are going up by 10 % in a week and you can buy at the current prices now with a 10 % discount. we got, you we haven’t ever raised our prices. And as the company gets bigger, things like

24:49
you know, inventory and salary and our costs rise and so we have to raise our prices. So we raised our prices and so we did things to increase our margins. How did you know how much to raise the price and how did you know that you weren’t at like some limit in terms of just price? So we split, so on our two front end offers, so I only have two things that people buy from me when they find me for the first time. Then those are my cosmetic sticks. They come to me for that. It’s a lot easier to sell.

25:16
than it is to sell like skincare, for example, because everyone has skincare. But the skincare is the back end, right? What we sell to people already know us. So the two items that are the front end offers, we split tested the changes in pricing from a low change, a medium change to a very drastic high change. And ultimately, raising the front end price of our products by $10 would have ended up increasing the profit the most significantly, but it was cutting down too much on customers that were coming in the door.

25:46
a goal of not only profitability but also a big footprint because one of the other things that affects your valuation is literally how big your audience is and how much revenue you generate, not just how much profit you make. So all three price tests won against our control and we went with the medium raise on the front end. The back end products, which is our all 14 other of our skincare products, we just raised by a flat 10 % across the board and we didn’t even test it and it’s been fine because those people

26:13
already know us, like us, engage with our content, and are gonna buy from us because they like us, not because they’re price sensitive. And so we kind of were in the medium end of the market in terms of what we were charging, and now we’re more at the higher end of the market. so front end products that are for customer acquisition, I would recommend that you split test that, but your back end cross-sells, you can usually get away with five or 10 % without much of a problem. Interesting. I actually didn’t even know that about your business. So you had this like one lead-in product.

26:41
that just opens up. have two lead in products. and it’s like my whole schtick is simplify your makeup routine, know, color cosmetics. It’s it’s make cosmetics are what gets people’s attention and then everything else I sell is basically a back end upsell cross sell and a lot of businesses are that way where they’ve kind of got like one fly, especially businesses that are driven by direct response. I if you’re an Amazon brand, sure you got a million products you sell but.

27:07
And if you’re a Google, if you’re, if you’re driven by direct response, but it’s search traffic, you generally have a whole bunch of products you sell because you’ve got a bunch of different queries. But if you’re driven by story based direct response where you’re telling a story, engaging a subscriber in a conversation and then offering them something, you usually have one or two products that are the real like 85, 90 % of what you sell on the front end. And then everything else tends to be a backend upsell cross sell to people who came in from one of those funnels and heard about you. And, um, you know,

27:35
Pretty much every business that I’ve evaluated that is this same kind of business has a similar story to that. So in terms of increasing your repeat business, what did that involve specifically? It involved running more sale events. So we now do six a year. It involved introducing more products. we’ve kind of ramped up the product launches work. I there’s a reason Apple does them. There’s a reason Amazon does them. There’s a reason that people do them. We started building anticipation rather than just, we used to just say, hey, we’ve got a new product. Here it is. Now we spend two weeks.

28:05
saying, hey, this product is coming, building up excitement for it, doing ads and emails, talking about what it’s gonna be. And then we release it. And we’ve literally doubled the effectiveness of our product launches just by adding a two week anticipation funnel on the front end of the product launch. Which I share that on the Zipify blog and the Smart Marketer blog, how we do that. But I mean, excitement works. If someone’s paying attention to you and there’s an opportunity for them to…

28:30
follow along and get excited about something and sign up for it and then get a few emails saying it’s coming. I mean they’re much more likely to convert rather than hey we introduced a new you know moisturizer that helps for after you’ve been in the sun. I mean that’s nowhere near as compelling as giving the opportunity for someone to be excited. So in terms of getting people excited in terms of just running Facebook ads are these just awareness ads or are they are you trying to get

28:54
And email. Yeah. So for product launches, they’re 95 % people who have either been on our email list or bought for us from us in the past. We still, do run a lead gen on our product launches to build anticipation for them to cold as well, but it doesn’t really convert that well. So really our product launches are about monetizing the community that we have. And then for Facebook lead gen, we’re still leading with our, our flagship products and our customer acquisition, Facebook customer acquisition. And you know, we’re constantly changing up our,

29:23
video formulas and testing different articles and doing everything we can to reduce our customer acquisition costs for sure. But you asked specifically about repeat business and one of the main things done for that in addition to improving our content marketing significantly. I we release four posts a week. We’ve got two writers on staff. I invest about a million dollars a year in non-branded

29:50
content marketing that’s designed to engage my community. And I think once you get bigger and you have a front end customer acquisition funnel that is bringing you customers, the game of keeping those folks engaged through content that they’re enjoying and being entertained by is a big part of scale.

30:09
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, you’re going to need a trademark to protect your intellectual property. Not only that, but a trademark is absolutely necessary to register your brand on Amazon. Now I used to think that any old trademark registration service would work and that could even try to register my own trademark by myself on the cheap, but I was dead wrong. Securing a trademark without a strategy in place usually results in either an outright rejection or a worthless, unenforceable trademark.

30:36
Now that is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council. They have a package service called Total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy. Their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other IP protection, such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge Council first and get a free consult.

31:06
For more information, go to emerge council.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a hundred dollar discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s merged council.com over at EMERGECOUNSEL.com. Now back to the show. Let’s talk about content marketing a little bit. Are you writing primarily to tell a story or are you writing for

31:35
the intention of ranking in search? do no, nothing is with the goal of search engine optimization. Not a single thing is with the goal of ranking. I mean, yes, we rank and we get organic traffic and we do put, you know, meta title tags and meta descriptions and maybe an H1, but there’s no keyword for thought before we create our content. Our content is all, you know, eight skincare tips for aging skin.

32:00
or how I overcame perfectionism or my battle with anorexia and what I did about it. Experiences that the women in our community are having, we’re talking about them. Women are going through their hair graying, their skin wrinkling, their hormones changing through menopause, their skin changing, all this kind of stuff. Dating after a divorce is a big one for women who are in their 50s. mean, there’s a lot of experiences that they’re having that we can talk about and we’re doing that in a number of ways. We’re writing articles. We’ve got a new ambassador program where we’re allowing our customers to

32:29
create videos about our products and also about their makeup routines. And so we’ve got a bunch of different pillars that we talk about. Sustainability is a big one. You know, how we are sustainable, why we’re sustainable, what we do in that direction. We have these sort of content pillars that we create regular content within a given sort of framework, know, tips, lifestyle stuff, ambassador stuff, sustainability stuff. You can go to the boom by Cindy Joseph blog, uh, and which, which will, which will about.

32:57
next week be on Zipify pages, my landing page builder for Shopify. We just released blogging and we’re switching it over. We currently have a WordPress implementation for our blog, but managing both WordPress and Shopify and the cross-domain tracking and the lack of, I mean, it’s just a nightmare. So we built this really sweet blog integration on Zipify pages and we’ve moved the boom blog over there and it’s about to go live. I’m pretty excited about it. But yeah, so that’s kind of like what we do for content. So what’s funny about that is when you’re articles, I guess that

33:25
Without the intention of ranking in search a lot of times those articles kind of get buried deep within the blog eventually right? So are you doing a lot of things to bring that content back to people or we we do remail on it? We remail you know any any article we track what articles and videos perform the best in terms of click-through rate engagement and purchase rate because people buy from these things too even though they don’t aren’t going to Content or aren’t going to products you can get to the our products once you get to our blog So it’s a big part of how we monetize

33:54
is keeping this content coming and anything that works, any good article, if it’s a really good one, we’ll turn it into a front end pre-sell article and run it to new subscribers and prospects. So we will use our current list to determine what is the best content and then we’ll take that and we’ll run that top of funnel. We will re-mail on our best posts, we’ll put our best ones in our email automation sequences, but a lot of our stuff just gets buried on the blog and is never used again. That does happen a lot.

34:23
So a lot of this really is just building a community, word of mouth, and social is probably your primary strategy, mainly because you’re in the cosmetics business, I would say, right? Yeah, I mean, we amplify that content. So any content, our blogs and videos and articles, our Facebook fans will see it, our subscribers will see it, we’ll amplify it on Google. So we’re paying to push that content out once it’s out there, we’re running ads to it, and we’re also emailing our list. And the idea is, you know, people get 150 emails a day, so.

34:50
We send three or four content emails a week and that generates 40 grand a week in revenue for us. Those aren’t sale emails. And then every four to six weeks we’ll either introduce a product or run, or sorry, we’ll introduce product four times a year, three or four times a year. But every six weeks or so there’s either a product launch or a sale or something like that where we have a big monetization of our community. So the content is responsible for, it definitely ROIs at a very, very solid,

35:20
number based on how much money we spend to produce it and amplify it and how well it has our see what happens is your sales work better right if you’re keeping your your community engaged if they’re seeing content from your brand in their news feeds and on Facebook and on Google and on YouTube and on display network then when you run a sale and they see sale ads they’re much more likely to engage with them so our sales work way better because we have this content strategy

35:45
I’ve heard you and Molly Pittman give a number of webinars about Facebook ads and how advertising is just getting a lot more expensive. What are some of the trends that you’ve been seeing and how have you countered them? Some of the negative trends, I should say. I mean, since we’ve been online, Steve, I think advertising costs have gone up on average 15 % year over year. Oh, yeah, actually more than that for me in some cases. Yeah. Yeah, me too. You know, I don’t think it’s going to change. And, you know, I think that there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And I think one of the biggest opportunities is short form.

36:14
video content, so sub 15 second video ads on Instagram stories, Facebook, mid roll videos, Facebook. I think if you’re not doing short form in addition to whatever normal video ads you might be running, then you are definitely missing out on the cheap inventory at the moment because that’s where all the cheap inventory is. Of course, you also have to have the longer form videos and what most people aren’t doing is also mixing in image ads, GIF animation ads and carousel ads because you know, Facebook is only going to show

36:44
user a video ad a few times it’ll show it but it’ll show that same user if you’re targeting let’s say a lookalike of your buyers or something or even just you know people who are fans of Ezra Firestone digital marketer or whatever you know what I mean if targeting any group of people and you have multiple types of creative images videos gifts short form long form carousels that prospect in that targeting group will see more ads from you because you have more diverse

37:11
sort of ad creative that Facebook is willing to show them. In addition to that, most people only run conversion focused ads designed to generate either add to cart events, purchase events, or even email leads. If you’re only ever running conversion ads, again, Facebook’s only gonna show a certain amount of conversion ads to every prospect. If you also have 10 % of your budget in brand awareness, in dynamic product ad or catalog sales, in Messenger,

37:38
where you’re clicking the messenger. Like if you’re using different objectives within the platform, even at a small percentage of your budget, you’ll reach way more people in your audience because those objectives have a much lower cost per thousand people, CPM, cost per impression. even though you’re spending less of your budget on these other objectives, you’re actually reaching way more people than you would if you were just using only conversion focused ads. Let me ask you this. I mean, your team is like over hundred people now.

38:06
And to do across three different companies and fair. Yeah, so, you know, it sounds really fancy, but I want to just give transparency into that, which is 40 of those 100 people are on the development team for Zipify. So that’s a big chunk of folks. And we rather develop a whole and that is my only physical location. All the developers are in one place. And then, you know, let’s say 20 on boom and then, you know, essentially it’s almost like 20 boom, 30 Zipify and

38:35
10 or 15 smart markers, of mixed up in that way. I was just going to say, to create the number of creatives necessary to do all this testing on Facebook, Instagram, short stories and whatnot, it kind of requires a lot of effort on your part. So if you don’t have a large team, would be your recommendations for kind of like a more bare bones approach? Yeah, and I mean, I think that’s another kind of limiting belief. With Boom, for example, we have like

39:05
five videos that we’ve been running for the last like two years. mean, yes, we mix them up and edit them in different ways. You don’t actually need a lot of creative. You just need good creative. And so one video editor or one graphic designer is actually plenty and you can freelance that. You you can hire a freelance video editor and you can shoot videos on your iPhone or you can hire a freelance designer and make GIFs and images. And basically you can run the same thing for months and months and months until it stops working.

39:34
Or if you’re spending a lot of money, yeah, then you’ve got to refresh your ads quite often. But if you’re spending less than four or five hundred bucks a day, you don’t need to refresh your ads that often. mean, Zipify, for example, you’re probably seeing the same Zipify ads that were running four months ago running now because I’m only spending, let’s see, you know, 50 bucks a day or something amplifying Zipify. So you don’t need actually that much creative. It’s more about.

40:00
quality creative that’s going to engage the particular audience and yeah, you got to test that. So when you’re first launching, you might need to try three or four different videos, five different videos, a couple different images, but you only need one team member in that role to support that. So for Zipify, I only have one designer. For Boom, I only have one designer, although I also have a video editor. SmartMarketer, I also have a designer and a video editor, so I have two. But you could freelance those roles. could buy that on an as needed basis.

40:29
through service providers. This is actually a question, this is kind of a different type of question, but I’ve always wondered how Zipify kind of falls into your overall strategy. Is it just because you were doing all these things with Zipify with Boom, like the equivalent functionality that you decided to create this SaaS company? So I, yeah, I believe in permaculture as a business model, and permaculture is a farming term, and what it means essentially is to reuse all of your resources to their greatest benefit.

40:59
capture the rainwater, water the garden, take the chicken shit, use it for the compost. Like take all your food scraps and use those for the compost. Use everything that you can to further your goal. And a lot of people think that they need stuff outside of what they already have, but they just haven’t taken inventory of the assets that are actually around them. And so this is a rule that I live my life by instead of looking outside of what I already have access to.

41:26
Let me look at what I have access to and how I can better utilize that. And if you look at my business model, it’s very permaculture. Um, take a look at this. It’s like, okay, I innovate in the direction of e-commerce first and foremost with boom and any other e-commerce business I’ve had over the years. Then I take whatever works and I document that and I share that on my blog with smart marketer and I offer that to business owners and I create courses that are in depth and I sell that. And then I take the money from those courses and I put it back into the e-commerce business. And then

41:55
I was also back since, I mean, 2011, 2012, doing development services. I was building websites for people on Magento, OS Commerce, XCart, PrestaShop. I understand the e-commerce customer journey and also the technology that powers that from the early days of before Shopify, BigCommerce, and Volusion were the big three, from the Magento days, the Yahoo Store days, the XCart days, the PrestaShop days.

42:24
I’ve been in this industry and I’ve also had a mind for development. Now, granted, I’m not the greatest developer myself, but I, I know how everything talks to, to, I know how every piece of technology talks to every other piece of technology to create the customer buying journey. And I I’ve always sold services. I had an AdWords services agency from 2008 to 2012. I had a Shopify, um, and sort of every other platform development agency from 2011 to 2015. And with services,

42:54
I failed miserably. mean, it may be my worst ever business venture. I had a real hard time in my life, setting boundaries in general, and that spilled over into my services agency. And I think I sold three or four million dollars in services and made like 30 grand in profit, maybe, because like what would happen is I’d sell someone a website and then they’d come back and say, hey, can you do this? And I’d be like, sure. And I go back to my developers, hey man, we need to do this, you know.

43:22
And basically I just never figured out how to really set a container around a sale. So I was just like doing stuff for people like forever because I didn’t, yeah, I didn’t quite have a command of boundaries, which is something I had to learn. And that’s something that served me well since I have picked up on how to do that in a way that feels good to the person I’m setting the boundary with. But when I, so I’ve always done development and sold development and I only stopped because I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, but I always.

43:51
thought it was a good business and thought I could do well in it, but I didn’t love so much talking to people or being the person. Yeah, I’m a charismatic hermit, man. I want to be in my cave making stuff and then come out to your event for two days and then go back to the top of the mountain where I get to be alone and make things. I I’m not the best service provider because I don’t want to talk to the client. But what I discovered, so I was taking a look at the Shopify ecosystem and I actually,

44:20
In 2014, I created a WordPress plugin for Amazon business owners, maybe it was 2013, that allowed you to do the one-time giveaway coupons where you could give a product away for a dollar and give them a coupon and this and that. That was kind of the strategy for ranking on Amazon back then. And so this WordPress plugin allowed you to collect an email address, give them a one-time Amazon coupon, follow up with them, build a landing page. It was a pretty sweet little plugin called Booster Page. And I think I spent like 30 grand to make it.

44:47
and about 380,000 in revenue on it. So it was extremely profitable and it was a monthly subscription. Of course I had to keep it up to date, but the update of the development, you know, was not that much. And so basically I was like, oh, so the way that you make development work is you don’t sell a one-time fee, you sell a subscription, you do software as a service. And so once I figured out the software as a service model, I’d always had the goal of when it, you know, I want to get back into the development game and I want to do it as a

45:16
product rather than you are buying me and my time and my consulting, you are buying this product that I’ve created that is essentially thousands of lines of code that create an experience for you when you log into it and do things to help you. But you’re not buying Ezra, you’re buying this individual product that you pay for on a monthly basis. So I liked the idea of recurring revenue of selling development and yeah, I mean, I am developing things for my site all the time and anything that works, I roll into my landing page builder or I roll into my upsell builder. So

45:46
Essentially, it’s permaculture all over again because I’m taking what’s working for me and my students in my mastermind and I’m developing that into the application and open sourcing that for my customers who can buy that on a monthly subscription. But what I underestimated was how difficult that business model is, is far and away the most difficult business I have ever been involved in by a factor of 15 or something. It’s very resource intensive too, right? It’s so hard. It’s like so, so hard. But

46:16
It’s really fun. It’s kind of a never ending spiral of integrations and madness and Shopify changes something and just like it’s crazy. Uh, and the product is amorphous. It’s like with boom, I’m selling a tub with goo in it. And when I, when I, when I scale, it’s like more tubs, more goop, more labels and ship them. mean, it’s really great goo and it’s amazingly well made and all. It’s a really wonderful product, but it’s very simple. Um, zipify is like a code base that’s always changing. And so like,

46:46
I don’t need just a manufacturer and then someone to ship it. I need front-end engineers, back-end engineers, QAs, project manager. I mean, it’s crazy. The product side of it is very, very difficult. How do you actually allocate your time between your three businesses? You know, I kind of do what is needed when it’s needed. I mean, that doesn’t give you good answer, but each business has a project manager who is responsible for all ongoing operations who you could label essentially a COO.

47:15
And then I have a president who kind of swings across all companies and is sort of like dipping in to the key projects when needed. And he’s really great. And so, you know, I might spend a week or two working only on boom and then a week or two working only on smart marketer. I might have a week where I do, you know, all of them in the same day. So it’s just kind of like as needed. But each of the companies at this point has very strong leadership and a very clear and cohesive direction and ongoing operations. And so we’re no longer, none of them.

47:45
are any longer in the startup phase where it’s like, we don’t really know what we’re doing. It’s all chaos. It’s like every one of them has consistent ongoing clear operations and objectives and team members. And, know, with smart marketer, had a big change because I was both the lead educator and also the lead kind of person who was doing strategy and content and all this stuff. And I found that as boom scaled and as zipify scaled,

48:13
I was no longer having time and energy to keep the courses up to date. And so with smart marketer, I’ve kind of transitioned to the main thing that we sell or the main thing people want to buy from us is training on paid advertising. And I’m really good at teaching that because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but Molly Pittman is also really good, if not better at teaching that. And so she’s now come on board to be the lead advertising educator, which has kind of freed me up. And then I’ve got Colleen Taylor teaching a course for me, Brett Curry teaching a course for me. So

48:42
Now with SmartMarketer, I’m no longer the one responsible for the courses, even though here and there I will do a course and I really like it, but it’s more like I am the guy who’s out there speaking on stages and generating awareness, because I can do that better than anyone else, getting people to know about us, and then the monetization or the product side of it is done by other folks, which is kind of cool. Okay, yeah, that makes total sense, Ez, I want to be respectful of your time here. We’ve been chatting for like 45 minutes.

49:11
Where can people find you? Where can people check out your products and see for themselves what you’ve been up to? That’s I got a little sidetracked there because I was going to go on another tangent about something. But go on the tangent. Go for it, man. Well, it just, you know, was going to say that I think what you do is super cool. You know, you do this podcast and you also run a bit. We have very similar businesses. And I think that this that in today’s world, anyone who wants to do something

49:41
and then talk about what they’re doing and share that and share tips has this opportunity to be an influencer. I mean, maybe a micro influencer, but an influencer to a group of people who are sharing a collective experience who are interested in getting better at that experience over time. And I think that there’s a lot of rewarding things that are available when you build a community around a given topic. not only can you monetize that community by selling products, but like then

50:07
you make friends with people in that community and like it’s just a super cool thing to do. And I just wanted to like anyone who’s listening to this, who maybe has considered the potential of putting themselves out there and starting a Instagram handle or a YouTube channel. Like I could not recommend it more highly. And, and you know, you’re talking from someone who’s pretty much introverted, even though that is not my public persona and I’m really good at turning it on on stage and being my authentic self and sharing that. like in general in my life,

50:35
I’m not like, if I get into a big room of people at a party, like I don’t know how to handle that situation super well. I like smaller groups, so I just think that this opportunity is available to anyone. I can definitely agree with that. Nothing ever bad has ever happened from creating content. Nothing bad can, only good things can happen. Totally. As long as you keep it up on a consistent basis. Consistency is the key. So you can reach me at

51:00
at Ezra Firestone on Instagram. That seems to be the hottest place right now. I can tell because it used to be when I spoke at events, I would get Facebook likes, know, a couple hundred Facebook likes. I don’t mention my, my, I don’t say go follow me, but I would just watch. And then like a couple of years ago, it was like all of a sudden I was getting followers on Twitter. And now every event, I literally get no Facebook followers, no Twitter followers, but I’ll get hundreds of Instagram followers. So it seems that Instagram is like kind of the go-to platform at the moment. So you can find me, uh,

51:29
at Ezra Firestone on Instagram or you can go to my blog smartmarketer.com or if you’re a Shopify person you can go to the Shopify app store and type in Zipify, Z-I-P-I-F-Y. You know it’s funny Ezra, we are very similar in what we do and SaaS is missing from my portfolio and I actually was thinking about doing a SaaS company for a long time but just after talking with you and a bunch of other people like my kids are my primary priority and it seems like it’s all consuming.

51:57
It’s in the first year to 18 months, it’s a very big cycle. But I will tell you, one of the ways to look at this, Steve, from one of the things I’m looking at, and I think this is the last run I will go on, but I think it’s really important. I think the game that we are playing is resource generation. And I think that a lot of people will say, what are we doing? Well, we’re optimizing our businesses so that they’re more profitable and perform better over time. But it’s like, yeah, but for what? To generate.

52:22
as much resource as we can in the time that we have to work and then to use that resource towards causes that we find noble, taking care of our families, supporting our communities, serving the world and taking care of the world. when we look at what are the most effective ways to generate resource, I’m looking at, most people look only three to six to nine months ahead. I’m looking at, I think you need to look further. I’ve got 20 years left at this pace. I’m 32, I’ll be 33 in a couple of months. I’m not gonna be working at this pace.

52:49
much later than my early 50s and then I’m going to be slowing way down, I think. So, okay, I got 20 years, right? And I have some high revenue goals and profitability goals and wealth creation goals because I have a lot of direct people in my family of where I was raised. I got 60 hippies to support. I got a lot of people I’d like to take care of. got a lot of things I want to do in the world that require large amounts of resource. So, as I understand it and have looked at the game of wealth creation, it’s

53:18
You know, cash flow businesses do not, will not get you there if the goal is massive amounts of wealth creation, which is a fun goal to have. And if you’re going to play the game, why not have that goal? So what gets you there is asset liquidation. So the monetization of assets that you own and have equity in, and then the deployment of that capital into the market to acquire other assets, let them appreciate and then liquidate those. And the most common way to do this in the

53:45
you know, 70s through today has been through real estate, right? Take your money, buy an asset, let it appreciate, sell it. But I think that, you know, the way that I am playing this game is to either purchase, operate and grow businesses and then liquidate them or build, operate and grow businesses and then liquidate them and then use that money to deploy in the marketplace. And when I looked at smart marketer, smart marketer is a cashflow business. You could never sell it. It’s built around my persona. So what was a way that I could

54:12
create an asset from this community that I have gathered around my persona who I am serving, well, Zipify could be sold one day. Zipify is an asset and the beauty of a SaaS business is the multiple that you will receive on the SaaS business is even higher than the multiple you receive on an e-commerce business because SaaS businesses are generally valued for a multiple of revenue, whereas e-commerce businesses are generally valued for a multiple of profit. So I do think at some point,

54:39
If you have the community and the desire and the skill set and the, you know, interest, it’s not a bad experiment because it would result in a very valuable asset, uh, even if it’s very small. mean, let’s say you built up a small little app that wasn’t super complex. You only needed a couple of developers for, and it only made a hundred grand a year. I mean, that could end up being worth between 500,000 and a million dollars free and clear liquid in your pocket. Uh, if you ever were to monetize that asset, which is a

55:07
a huge sum of money in liquid cash. especially considering even if you have a million dollars in liquid cash, you can put a hundred or two hundred of that thousand down towards the acquisition of an asset and take a loan. mean, it affords you opportunity that not having large sums of money doesn’t afford you. I know you already know all this, but I’m just saying it for the audience. And this is just something like our mutual buddy, Drew Sinaki does all the time. Exactly. So anyways, I think you should do it maybe someday.

55:35
Thanks, well we’ll catch up at the mini chat conference. I’m eager to hang out with you. Yeah, looking forward to it. Hey man, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot for coming on. Take care. Hope you enjoyed that episode with Ezra, which is actually one of the favorite ones that I’ve ever recorded with him. More information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 499. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting,

56:04
develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. That’s SellersSummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantity of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:59
I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th, and right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be.

01:28
For more information, head to SellersSummit.com. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon right now at 38 % off. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still redeem my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting.

01:55
when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now on to the show.

02:12
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have John Acuff on the show. Now, John is a New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including his latest book, which comes out very soon called All It Takes Is A Goal. Now having just published my first Wall Street Journal bestselling book, I’ve really come to appreciate how really incredible John’s accomplishments are as an author. He’s also one of Inc’s top 100 leadership speakers.

02:41
and has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences and events. And for the last 20 years, he’s actually helped some of the biggest brands tell their story, including Home Depot, Bose, and Staples. Now, clearly, John and I could talk about a lot of topics, but what we’re gonna talk about today is actually a problem that many of the students in my Create a Profitable Online Store face. It’s basically how to get off your butt and find the levers that you need to pull in order to take action.

03:11
And we’re also going to talk about how to tap into your massive potential. And with that, welcome to the show, John. How are doing today? I’m great. Thanks for having me. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Yeah, John, I know a lot about your books, but I actually know very little about your backstory. How did you blow up? And I know how hard it is to sell books. So how did you become a New York Times bestselling author?

03:31
Yeah, so I was in corporate marketing for about, I don’t know, 14, 15 years. I journalism major loved advertising. I’ve always loved the ability for copywriting to inspire action. I was an ad nerd. would, I would rip like before Pinterest, I would rip ads out of magazines and organize them in binders on my bookshelf. Like completely like there was an automotive section. There was a makeup section just cause I was fascinated by why did they write their headline that way? What does that mean?

04:00
So I love the written word. And when I was working at Auto Trader in Atlanta, I started a blog just kind of on a whim. And it was the first time I kind of realized, wow, there’s this whole other world out there and a lot of the gatekeepers are gone. Like for me to have an audience in the sixties, I would have had to have known somebody who owned a radio station. And for me to have an audience, you now I can just decide, I want to talk to people about these things I care about. So that’s really what started it for me. And it kind of grew from there where

04:29
The blog turned into a book, turned into some speaking, turned into some other opportunities. And so for the last 10 years, I’ve had my own business and I do primarily two things. I write books and then I go speak to companies about the books. What was the name of that blog? Well, the first blog I had was in 2001 and that was called, that was called Sweet Raymond and it was a music review blog. And it was, I, it kills me that we were like, ah, we quit it. Me and my buddy, Billy Ivy started it and we had a little bit of momentum, but you had to build it in Dreamweaver.

04:58
And it was impossible, dude. It was impo- and so like, I was an early slash lazy adopter. I was there kind of early, like a blog in 2021. Like if I was telling you today, I’ve been doing it for 23 years, but then we, did it for like a year, got a bunch of people to send us free music, which was like, oh my gosh. Like, and then I started a second one in 2008 called Prodigal John. And then a third one called Stuff Christians Like, which was a satire of, um,

05:27
growing up in a church, my dad’s a pastor, so I wrote about kind of the funny side of that. And then it just started to grow from there. And then Twitter kind of came on the scene. And as a headline writer, Twitter felt right in line with what I like to write, which is short, of hooky, sticky statements. So I felt like I got a 15-year education from Home Depot, Bose, Staples, these big brands on how to write tweets. And then all of a sudden, just like the world opened up. Nice. So you start out with the blog, built an email list, and then Twitter started blowing up.

05:55
Well, now it’s called a bill. No, you’re giving me credit. didn’t build. didn’t put enough into my email list. Like, so I would say like people sometimes will go, what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago? Please, please, please invest in email. Like, please for the love of like, please build an email list. Like I’ve, I have one, a great one now. I feel great about my email list now, but I think I wasted years chasing shiny forms of social media because they gave me these dopamine hits of immediacy. Like there’s a heart, there’s a like versus doing the slow

06:25
delayed gratification of building a really good email list. again, I’ve made up for it in some of my lost time, but yeah, that’s one of those things I always tell younger people especially like, don’t sleep on email, like don’t sleep on email, like do it. Yep. And this is just a random question. I came back from vacation a couple of weeks ago and discovered my Twitter app was named X. Are you still big on Twitter and where do you think it’s going?

06:50
No. So like in 2020, I deleted it from my phone, which was like heartbreaking for me because I just didn’t need that much anger in my pocket and I didn’t need that much anger in me. So like it was this circle of like, it just wasn’t healthy for me anymore. So I still use it on my laptop because that feel like when I’m out with my kids, Twitter was so easy to try to document a moment. And then I leave the moment and I could feel my wife, my kids be like, Hey, we’re here at this zoo. You’re writing what you think is a funny

07:19
tweet about a giraffe, we’re also here at the zoo. And so I still have it on my laptop. I still use it. I, you know, I don’t think threads is killing it. Like, don’t like so many people are like, this is the end. think we love to say things like that. I think it still has a future. I still enjoy it. I just, you know, for a couple years there, it just felt so toxic to me. And so like I had an interaction on threads the other day that kind of sums up how I think social media sometimes I posted a parenting tip.

07:49
I’ve got two teenage daughters. I’ve got a about to be 20 year old. She turns 20 tomorrow, which is crazy to me. And I’ve got a 17 year old. So I posted a tip about parenting and a single mom responded like with her version of it, like, well, here’s how this is impacting my life. She got three kids and then a dude who is like late twenties with no kids corrected her. And I was like, this is the problem. Like, and like he shamed her with his, like he was like, well actually, and I was like,

08:15
She’s a single mom with actual humans she’s raising. You’re a 29 year old with cool tattoos and a thread account, like stop it. So I think there’s some parts of social media that are like that and Twitter sometimes leans toward that, but I still like it as a concept that still think there’s tons of possibility there. Yeah, I’m not a big fan of social media. In fact, I don’t let my kids have a social media account. It just puts me in a bad mood sometimes. Yeah, yeah, it’s not a, I rarely

08:45
scroll and get happy. Like I rarely go, man, that was an hour well invested. And so my relationship with it is, I would say it’s medium hot right now. It’s not super hot. When Twitter first came out, was, man, I love tweeting. It felt like this whole new world. But now I’m kind of like, where do I need to draw healthy boundaries? And like to write books, like it takes me a long time to write books. And so I have to be like,

09:11
Something I often tell people is that time is our most valuable resource, but it’s also our most vulnerable. Like time can’t protect itself, only you can protect it. So that’s been part of my journey too, is as I want to write more books, I have to go find that time. And if I realized I was on Instagram eight hours last week, that was eight real hours I gave to something that wasn’t paying me. Like why am I doing that? Hey, so John, so I’ve been teaching

09:38
online business courses for over a decade now. And I really wanted your take and your philosophy on some of the most common psychological issues that my students face. And I do this all the time. I compare lists of my successful students versus the ones that really don’t go anywhere. Really? That’s how do you do that? I’m just curious. Like, is it like you have a list of people that you’re like killing it, killing it, killing it, killing it? Like, tell me about that. So every couple of years.

10:07
actually every year, I’ll send out a survey and see where people are at revenue wise. And a lot of these people I’ve noticed on these lists are people that I interact with regularly. I give live office hours every week. Gotcha. And then I also do one on ones with other students. And oftentimes I can tell within the first five minutes whether someone’s going to succeed or not. Just some of those signs. What are some of those like, okay, this is a red flag, a red flag is if they come on and they’re not prepared at all.

10:37
And they’re just wishy-washy. They didn’t watch a single lesson. They just come on, they go, hey, you know, I was hoping you could help me. Is this good? And you didn’t do your homework. Yeah. Right. And if you’re wishy-washy and you’re not and you’re all over the place, that’s another red flag for me. Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. So, for example, like if somebody though says, hey, we’ve got our one on one coming up. I want to use your this office hour.

11:05
and they come in and they have five pages of notes and specific questions and they like that’s somebody you go, okay, like they’re into this. They’ve got some skin in the game. I like that, but it also works in reverse. So sometimes, ironically, I think the engineers in my class are the worst ones because they want definite answers. So they’ll come with this book and they’ll come to office hours and whatnot. And they’ll say, I need to know this, this and this. I’m like, dude, you don’t even need to know that stuff. Just get started.

11:33
It’ll work itself out because you can’t prepare for any of that stuff. Right. Yeah, that’s interesting. My version of that is people want me to specifically tell them how many goals they should work on at any given time to say how many goals and they want me to say four point eight. Like that is the number. And the truer answer that I give, which is sometimes frustrating is as many as you can, like as many as you can do well. Like some people can they’re they’re in a zone and they can do 10 different things at a time. Some if it’s their first one, they need to start, get a little momentum.

12:03
You know, I so I totally get that. What are some of the things in your world they want specific answers on? How long is it going to take for me to make money? Yeah, how can I? How can I guarantee that this is going to work? How much does it cost? To start, how much can I like these are all questions that are very highly dependent on what you’re selling and there’s there’s too many variables. There’s not there’s not general answers or even specific answers until you know the situation and it’s going to change. It’s going to be fluid. Correct.

12:33
Yep. Anyway, my point is, is that I’ve just noticed running my class for last decade that most things are just completely mental, right? Another thing that I teach is rocket science. It’s not like you need a degree or anything. You just need to know how to sell stuff and it’s just people getting into their head. I would say the majority of the people though have problems getting started because you know, when you, whenever you start something new, there’s all this knowledge overload and you feel like you don’t know exactly which direction to go.

13:01
And even if you know which direction to go, it’s hard for people to get outside their comfort zone and actually give something a try. So question for you is everyone’s different, right? What are the steps that you would take to understand your own personality and then trick yourself into making forward progress? Well, I love a simple technique I sometimes use with people is to interview a previous win. So what I’ll see sometimes is people come to me and they’ll say,

13:30
John, I’m having a really hard time losing weight or getting in shape. And I’ll go, okay, well, tell me about a time when you did achieve a goal. Like, tell me about the time. And they’ll go, okay, you know what? I got out of debt like three years ago. And I’ll say, well, so what did you do? What were some of the factors? What were some of the tools that were helpful? And they’ll say, well, I was in like a small group where we met and we talked about it. And I had an envelope system that I used. And we printed out a picture of our car and we cut it up into 12 pieces. And every time we paid off a piece, we put the picture up and we…

13:59
We kind of built the car as we progressed. And I listened to radio stations about radio shows about it and podcasts. And then I’ll go, how many of those helpful things are you currently doing in your weight loss goal? And often they’re not doing any of those. So I’ll say, how do we translate some of those tools into this new goal? You might need to hire a coach. You might need a personal trainer. You might need Orange Theory because that’s a group of people that all work out at the same time and it becomes a community.

14:28
You might need a sticker system. You might need all these things. So a really easy way and it’s encouraging versus overwhelming is to go, tell me about something. And most people have done something. If you ask them enough ways and enough times, they can find something that’s gone well that they’ve, you know, I have a friend for instance, he’s thinking about doing a business, his own small business.

14:52
And I reminded him, he sold books door to door. Like he did that college book program, which is one of, my opinion, I’ve never done it. In my opinion, one of the hardest sales things in the world. You’re going door to door in an area you you’re not from selling a product that, you know, some would say is fairly archaic. Like you’re like, Hey, you know how you have Google? What if it was this? You know, like, and he made tons of money as a college student.

15:18
So part of my job in that moment is to remind him of that and then take some of the learning from that and apply it to the new thing. And then you’re, it’s like you’re automatically starting with a win. You’re not starting with this feels so massive. Yeah. I’m just trying to think about your analogy that you just gave. So right now I feel like I need to be running and the problem is I hate running. So every time I shut myself out and I run, I do this Hill and I hate every minute of it. And then I come back and I,

15:46
It feels good afterwards, but during sucks. And then the next week comes around and I have to do it again. And I just can’t get myself. Why does it have to be running? Like, why does it have to be running? It doesn’t, but that’s the most efficient way to get the most amount of exercise in the shortest period of time. It is. That’s true. It’s part of why I don’t, I’m not a cyclist because I have to do 30 miles of cycling to get three miles of running. But I, yeah, in a situation like that, I would specifically go, okay,

16:14
Does it have to be running? Can it be something else? And then you could say, well, it’s the most efficient. And then I’d say, well, can you like, if you gave it X amount more time, would you get X amount more joy? Like maybe there’s a joy, there’s a joy payoff. Like if it’s that miserable that you’re not doing it, it doesn’t matter if it’s the most efficient. It’s kind of like saying, I never eat Brussels sprouts, but I know they’re really, they’ve got the vitamins I need. go, well, do you eat them? go, no, I don’t eat them. But I know they’re like someday when I like, would say,

16:44
If you’re not doing it, doesn’t matter. It’s efficiency. It’s not being done. If you are doing it and you’re grumbling through it, but you feel really good after I’d go, well, if the payoff of the after is work it worth it, still do the thing. Like that’s, still worth the, I’m always trying to do that ROI of this thing I got is worth the work I put in and it like multiples of the work I put in. It’s not just a one-to-one. It’s like five X, four X, whatever. So it’s, it’s worth doing it. Like,

17:13
writing books is hard for me. it takes a really, and it is, it is. And if I, if I did probably an hour, if I broke it down hourly, what I’m paid to write them, there’s other ways to make more money. Like there just is, but I love the challenge I need. You know, I read a book called ADHD 2.0. It talked about the right kind of difficult. Your brain needs something that’s the right kind of difficult for me. Writing books is the right kind of difficult when I’m not actively writing.

17:43
I’m a much grumpier person. I’m a much more stuck person. for me, the challenge of writing the book, even though it’s really challenging, is worth the many, many forms of payoff I get for it. So I continue to do it.

17:58
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 eCommerce 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 attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

18:27
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. I mean, the students in my class clearly want to start a business that’s successful, but it’s hard, especially when you’re learning a bunch of new things and there’s a ton of variables. So I don’t know if that’s analogous to you writing a book, but whenever someone tries something hard, the tendency is to just kind of give up.

18:55
Like you try really hard for a short period of time, things don’t move and then you say, hey, why am I doing this? It’s not working. How do you get over that? Yeah. So for me, I expect it. go, every goal you go through a this is dumb anyway phase. Like it’s just gonna happen. So part of it is you think that’s not going to happen and then you feel surprised and feel like a failure. So I know in the middle of any goal, I’m gonna be like, this is the dumbest thing. Like why, who cares? Like, and I’m gonna start telling myself another story.

19:22
Like there’s a show called Alone. don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. love the show. It’s the best show. So you can always tell when somebody is preparing to quit. They do like the same four or five speeches. I had the producer of the show on my podcast. And so one angle is they’ll start to talk about the people at home that need them. So they’ll go, you know, man, my uncle, I just, I left my uncle. Like I don’t want to quit, but I know he’s somewhere. He’s got a bad foot. don’t want to.

19:47
What if he’s limping somewhere and I’m not there? Like they start. So that’s one of the stories. And so I think it’s the same with in the middle of a goal, you know, you’re going to have the, is dumb anyway story. So don’t be surprised by it. Be prepared for it. So one of the things that I think Steve happens is we think we’re going to maintain our motivation at a fairly reasonable level, the entire goal. And what I say is the opposite of that.

20:12
Motivation is the flightiest thing ever. It leaves on day two. Like when the work shows up, your motivation dissipates. And then the other problem is we think we’re going to have one form. So we have this like, I’ll find my why I’ll find my perfect thing. And that’ll propel me for 10 years. And what I teach instead is what about a motivation portfolio? What about like making a list of the things you can refer to, not just one or two, because some days like on my portfolio, my personal portfolio would be things like.

20:39
you know, showing my kids that they can do difficult things and showing my kids that like hard work is worth it. Some days I’m like, I don’t care. Like that’s not like my kids aren’t motivating me. Some days I’m like this music is some days I’m like this accountability, this mentor, whatever. Some days I have to go like 12 deep to find the reason I’m doing the thing. And I go, okay, that’s right. Some days I have to remember like my favorite thing, Jocko Willenick ever said was that if you’re going to procrastinate, procrastinate on quitting, tell yourself I’ll quit tomorrow.

21:08
I’ll give myself the ability to quit tomorrow because chances are by tomorrow you’ll be like, got a night’s sleep. had breakfast. Like I’m not quitting. So I, I am very serious about treating motivation as a skill that I can practice and add to versus going, I’ve got my motivation. Now let’s just hope it lasts because that’s just not, that’s just not how it works. And so for me, if you were trying to start a business, I would expect to think it’s dumb in the middle. I would expect to be discouraged.

21:37
I would expect for those things to happen. And then before I started, when I had the most natural motivation, I would try to fill my portfolio as full as I could for the journey ahead. Knowing that it was going talk about this portfolio. I mean, what does it look like? Yeah. So for me, it’s a, it’s a written down list. It’s a, I’m a notebook guy. I’m a paper guy. And so I have a bunch of notebooks. So like, I’ll have a notebook that I’ll keep kind of a running list of like, Oh, that was really fun. Oh, that was really cool. Like, Oh man.

22:07
Like, like think about it this way. I was, I was thinking about this. I asked an NBA coach or NBA trainer this the other day. I was like, how many minutes do you think Steph Curry has practiced? You’re on the West coast. Like you know, Steph Curry. And I said, will you do the math on that for me? He’s trained tons of NBA players. And he was like, in my estimate, 29,000 minutes, no, 29,000 hours, 29,000 hours. He said from six to 35 with an NBA dad. So he got an earlier start than some people, 29,000 hours.

22:36
And then you look up his stats and he plays what like 38 minutes a game maybe on a real like he’s traded eight like in a week, he probably practices 25 hours. And if they have three games, he had 90 minutes of court time. Like you go, well, that’s not like mathematically that doesn’t make sense, but he knows that like that 20 minutes, that four second shot is worth the 29,000 hours. So like that’s another big part of it is like.

23:03
If I have a really amazing event that goes well and I got to speak for 20 minutes, I’m writing that down on the list so that I remember. really feel like, scientists call it negativity bias. We have an ability to remember the negative moments easier than the positive. And so I work hard to remind myself about those positive reasons that I’m doing this difficult thing. I don’t hope I’ll remember because I know I’m not gonna. Like I know I’m not gonna. I, you know, people are sometimes surprised. I’m a naturally very negative person.

23:32
I’m super cynical. I’m super jaded. I’m pessimistic. Like I grew up in Massachusetts. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the Northeast. I don’t know. But I often tell people I’ve tested positivity and I’ve tested negativity and the ROI of positivity is so much better. So I just work really hard at it. don’t, you know, so I don’t wait to feel motivated. I don’t, I don’t wait to kind of keep going. I have to work on it. And somebody might look at me and go like, well, that’s a crutch. And I’m like, yeah, exactly. Like not even just a

24:01
crutch. Like I’m the guy that they pull down the ski hill, behind the, like behind the snowmobile and I’m all wrapped up and I’m like, I need that many tools to get through like this challenging stuff I’m doing. So I take a lot of the shame away for people to say, if you need additional ways to stay motivated during this challenging thing, this business you’re building, like go ahead and plan for that, like go ahead and that’s going to happen. And your version is going to be different than my version, but you, have a version. know a woman that one of her,

24:31
things for building a business was she said she was gonna buy a Louis Vuitton purse. Like once she made a certain amount of money, like that purse, that purse would do nothing for me. That would be wasted in my motivation portfolio. For her being in Paris, being on the streets, every time she saw one on another woman, it was like, hey, hey, hey, don’t forget. Like this is, you’re building this bit. Like that was amazing. Like that was, she probably got a thousand reminders to keep pushing on her business. She eventually got to do it.

25:01
So I just think you have to get creative with your motivation as creative as you get with building the actual business. You know what’s funny about what you just said? I was just thinking to myself in the beginning when I used to teach my class, it was all about motivation and, and you know, just, Hey, you can do this. You can do this. A couple of years ago, I took a different stance and I think it’s working. I went out and I gave a lecture and I said, Hey, this is going to suck. It’s going to take you longer than you think it’s going to be. And you’re going to, you’re going to witness these

25:30
what I call troughs of sorrow, right? When you’re doing really well, and then it’s gonna go down, then you’ll figure something out, it’s gonna go up and down. And I think that’s mentally prepared people to think and give a longer timeframe for success. And so they stick with it a little bit longer. What’s worse about today’s environment is there’s so many get rich quick schemes out there, where people expect to make money within like two or three months. And when they don’t, they’re like, oh, this must not be for me, I’m not doing something correctly.

25:59
Yeah, I did something wrong. Yeah, I think there’s the tension. I think for people who encourage other people is like, where’s that line? Because some people like, you know, if you look at motivation as a spectrum, there’s some people that want that. Hey, get out of bed. You got to get going like you got to do. It’s gonna whatever that you got it like that type of motivation. There’s other people where it’s like, hey, I want you to try one thing and then let’s be let’s be kind to ourselves about the progress like let’s.

26:28
And I just think there’s different ways different people are motivated. I don’t think it’s one size fits all. But one of the things that I say that relates to what you just said is that I say excellence is boring. Like excellence is boring. Like the things I do that contribute to my excellence are very like thank you notes. Like they’re not, they’re not exciting. They’re really not like getting somebody’s contact information and then making sure it makes it to my CRM system. Like when I get on a flight and I did it, like there’s like five little detail steps I have to do. It’s very, to me, it’s very boring. Like

26:57
being on stage, super exciting, but that was a fraction of what the whole experience is. So I just, try to set this, the, kind of expectation that way. And then I also, people say, how long will it take my business to be successful? And I say, I actually know the answer. The answer is longer than you want. Cause I’ve never met somebody who’s like, yeah, it was like, it took like five minutes. It’s crazy. Like I just, I just did it. It took five minutes. I think the challenge is social media gives us a lot of befores and a lot of afters, but not enough during.

27:27
Like we don’t have enough during. And I get it. Like when you post the during, people are like, eh, it’s kind of boring. Like, yeah, cause excellence is boring. like the stuff I, that’s why I like, I don’t do a lot on YouTube because the things I do for my business would make boring videos. Like today, if I, like I wrote for two hours by myself, if I set up a camera, like that, what would you watch? You would watch me be like, oh, that, no, that’s the wrong word. What am I, this story feels fake. What do I?

27:56
That wouldn’t be exciting. And so I just think we don’t show the boring stuff. And that’s unfortunate because most of it is boring stuff. I agree. My friends used to joke with me when I was an electrical engineer. was like, I was always like, hey, they should make a movie about engineers. And they used to make fun of me. It just be like this dude typing in front of a computer. Yeah, that way. And for like two hours with like some sad song and then you like it’d be the national and then you’d go.

28:23
Then you go back to your car and be like, all right, did my job today. Yeah. Let’s talk about breaking out of your comfort zone. I actually have mixed feelings about this term because I seek comfort actually in everything that I do. Right. I like everything to be in steady state in a place where I can just maintain it indefinitely and not have to worry about anything like I optimize for stress. So when someone tells me to go outside of my comfort zone, I resist.

28:53
But I know it needs to be done. So what are just some ways to encourage not only me, I guess we can turn this into my own self-help session. other people. Let’s fix Steve. What are some of your tactics for doing that? Well, to the phrase comfort zone, I always tell people like use the phrase that works for you. So if your version of that is I want to be comfortable, I don’t want to be stuck, call it the stuck zone. Like sometimes people say, what’s the difference between a habit, a goal?

29:21
And like, I don’t care about the word. I care about the results. Like so, cause I heard somebody say like, Oh, I don’t believe in goals. And I was like, what do you believe in? They’re like, believe in commitments. And then they described what was exactly a goal. So some of the words, but I think we’re talking about the same thing of like the moments when I’m stuck, when I’m in a rut, when I’m in a funk, like you can use whatever phrase to describe that. Um, I just mean you’re, you’re being less than the Steve you’re capable of being. Um, there’s, there’s more to you there. Um, and you can still perform it.

29:51
you can still be high performing in a relaxed state. Like I think the times I’ve tried to create out of stress, the creation is not as good. Like the times I’ve written things out of stress, it just has a texture that’s not helpful to people. Like I think you can tell that. I think you can tell when somebody, I think there’s a difference between having urgent information and frantic information. And so like there’s people that I respond like, oh man, that was urgent. They really wanted me to get that idea.

30:17
That felt frantic and manic and like there was so much stress that I don’t feel like I can learn from that person because they feel like they’re living in perpetual stress. And that’s not what I want in my life. But as far as getting out of the comfort zone, um, I always say nobody willingly leaves the comfort zone and they shouldn’t because it’s comfortable. Like, why would I, why would I leave that? You have to trick yourself out of the comfort zone. You have to create something that’s worth leaving the comfort zone. So my personal example,

30:45
which is really where I started kind of building my own business. When I lived in Atlanta and I started to blog, I didn’t wake up one day and say, today I’m going to be disciplined. Today I’ll get out of my comfort zone. Today I’ll have grit and persistence or whatever. I just started this small experiment called blogging and I really liked it. And I liked it so much. I wanted to do more of it. And the way to do more of it, cause I had two kids under the age of four and a young wife and a Atlanta commute and a full-time job and freelance clients, the way to do more of it was for me to get up earlier.

31:15
So desire drove that change, not discipline. I thought about time like logs and like each hour I threw at the project was like throwing a log into a fire and the fire just got bigger and bigger and bigger. So for me getting out of the comfort zone, I’ll often say to somebody, well, what do you want? Like what would make it worth it? What’s something outside the comfort zone? Like what’s the challenge you’re trying to fix or the thing you’re trying to win? And if I can get them thinking about that,

31:44
then leaving the comfort zone isn’t a challenge. You want the thing you, you know, it matters more than these other things that maybe, you know, for me, like think about, I think about my job. I love speaking on stage. Like I feel so honored that I get to do that. I don’t love, uh, delayed flights. I don’t love airports, airports assault every sense, like every single sense. I don’t love missing flights. There’s a million parts of it that I don’t love.

32:12
But the thing I love is so strong. Like I’m a homebody. My wife, it’s so funny. I don’t like if somebody invites us to a new restaurant, I’m like, well, what’s the parking going to be like? What are we talking about? it a valet? Like, is it on street? What are we talking about? Like I have all this anxiety about that. Like, cause I’d like, I don’t want to get out of my comfort zone. I don’t like, and then when somebody says, Hey, we want you to come to Omaha, Nebraska, you’re going to rent a car. You’re going to go to a city you’ve never been to. You’re going to have to connect. Like, would you do that? I’m like, yeah, I’ll do that. And she always laughs like,

32:43
I can tell you love it because of all the things you do that you don’t normally do. And so that’s what I try to help people with the comfort zone is like, why, like, how can we find something you love that you that you’d willingly leave the comfort zone and you’d and you’d leave it in a way where it was small enough that it was easy to do. And then it started to build momentum. And then before you knew it, like I, one of the lines I sometimes tell people is like, I want you to find something you love so much. Netflix is boring.

33:09
Like if I’ve done my job, I’ve helped you find something you love so much that Netflix just gets boring. All these other distractions get boring. Like you’re not on social media bunch for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is you have stuff you love doing and you go, no, like I’m helping students. Like, like I’m doing all these other things that are more exciting and fulfilling for me than social media. So that’s not a difficult choice. Let’s use the analogy of business here. So you want to make money.

33:38
and you’re excited by making money, but the process of doing that is not, you kind of have to take a leap of faith, right? When you started your blog, was it hard to write? No, no, felt like I’d been stuck for years and I had all these words. So the writing wasn’t hard. The making money part was still challenging. like sponsors, stuff like that. There was a lot of things I didn’t know how to do. And so

34:06
those parts were hard. The actual content wasn’t challenging to me because I felt like I was tapping into something that I really wanted to do. And I think that’s the same with small businesses where if it’s something you really care about, there’s a natural obsession that starts to take over. Like I watched a video the other day where this guy reviewed his five favorite types of socks from these like obscure sock manufacturers, because that’s his business. And I was like, man, this guy went real like real nerded out on socks.

34:36
So I think like for me, there’s a ton of people that would say, you um, I started the business that had the most potential profit. I don’t really care about owning car washes, but it had the most potential. I think that’s great. If you’re motivated by that, go for it. Like own 50 of those. think there’s other people who are creators where they’re like, this is a thing that I care about on a creative level and I want to do it and I want to turn it into a business. think those are two very different expressions of business.

35:05
And you got to kind of figure out which one you fit into. One thing that happens to me is I, I feel like I’m not meeting my full potential. And then I just started saying yes to everything. And all of a sudden I’m over committed. It’s kind of how I felt last year when I was launching my book or earlier this year. And I ended up in this like seesaw of, you know, feeling complacent and really kicking butt, but like not being happy with all the things that I’m assigned. How do you find the balance?

35:35
Well, I think you find the balance daily. I think it’s I had a I had a friend David Thomas He’s a therapist here in Nashville and he said the problem is people want there to be a switch They’re looking for a switch I do the thing and it switches off the stress it switches off the out of balance switches off the negative thoughts I have whatever and he says so you’ll see people jump from switch to switch to switch They’ll go I did yoga yoga is the new thing or I did but like I launched this thing. I’m gonna this is the new thing

36:03
and it works for a week, maybe even two weeks, maybe even a whole month, but eventually life gets stressful again, the world gets loud again. And he said, life is more of a dial than a switch. When it gets dialed up, you have to dial it back down. You have to use turn down techniques to turn it back down. So for me, I know I can start to feel when I’m out of balance. I can start to feel when I’m not writing it as much anymore. I don’t have time for it. I’m so busy. I don’t have time for writing.

36:30
I’m short with my wife and kids. I’m not interruptible. As I’m working, if my kids can’t interrupt me or my wife can’t interrupt me, I feel thin. My favorite description of being overwhelmed is I’m so nerdy. is Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings says he feels like too little butter spread over too much toast. I remember that mental image of that scraping of trying to…

36:57
I’ll have moments where my dials turned up like that and I have to start saying no to stuff and I have to start doing things differently and I have to start relooking at why I’m doing it in the first place. And then the other thing is like, I’ll do exercises. So an exercise I do occasionally is I’ll make a list of the things I do that are important and the things I’m doing because they make me feel important. It makes me feel important at a meet at a dinner party, be like, okay, 10 people on staff. Like, but

37:25
Is that important for me to have 10 people? Could I have four people? Could I have five people? Like it makes me feel important to say, oh, you should talk to my COO. And like, do I, do I need a COO? Like am I building a business that has that, that real need and it’s beneficial. So I’m often going, okay, where am I doing things out of ego versus out of I’m supposed to do them. And a lot of times I’m, you know, it’s, it’s wrong. And then the last thing I do is I try to practice self-awareness and my version of self-awareness. One of them is overhearing yourself.

37:55
when you can overhear the things you’re saying. And I’ll get into this rhythm where I can start to do that and I’ll notice on go, Oh, I didn’t like how that sounded. It came from me. Like I didn’t like the person that said that, Ooh, I took some steps down a path. didn’t intend to go down. So an example, or, or I’m limiting myself. An example of that would be just the other day, I caught myself saying to somebody, I’ve plateaued on my speaking fee because I’m not a celebrity and celebrities like you win a super bowl. can make

38:23
10 times what I make as a keynote and talk about throwing touchdowns. And I was like, so I’ve plateaued. And then I teach these three questions in this book, Soundtracks, wrote that say, it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind? Is it true that celebrities make great keynotes? It is. That’s true. Is it helpful for me to say that to myself again and again? It’s not because what I’m doing is saying, so therefore you don’t have to work hard. Therefore you can, like it’s over, whatever.

38:50
And so instead I switched it around and said, I’m going to make my content and my customer service so great that I get around the celebrity obstacle. I get around that. And so when you work with students, I guarantee you hear them say things like that, where you say, I think you should try this. And if they come up with their five excuses, you know, okay, they’re, so committed to the excuses. Like gay Hendrix. Yeah, I’m not tech savvy.

39:17
I’m not good at video. I don’t have a big network. I don’t live in a big enough city. You know, like I’m not an expert in 10 years. could be maybe do this, but like Gay Hendricks, who wrote the big leap says I get to keep the limitations I fight for. So if I fight for my excuses, if I fight for my limitations, get to keep them. So I’m trying to constantly like keep my finger on the pulse of that and go, okay, where am I at a balance or where am I stressed in the wrong way? What can I do about that?

39:47
Yeah, one thing that I’ve started doing, what’s funny is I started out teaching this class, but it’s turned out to be like a psychological class. You know, just dealing with the way people work. And what I found is that if you can get someone to just do a little teeny thing, like you don’t tell them all the work that needs to be done up front, you tell them to do a little bit. And then over time, you get used to doing that little bit of work on a regular basis. And then you can just gradually add on to it. And an example for me was I remember this was like 10 years ago.

40:16
Ramit Sethi came on stage. He told us all the things he was doing with email and his autoresponders. I’m like, oh man, that’s overwhelming. And so I went up to him I was like, how do I, it just seems so overwhelming to implement all that stuff in one go. He’s like, oh no, no, no, just start by sending out one email a week. And I’m like, oh, okay, I can do that. And then gradually, it’s just like one video a week for YouTube or one blog post a week. And then gradually I’m used to that. And then I can increase it just a little bit. And before you know it,

40:46
I’m writing all the time or putting out all the time. A hundred percent. I think that’s, you know, the way I sometimes describe that is if you think about a goal, like a ladder, most people only have two rungs. So imagine a 12 foot tall ladder. There’s one rung at the top that says make a million dollars in my business. And there’s a rung at the very bottom that says, start my business. And there’s no rungs in between. So the person sits there and goes, okay, I just have to jump up 12 feet, which is two feet higher than a basketball room. Grab that rung and pull myself up where my approach is more.

41:16
What if we put a rung every six inches? Like, could you climb to the top of that ladder? And they’ll go, yeah, that would be really easy. And sometimes they feel it’s too easy and that’s self-sabotage and there’s all these things, but I’ll go, let’s figure that out. Like, how do we add some rungs to that? Which are those little things like Rameet? He didn’t say to you, you just got to get it together, Steve. Like, don’t be lazy. He was like, no, just, just do this, you know, and here’s, and plus like in a speech, somebody’s experience is condensed. Like,

41:43
You’re often looking at nine years in 30 minutes and you forget that. Like, you know that intellectually, but you forget it in the moment. And the other thing is I wouldn’t have done half the hard things I’ve done if you told me how long it would take and how hard it would be at the beginning. If somebody at the beginning, like I got to speak at this event called global leadership summit, which was amazing. It was so fun. And it probably took me 12 years to get on that stage, like 12 years. that like, but if, if you had told me at the beginning of that, like, Hey,

42:12
you’re going to get to do this really fun thing. It’s going to take you a dozen years. That would have been so demoralizing to me. And I wouldn’t have been able to receive that and certainly been encouraged by that. the little one email is to me, it’s just another rung on the ladder. And that’s why I tell people all the time, like, want to start a business. And you’re like, what would it look like to spend half an hour thinking about what type of business it would be? Or what would it look like to spend, know, because what’s funny is

42:40
I’ll have people say to me about business. They’ll go, I want to start a business, but what if I get sued by one of my customers? And I’ll be like, do you, do you have a product yet? And you’re like, no, Mike, do you have a customer yet? And they’re like, no. I’m like, well, that we can’t, let’s not fix a fictional problem. Let’s go. Like we don’t even have that problem. They’ll say, what if I sell out? What if the product sells out? And I go, do you, do you have like a storefront yet? And they’re like, no, but what if like, and all these people are mad at me you’re like, they don’t exist yet. Like.

43:09
let’s figure it like, let’s do the first thing and then we’ll get to that. But I think sometimes we fantasize about future problems that prevent us from taking like today steps. What if someone copies my product is a big one. I’m like, well, if they’re copying it, then that means it’s selling well. You’re doing well. what if somebody steals? Yeah, I on the writing front, people say, what if somebody steals my ideas? And I do you ever see a read Derek Sievers book? I think it’s anything you I have. So his metric, his thing in there, I think it was in that book.

43:39
where it’s idea times execution. So the idea is worth one and the execution is worth 10. So he’s like, most people will never execute your idea. Don’t even worry about it. Everybody has ideas. They don’t execute them and they certainly don’t execute them faithfully and consistently. So don’t worry about that. So that always makes me think, oh yeah, I don’t need to worry about that. If somebody does that, they’re probably not going to.

44:07
go as long as I go on this. Like they’re not going to put 10 years in. So it’s not a big deal. Yeah. John, it’s funny. When you’re talking about evaluating, you know, what’s on your plate and that sort of thing. Why does the world need another book? All it takes is a goal. You’ve already hit, I mean, you hit the New York Times bestseller list, which is like the pinnacle for an author, right? But you continue writing these books that are amazing. What motivates you to write this book? Tell us about this latest edition that’s coming out, I think in like a month, right?

44:37
Yeah, it comes out of September whenever I don’t know when this is going to air, but it comes out September 12th. So here’s how I, this is my, like, this is my Venn diagram for starting a business or writing a book. And I’m sure you might have different things you tweak, but I look for three things. I look for a personal connection that I’m deeply passionate into the idea. Like I, I have to be personally connected to the idea. The second thing I look for is a need like

45:04
Is there a real need for it? So for instance, am I hearing about it from neighbors at the pool? Am I seeing it online? Like, am I seeing clients ask me about it when I go speak at their companies? And the third thing I try to find is, is there a spot for me in the marketplace? Like, can I fit in in the marketplace somewhere? So the thing I’ll sometimes say is, if you have a passion and there is a need, but it’s already over-served in the marketplace, that’s a cake pop. Like if somebody told me like, hey, I got this crazy idea I’m going to do, it’s called cake pops. I’d be like, oh.

45:33
They’re already at Starbucks. Like you’re late to that. If you have a crazy passion, nobody’s serving it in the knee in the marketplace, but nobody needs it. That’s a hobby. Like I love that you’re into ferrets, but like there’s not a huge need for that. And if you have a need in a marketplace, but no passion, you just built yourself a day job. and you’re not going to. So with this book, I went and dropped, uh, brought my daughter, my oldest daughter to college for a tour. was a college I went to college. My wife went to, and we’re walking around and my wife is like,

46:00
wasn’t college amazing. I was like, no, it was a train wreck. Like it was horrible. Like I, I wasted so much of my time there and, I was having this real moment of regret. Um, and so then I, when I drove back to Nashville, because I just written this book about mindset, I was like, well, let’s change that mindset. That was four years. I might live 40 or 50 more. What can I do with those? Is there a way to live into your potential? Like on purpose? Like, what does that look like? And so then I had the first piece, which was passion. And then the second piece was need.

46:28
I’ve got this PhD who’s a professor here in Nashville and he and I did a survey with 3000 people and said, are you living up to your potential? And 96 % said no. And 50 % said 50 % of them was untapped. So then I had the need. So then I went to the marketplace, which is pretty easy for me, which is usually just Amazon. I realized there’s a ton of books about potential, but a lot of them are very high level and very holistic. And they kind of like, they say things that you go like, what do I do with that? And my, my

46:58
content I try to create is I’m always trying to answer the question for people, what do do with this on a Tuesday? Like, what do do with this on a Tuesday? How do you actually put this into, you know, into action? And so I felt like I had the three things. And so the quick answer to why does the world need another book is like, I needed another book first. And then I tested to see if my audience needs that book. And then I tested the ideas with hundreds of people first. So that, that’s what’s changed about my writing process as a, I think, and I think you would probably agree with this, like,

47:28
I live in Nashville. You’d agree with that because I do. That’s true, Steve. I don’t know why you’re being argumentative, but to be a long-term musician in Nashville, you eventually had to be an entrepreneur. Like you eventually have to have some business acumen. like Taylor Swift is a brilliant CEO. Like she’s doing so many smart things. Garth Brooks is a CEO. My friends who are musicians who never caught the big break, but still have full-time careers.

47:57
are entrepreneurs, like they look at it like a business. I think about writing that way too. So I now know like one of the things that’s helped me is instead of releasing a book and hoping the ideas work, I test them in online communities. I have hundreds of people poke holes in them and go as a single mom, this isn’t how I’d look at it. As a retiree, this is not how. And so by the time the book comes out, there’s 30 to 40 real people in it other than me. Like you’re right.

48:22
I don’t need to write another book that’s kind of like a memoir. I’m 47. This is my ninth book. Like get over yourself at some, like what, what new part of my life I’m going be like, Oh my gosh, you need to see this side of me. But what I can do is say, here’s a challenge I face. Wow. A lot of people face it. I think there’s a fresh way to talk about it. Let’s go. I will say this, you know, when I first saw the title, if I didn’t know you and your history, and if I saw it for the first time, I would have been like, Oh, okay. Uh, you know, all it takes is a goal, but.

48:52
What I really like about your writing is you make it really fun. You tell stories. I ended up chuckling a couple of times reading the book too. let’s go, Steve. Let’s go. It’s hard to make me chuckle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He’s a steel. He’s a certain Asian man. Yeah. He’s, he’s an electrical engineer. He’s not here for you, for your riddles and your limericks. And I just love books about psychology, right? Because we’re all in our own have you read lately that you love?

49:19
Like what would have been the family first entrepreneur? hear that’s a great book. Nice. Nice. My favorite all time book actually is a influence psychology. yeah. By Chaldini and how to win friends and influence people. Uh, any book like that. I love, actually really like Michael Hyatt’s recent book also. Oh really? I forgot what it’s called. Make your mindset. I have it up in the back here. Yeah. It came out like six months ago. I mind your mindset. That’s what it was.

49:49
Basically how to reframe the narrative that that’s in your head because we all have narratives in our head. Yeah. I’m just a head case, John. I think that’s what it is. anything that can are you were you unusual in engineering that like that you cared about that stuff? Well, you know, what’s funny is I always hated the stereotype of being an engineer, you know, that we just heads down. But I was I was a stereotype. was heads down. The computer was my best friend. Yeah, but

50:18
Everyone always thought that I was more social than the average engineer. And I didn’t start embracing that until I started getting into business. Yeah, that’s interesting. yeah, I guess I’m always curious about what different types of books different types of people read. And you and I read a lot of similar books, but we have very different backgrounds. So that’s curious to me. Yeah. Yeah. mean, just the whole, maybe I should have majored in psych and not electrical engineering. Who knows? Okay. Well, let me ask you a question. So you know a little about what I do.

50:49
From an outside business perspective, what would you do differently? As you? Yeah. Well, I mean, we’re different people for, and I know you have courses. So for me, I, I don’t necessarily like doing customer service. So, which is why everything I do is kind of online, right? So we sell handkerchiefs and linens in our e-commerce store. That’s all online and the customer services through email and you know, it’s easy to, to farm out online course, one to many, it’s the same thing, right?

51:18
People are digesting the same amount of material. And I run customer service just once a week, pretty much in live office hours where I just answer questions in real time. Smart, smart. I found writing my book to be one of the most challenging things because I was under the impression that you put the book out there and if people love it, it just kind of sells itself. get it, dude. Selling books is hard in my opinion, but I don’t know. I didn’t realize that

51:48
It was harder to sell a book than it is like a $2,000 course. Which doesn’t make sense because the book is $19. But what you’re selling is actually work is what I discovered, right? Like people would rather watch a movie or video than read. At least my folks, I don’t know about yours. Well, the thing I’ll tell would be authors is walk down a plane and like the aisle of a plane in the middle of a flight and count open books versus open videos.

52:17
and then cry in the bathroom a little bit. And then, or I’ll say, go to Barnes and Noble and count the number of Harry Potter collectibles and puzzles versus like there’s been a, like it’s been growing the toy section of Barnes and Noble. So yeah, think it’s books are books can definitely be challenging, but I, what’s interesting to me from a business perspective is I sell two and a half times as many audio books as I do eBooks. And that’s been a change that I’ve noticed for the first time in the last like two years.

52:46
And I think it’s because of podcasts. think podcasts taught people there’s great content via audio and now more people are going to audiobooks. I read like from a business perspective, I read my own audiobook and I add 10 bonus stories. So that because there’s people that will be like, Oh man, I got the print book. Why would I get the audio book? And I want to be able to say, Oh, there’s a, there’s a whole other, you know, exploration in there. You should check that out. So I’ve over the years, that’s been a shift for me. You know, what’s funny is

53:14
I tried to veer from the script, but the director refused to let me say what I wanted to. As I was recording. to riff a little bit? I wanted to riff a little bit and I wanted to add a couple extra stories just kind of off the cuff. But I guess it depends on the director. me, like I’ve done it two or three books and we saw some success with it. So I felt like I had a little bit of an ability to say like, hey, here’s how, like, let’s try this. And I didn’t have a director. I had an audio engineer. I’ve had directors on different books.

53:44
But for the last two, was mostly an audio engineer and they were super like, yeah, dude, let’s do it. Let’s make it. So like, didn’t feel, you know, and there’s words I can’t say lie. Like I had to change rural road to country road. Cause I couldn’t say rural road. Like it’s hard. Like audio books are hard to record. So it’s fun that we have that in common that that’s something we’ve both kind of looked at. So do you sell more audio books than hardcover? Is hardcover last?

54:11
Unless the hard covers first. So I would say like if we broke it down, I would say right now it’s out of 10 books, seven print, three audio, one ebook. Like that’s the breakdown right now. So no print is still, but you have to remember I am a corporate speaker. So I’ll have, you know, I’ll go to an event and a corporation will buy a thousand paper back or paper hard, hard backs. So no, they never go.

54:39
We gave everyone in the audience a code to redeem, to get an audio book. like the nature of my business leans toward hardbacks. That makes sense. That makes sense. I wonder, I wonder how it works in just traditional online sales, not, not bulk buys. Yeah, I don’t know. I still think print is number one. It might not be as big a gap as mine, but I still think from what I’ve seen in authors I’ve talked to print is still we, you know, 20 years ago, we were like, the ebook’s going to kill print. Like it hasn’t, it’s been a slow death.

55:09
And it hasn’t happened yet. ebooks have gone down. yeah, there’s less. Yeah. So like, again, audiobooks, I think are eating ebooks lunch right now. Hey, John, I feel like I could talk you forever. we Yeah, it’s fun, Yeah, we appreciate you coming on. The book is available at every major retail store, I would imagine. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And you can johnacuff.com is my website and my podcast is called All It Takes is a Goal. So yeah, that’s where you find and I highly recommend it for anyone out there who’s

55:37
just looking to take some action and looking to trick yourself really into making forward progress. that’s good. Yeah, I like that phrase. That’s fun. Thanks a lot for coming on. Thanks for having me on, Steve.

55:52
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now, if you are having problems making forward progress with anything that you want to do, try some of the strategies in this episode and feel free to reach out. More information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 497. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event.

56:21
That’s over at SellersSummit.com. If you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuoterJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:29
Phil and I are going to discuss the single most important thing that will grow your business this year. But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Chase Diamond for sponsoring this episode. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing, and he runs a successful email marketing agency over at Structured Agency, which caters to many eight and nine figure e-commerce brands. Now, for those of you who can’t afford to hire an agency, Chase offers a pretty good email marketing course if you want to learn how to do email yourself.

00:57
And this course can be found over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. I also want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. Now if you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at bumblebeelenons.com. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council,

01:24
is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. For example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. And the students in my class have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to emergecouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you,

01:54
you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now onto the show.

02:07
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. Today I have a very special guest on the show, Phil Taylor. Now Phil’s a longtime friend and he’s been creating content about personal finance probably for over a decade now. He runs the popular conference FinCon, which is one of the largest financial influencer events in the U.S. where I had my very first speaking gig and Phil took a chance on me as a speaker and I’m extremely grateful because

02:35
That experience actually made me super excited to speak on stage and at FinCon, I also met my mastermind group who is instrumental in helping me grow my blog to where it is today. And as a result, I owe a lot to this guy, man, and I’m thrilled to have him back. What’s up, PT? I owe a lot to you too, Steve. It’s good to be on with you, So the last time you were on, which was, man, years ago, I want to say FinCon was not nearly where it is today.

03:04
And I’m just curious how it’s evolved over the years. It’s been like 10 years, right? The event where we started in 2011. So what is that 12 years? Yeah, 12. Yeah, crazy. Yep. No event in 2020. Unfortunately, we did a digital one that year. But yeah, I think this will be our 12th or 13th. Oh, I’ve stopped. I’ve stopped keeping count. Oh, past 10. It’s like, who cares, right? I’m not there yet. I think I’m at year eight. And that

03:29
That pandemic year was really tough for me too, but let’s not talk about that year. Yeah. So a lot, a lot has changed. started in 2011 with 200 people. It was a side hustle for me. I didn’t know anything about events, but I had friends who knew about it and I’m better, better. I more importantly, I should say I had a community of people who were ready to get together. And if you go back and listen to the first podcast, I mean, that’s the first big nugget that I’m going to give you back then is if you’re going to be in events.

03:56
have people ready that want to be together. That’s the easiest way to do them. And I knew that. I knew that it was a great community. Started with about 250 people that first year. And yes, we’ve grown it to a high water mark in 2019 of around 3000. which is nuts. Yeah. It’s a great run there. We’re sort of post pandemic now and growing things back. We hope to reach back up to around 2000 mark this year. So we’ll be in New Orleans for our 12th and that’s in October. And,

04:26
You know, we’ve done a lot of iterations through the years. I’ve tried to evolve with the industries. We can talk about some of that. Um, we’ve got a fantastic community that we tried to shepherd through the years, but how has it changed? would just say the biggest probably change we’ve had is me moving the event from just bloggers because initially it was called the financial blogger conference. don’t even know if you remember that. So someone like you sort of was on the.

04:54
sort of the outskirts of that community to a degree. And so you might’ve perceived it as necessarily not for you, but you knew it was for someone specifically, which helped us to grow it. But then we quickly expanded sort of the umbrella, the tent, and it became ThinkCon, which really stands for financial content expo these days. And that could be a blogger, it could be a podcast or YouTuber, anyone really creating content around the idea of improving your financial life. And that can expand into

05:24
business and real estate. so that’s the biggest change, I guess, is the growing scope of it. Um, and then continuing to change that as we’re entering sort of this creator economy where everything is really sort of podcast and YouTube driven. Um, we really want to move the conference and that continue moving in that direction. So just trying to evolve the event, you know, from a scope standpoint. Yeah, you know, uh, I think I, missed the very first year.

05:51
I came the second year and I haven’t missed one since I don’t think and what I noticed is like it basically replaced blog world. Do you remember blog? That was a great event. I love that event. Yeah. And all the sessions were about how to content and everything. So I want to feel like FinCon has replaced blog world in a way it has. Uh, I saw it initially as a niche down version of blog world, right?

06:17
So, but what we ended up doing because the FinCon community was so great was just making a fantastic event that even people from other niches were excited to come. So we started having people from travel, from the entrepreneurship side. I mean, just really people were attracted to the community and this cool event that we created. And yes, I was a huge fan of what Rick Calvert built with Blog World Expo. think the last year he called it New Media Expo or something like that, because he was trying to make that scope change as well.

06:45
You know, not the, I don’t know the details of, of why, you know, he shut that event down, but I know that for me, it was finding that niche. so even having created FinCon, I now see other event owners create niches within our community and spin off events. So it’s just a natural evolution of gathering people. Uh, the bigger that gathering becomes, the more likely it is that a group within that group is going to then peel off and find their own thing too. Um, so.

07:14
That’s just kind of how events work. So it’s funny is you were pretty instrumental in helping me start my event. I have chosen to keep my event small just because I miss, you know, just small. I like small events over large ones, but I am curious. How does one grow an event to 3000 people? That just sounds ridiculous to me. Just the logistics gives me a headache. Actually, how did that happen? Yep. So for me, I always

07:40
I didn’t necessarily want to have a big event just to have one, even though that does improve the margins of the event and makes it more profitable. Um, but I always perceived it as our community needs a bigger event because our industry continues to grow. And so I’m not the person on stage, give it, doling out the advice. You know this, I, you know, get guys, smart guys like Steve to get up there and talk about, um, what they’re great at. And, and that’s what makes the event great. So.

08:09
Uh, if I’m not the talent, then the community is bringing that talent, but more importantly, the community wants to place to come and do deals. They want a place to come and do business at the event. And so financial creators are looking for brands to work with on a regular basis. And so this gives them a chance to work with those brands face to face, you know, be at a party together and sit down at a meeting table together and talk about like how their content could work with their brand and strike up a real deal face to face.

08:38
Not this cold emailing, you know, trying to hit people up on Twitter if you’re for a new creator. So the idea for me has always been about like creating these partnerships. And so if we want to create these partnerships, well, then it kind of matters. Uh, that we get a, there are all the right people that we, need the industry there from a brand side. And then from the creator side, we sort of need everyone there. So that’s been my natural push to grow it. And yes, you, you should be, you should.

09:05
be strategic and intentional about whether you want to grow it or not. Uh, and, and, sort of understand that that’s what you want. So for me, it was all about growth because our industry was growing. So how did we grow it? Uh, I wrote an article, um, post and go check it out on PT money.com. It’s, it’s, uh, essentially seven ways to grow your business. And I sort of tried to apply this to any business, but the examples I use primarily were how we grew FinCon. Um, and so if you want, I could just go through each of those points and we can hit on them and kind of.

09:34
kick them back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s do that. And I’ll post actually the the link to that article below. One thing I just wanted to say was, I remember I was just getting started blogging. And I wasn’t even writing about personal finance. I was writing about business. And I walked into FinCon. And I think I secured a bunch of sponsorship deals, like right on the bat. So I got I think, Hostgator to sponsor my or I can’t remember what the hosting company was just to sponsor my podcast. And then I got like a couple banks to

10:03
to pay me to just promote their bank. And yeah, it’s like a great place to monetize whatever you’re trying to do. So I really appreciated that too. that’s good to hear. That was definitely the goal. So cool. So number one, number one way, just more context. During the first seven years of Vincon, I took it from around $100,000 in top line revenue to over a million. So it was seven years to a million dollars. And so that adhered these seven points I’m gonna give you. Perfect, right?

10:33
Okay. The first one is, uh, make the product better for us. We were, we had the, we had the posture of continuous improvement with our event. So every year I wanted to improve it. the challenging thing with events is that you have to kind of wait 11 months to kind of improve it or show the improvement, but that was the goal every year. Just make it better. Just make it a little bit better. So as you think about your business, um, have that growth mindset, have that, uh,

11:02
mindset of trying to improve upon what you build before you go expand into other things. Just take this one thing you’re doing and try to make it as good as possible, right? And how do you get those ideas to improve it? How do you understand what you need to improve? Because what is good, right? The way we did it is from user feedback. So we actually polled, regularly poll our attendees, post conference, sometimes free conference, to try to understand what they want out of the event, what they’re getting out of.

11:31
how they’re liking certain aspects of the event. So I think it’s Sam Walton who said something like, the boss, there’s only one boss in your business and it’s the customer. Right. And so I think that’s a good posture that we tried to take was there. This community is going to help us drive this event forward and make this product better. Um, and so that’s just the posture we took. How did we do that with our event? Um, we did it by, you know, trying to get better speakers.

12:00
trying to get cooler locations, a better hotel. They wanted better parties. They wanted more networking opportunities. We hear up here in that in the initial outset, it’s like too many sessions. We just want to be able to like talk with each other and do business. Clear communication leading up to the event. So these are all the things that again, that our users told us. So as a business owner, it’s important to discover that feedback mechanism that you need to get and not be afraid of that. So many business owners I see.

12:29
afraid to hear what their customers actually think of their product and that’s such a There’s insecurity in that and I have that too Sometimes you don’t want to hear those negative things but and there’s so much gold and opening that conversation up with your customers. So Yeah, let me ask you this PT What are some of the biggest challenges right now that people are asking for in the financial creator community? So just in general sort of doing business in that community

12:59
How do you get a hold of brands to do deals? Because there are a lot of them are little scared right now to work with creators because of 2022 and sort of the FTX blow up. yes, that’s right. Yeah, I forgot about that. of a negative perception. I think sometimes with financial creators, especially YouTubers, overcoming that hurdle, overcoming the hurdle of sort of burnout is very common amongst this crew because you’re just a content creator and it seems like an endless.

13:27
project that you’re working on. There’s no stop and start to it. Yeah. Other, I would say also the, one of the biggest that our business straight up solves is the fact that being it’s kind of lonely being a creator, right? So you’re sort of doing this editing behind the camera, behind the mic. And, um, you know, eventually it’s just like, man, I wish I had, or my wife’s tired of hearing me talk about this thing, the neighbor, he’s an insurance or he doesn’t relate to actually what I’m doing. So.

13:56
How do I find this group of people that kind of understand me and I can relate to and kind of share ideas and move forward with, you I’m curious what types of content are working right now. Are those the people blogging or is it tick tock YouTube, uh, Instagram? Like what are people asking for right now? Yep. Uh, I think, I think you should think about your content like this and good creators out there like yourself are already doing it. They starting with some type of video.

14:24
script, either scripted or interview based, right? And then they take that and that conversation or that monologue then becomes a blog post. It becomes short form video that they can put into the feed of what everyone’s really doing, which is just flipping through their phone on these, um, know, Instagram stories and YouTube shorts and all this stuff. But that’s so that you gotta have that out there to get people into the deeper stuff.

14:51
But this deeper conversation is where the real content is being created and real relationships are being formed and people really get to know you and feel intimate with you and kind of understand your brand and really fall in love with you. Um, so that’s kind of the, that’s kind of what I see the best creators doing right now. They start with this either a conversation or that monologue and that that becomes a blog post. And then it’s chopped up into social media bits to go out on all the different channels where people are actually watching.

15:20
to attract them into the long form stuff. I guess what I’m asking is, you know, the brands that go to FinCon, what type of sponsorships are they offering? Are they looking for blogs, videos, shorts? I mean, what’s the trend? think it depends on who you’re talking to. Affiliate marketers are still very comfortable with blog content. Yeah, because it’s evergreen and it’s richer to a certain degree, or can be.

15:50
Um, so the affiliate, any affiliate performance marketer you’re going to be talking to just likes that sort of static web organic SEO based traffic. Yep. Campaigners typically are more comfortable with a video. So someone who’s really charismatic on video and doing really having a good conversation with their audience tends to do well with campaigns. So sponsored campaigns, pay per video, pay for podcast episode, that kind of stuff.

16:19
Um, and I think the context of it matters too. So if you’re a military finance show, I mean, there’s a handful of advertisers that are perfect fit for you and they’re going be more interested in working with you, regardless really of the size of your show. Um, and so I think you’re seeing a little bit more of a niche down with advertisers. They’re not just kind of throwing money at the Jake Paul’s of the world, even though that still does happen with big brands. They’re more interested in what you consider like a micro influencer or creator.

16:48
who is really targeted. So think about that. that’s the kind of advertising you want to attract, then get more targeted. Yeah, I remember when I was first starting out, the main advertisers I was attracting was very e-commerce specific. And I was surprised at how much they were willing to pay because the audience is so focused. So I would imagine the more you niche down and you find that perfect advertiser, they’ll probably be willing to pay you a decent amount of money. I think so.

17:17
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18:33
PT. Sorry, we want off the tangent. So what’s number two? Well, just to close the loop on one, a great, great book to continue discovering sort of what your customer wants is asked by Ryan Leveque. So that’s kind of my second resource I’ll drop in there. Okay. And it’s sort of helping you understand like how to have those conversations with your customer. The second is once you feel like you’ve perfected core product, then it’s time to innovate with new products. And this doesn’t have to be done.

18:59
And a big splash all at once. You can take sort of the lean startup method, which is to pick these, um, little elements of your event to expand upon or kind of introduce something new. Right. And the key here is two things. One, it allows you as an entrepreneur who is a creative to come up with something new without completely abandoning the thing that’s your bread and butter at this point. Right. So, you know, you know how it is, you’re a creative guy.

19:28
You’re kind of chasing these shiny objects and all over the place. And it’s like, Oh, I could do this new thing. So with an event, you don’t have to necessarily go create a new business. can still sort of just iterate within the event itself. The key is not being married to them and just, and using almost as like figure out how to test them. Right. So, so come up with these small innovations within your, uh, event or whatever business you’re running and then, uh, test them instead of sort of.

19:56
going full board down that road. And if one pops, then you know you’ve got sort of a new product line or you’ve got this new sort of benefit attached to what you’re doing. So that’s kind of the perspective to have, I guess, when you’re thinking about new things to create. having been to every FinCon, give me an example. Yep. We expanded what we offered sponsors. So that was some of the that’s some of the we sort of iterate on that every year. We come up with something new. We can offer sponsors for them to pick up.

20:26
whether that be a new party or a new sort of a mastermind element to the event or this new meetup thing we’re doing, or for instance, this year we brought on, um, we made our own video recording booth at FinCon this year. So FinCon just put one up, we have one and you can buy time in it and bring an influencer and do stuff in there while you’re there. So we’re just kind of come up. Yeah, we’re just coming up with these all kinds of new things, new tracks, new ticket.

20:54
Something we did really well was create the, pro pass. So I resisted in the first couple of years, cause I wanted it just to be so accessible. said, we need a $99 ticket. This was the first couple of think cons. was $99 to go to our conference. Um, and I was so stubborn about that. Everyone told me that’s so stupid. You need a more expensive ticket. You need to make some money off this thing. It took me too long to figure this out, but, uh, essentially I said, okay, how can we keep that low, but still make a little more margin? Well, let’s offer like.

21:24
some more advanced people, you know, this more premium value ticket. So we put them together, make it easier for them to meet with brands, give them some extra swag, make it do an extra party for them, not to create a VIP status at our event, because I’m very anti that, but just to give people more value and we can charge for it. creating a second ticket tier was a big part of sort of expanding what we do with our event.

21:51
I thought that was ingenious by the way. just thought I mentioned this and it’s unique to your event because the people who attend are actually creators who actually want to get brand deals. And the best way to do that is to get the pro pass to facilitate that. It’s almost like unlike any other conference that I’ve been to. I don’t think anyone else could pull that off. Yeah. Yeah. We’re we’re it made sense.

22:15
So you got to figure out with your event, you got to figure out where is the deeper value for your attendee and the sponsor. Right. And then Mary, the premium ticket to that activity. And then you found this out just through surveys from the attendees and that sort of thing that you knew that. my own, uh, inclinations because I am, I was a creator at the time in the space. I’m less and less so these days, but I was, I was definitely like, you know, a member of the tribe. And so.

22:45
These were my needs too. And to give credit where credit’s due, Blog World Expo did have something similar. Yeah. So I, I, I did see an somewhat of an example that Rick was doing over there and you could say I, you know, I stole that idea a little bit, but still, still like an artist, right? Cool. I like that. I’m asking you now for selfish reasons. Really? I do like that booth because sponsors always want influencer content, right?

23:15
And just casually pulling someone over to just record a quick testimonial video seems pretty easy. Yeah. It just gives them a space to activate. Now it’s our first year doing it. And to be honest with you, I’m not sure how successful it’s been in selling it. And it may be one of those things where once we introduce it, the brands get there and they see it in action. Then it makes more sense. So there’s probably a better way we could have introduced it where we had more intentionality around it. For instance, maybe we made it.

23:45
free for the first year, but you had to sign up for an official time slot. Um, that may have created more activation for it. And then next year, you know, we actually start charging for it. So yeah, you know, think about these things as you do them. You make some mistakes along the way, but again, don’t marry yourself to these new ideas. Just throw them out there within the umbrella. Don’t spend all your resources or time on them, but if one pops, then you know, you got something, you know, you got something else. Great. So, yeah. Awesome. Great advice.

24:14
Cool. Number three, you want to go to three? Yeah, let’s do it. Number three is creating content and social media. Obviously this was a no-brainer for us being a content, you know, financial content expo. We had to be sort of, yeah, but content can be scary for a busy entrepreneur. How do you get this done? Uh, for us, we reached initially into our attendee community, um, and said, is there anyone who can write?

24:41
You know, or we actually we asked for guest posts. Initially we started our blog at FinCon with guest posts. So we just asked people, the community, if they wanted to contribute something. And then we had the idea, Hey, instead of just a conference pamphlet, we give people when they walk up, what if they had articles in it too? So we make this little magazine that you could get when you showed up to the conference and it had these articles that these folks had contributed. So not only was it sort of a community building exercise, but it was a user generated. So didn’t.

25:09
necessarily take us a lot of time to do it. We iterated from that into a podcast, the financial blogger podcast, where I interviewed speakers and sponsors who were coming to the event, leading up to it. We did that for several years, just like in the last six months before the event, which is a perfect vehicle for to talk about the event, but also hear from the people who are going to be there, get the audience comfortable with, you know, certain speakers and sponsors and, uh, do the, you know, do the work of promoting the conference as well. Um,

25:38
We got into newsletters in 2019 and did really good community newsletter, but frankly, we’re slipping in the content game. And so we’re going to bring that back in the next couple of years to do a, to a better job of that. know, walk me through that actually. as you’re considering what content to create, I know you mentioned a podcast, you mentioned the blog. What, where’s your focus? Is it going to be on video? Is it going to be on blogging podcast?

26:03
We have great resources and assets already available. We have all the pictures from the event. have all the videos from the event, including all the sessions. So my big push going forward with, with the team is going to be to suggest that needs to be what’s, what’s our YouTube channel. It needs to be all those sessions and then those need to be chopped up into smaller bits. It’s embarrassing that we’re not doing it already, but we’re just, we’re coming out of the lean years of the pandemic. got through that and now we can start.

26:33
Spending some more money on marketing to do it right and we just had we have all the assets that a year’s worth of video and That becomes short form those can become bulk blog posts. We don’t have to create anything new, but I am excited about one new thing So another idea that I had for in terms of content And this was sort of after seeing what the starter story well starter story is a good example where he builds essentially a database of

27:02
businesses and then he uses that database to sort of create lists and create like bigger content ideas. And so when we sign people up to the event, we ask them all kinds of questions about what niche they’re involved in, um, whether from how many FinCons they’ve been to what media, what platforms they’re on, all this information that’s very rich and valuable, uh, which should be shown, you know, to the community to give them perspective.

27:30
And to help them sort of understand the trends and what’s working and also to highlight people who are doing good work. So this user data that we have from the, from registrations is something that I’m toying around with playing around with creating a database of sorts. So then we can take that database and use it to create lots of content ideas. You started to see me do it already with, I think I did a list of top affiliate programs for personal finance creators, top top personal finance journalists.

27:59
So I’m sort of, you know, there’s tons of content ideas based on just the data we have. So the assets and the data are the things that are going to help drive the content generation forward. It’s not going to be me doing sort of a one-on-one deal. It’s going to be sort of expanding all that information that we have. Yeah. I mean, I’m just thinking about the size of FinCon and the number of sessions you have enough content for years without having to do anything. Yep. And we’ve been somewhat foolishly putting it behind a paywall.

28:29
Uh, to see if we can get people to pay for that content. And we do, but I think it would be better served. It’s just the community had it on a free basis and we figured out another way to offer premium content down the road. we wanted to do that. Cause I’m in kind of the same boat. I’ve got like eight years worth of content that isn’t even really behind a paywall. Actually, it’s just behind a wall that’s not getting paid. Yeah. I’ve never seen one of your sessions from your event.

28:58
Except maybe a keynote for you one time. Yeah. Yeah. I published the keynotes, but yeah. Uh, cause we sell the virtual pass, you know, during the event, but you know, the value of the virtual pass kind of declines over the years. Right. Yep. So even if we just started, let’s say three months post event and started publishing it on YouTube one at a time, it’s not like everyone’s getting this big data dump. They’re getting it slowly dripped out over, over the years. And there’s so much stuff we already have in the back catalog. That’s evergreen.

29:28
We could release so it’s a matter of distribution. Yes, great idea and I’m sure people listening probably have gold mines of content somewhere. Whether it’s something you’ve done for work or whatnot that you can just break apart and start creating content to promote whatever you’re selling and if you don’t have it start start collecting it now. Yeah, for all right. had number four create or foster or community. So the big thing we do here is we let the community sort of help form the event right? So we’re.

29:57
in a posture always of this is for the creators that are there and it’s by them. So they help us, uh, it’s open speaker submissions. So we get over 500 speaker submissions every year to the event, which is great. And we, publicize that we almost run ads for that. Cause I just want as much coming in as possible because again, that, gives a, and I say that I shared this in our, in our previous episode was, it’s just like ownership.

30:25
You’ve got to give the attendees ownership in the event, right? You got to let, make them feel like they helped craft it. Right. So that’s what we do as much as possible with our community is we empower them to help us build this event. New ideas, some of the new innovations we’ve done at the event have been things that the community has contributed. And so we sort of have this open posture toward open sourcing the event itself. Um, and then for community sake, we do, uh, we do.

30:53
Facebook groups, we’re still stuck in those. They’re not ideal. We’re about to move away for them, I feel like, but through the years, they’ve been a tremendous tool to bring new people sort of into our tribe when the event is not going on or being promoted. And then for them to have conversations 24 seven, and that’s sort of, you’re moving away from Facebook, just curious what platform you’re considering at school. That’s probably the one I’ll end up with. There’s also circle. And then what’s the other one? Mighty networks. So it’s sort of amongst those three.

31:23
Um, but I really like what I see out of school. know I like the founder and I like, he’s sort of taken a slow growth method with the platform. Um, very intentional. Um, so, I’ve, and I’ve been in some communities on school before and enjoyed it. guess the problem with that is like most people don’t even know what it is or have the app or whatever. They’re not logged in, right? Right. That’s right. And yeah, so that’s a hurdle is getting, but half our audience is not on Facebook anymore.

31:52
So, yeah. So we’re going to lose them either way. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think community is important. We also did local meetups for a while. We still do a few of those. So we encourage people in cities all over the US and the world to get together on a quarterly basis. We give them funds. We create a community leader and we give that community leader some funds to throw the

32:21
meetups, the happy hours, get some appetizers, that kind of thing. And they all gather together. And I do that personally when I go to places, I go to other events. It’s a, community building exercise. For instance, I just got back from podcast movement and my whole deal there was to connect with every financial podcaster there was at the event. And how do I do that? I throw them a big meetup party, drinks. Um, and then we have a podcast booth in our booth.

32:49
where they can come and do their show. They can kind of hang around that area and meet other people. So being that community builder with your business, just continuing that throughout all you do is important. I love it. Community is tough, man. You’ve done a great job. It really is tough to foster community. is. And yeah, it’s easy to screw up too. But, but you know, if, your heart, if you’re in your heart and soul, you’re,

33:18
You really value like trying to help these folks then over time, you know, you’ll be able to build that. So, uh, I am so thankful for the community. And again, that goes sort of goes back to posture. I think it’s important as a business owner to see your customer as really the most important piece of this whole thing. And if you put them in that position, then you’ll treat them, you know, appropriately and build a community. right. Uh, number five, charge more.

33:47
This is hard for me because I’m a frugal guy and I don’t like, I don’t like paying for stuff myself sometimes. So it was hard for me to increase prices at the event, but we were able to do it through not necessarily charging the loyal customers more, but just everyone sort of after that point. we introduced price increases post what do call it pre-launch, you know, another thing we did was I sort of talked about the one ticket new created, but ultimately we landed on three tickets that we now offer. And so you it’s the rule of three.

34:17
right? So you can you can see the three prices out there. I sense that you had a question, Steve. So I was just gonna say, I’ve always thought that the ticket prices were ridiculously low for you. Like, if you look at how much I charge for mine, I mean, yours is like easily less than half or a third. And I’ve always wondered. Yeah, it was a no brainer, I think because you give so much value for the for the ticket price. How much is it now?

34:44
It’s still probably pretty cheap. Am I, I’m guessing it’s essentially a less, we try to keep it less than 300 for the entry. Exactly. Crazy. And then we do around 600 for what we call the pro pass. So it’s a double price for that. And then we offer a brand pass. So if you’re coming from the industry, um, sort of not necessarily in that creator, uh, avatar, if you’re sort of someone they’re doing business and you’re not sponsoring or you’re not exhibiting with us, then you’re going to pay a

35:11
the biggest premium and that’s a thousand dollar ticket. So that’s how we structure. And man, by having that brand pass up there, those will, we don’t sell that many of those, but having that thousand dollars up there makes that $600 ticket look really nice, you know, for the creator. And so we, we could see it as soon as we launched the three options, man, people moved toward that second option so fast. I mean, it’s just, that’s just how your mind works. Right. I can’t do three, but I can, I could do two, you know,

35:41
That’s just, that’s how we think. So, it’s, there’s real value in that. It’s just not, there’s not trickeration going on, but if when we structured it that way, we saw a big increase in the second option, uh, versus just having two tickets up there. How do you get that? six. I’m sorry. What, uh, how do get that price? Right. That’s a challenge. I think, I do think it’s important not to discount and I’ve, I’ve stopped offering as many discounts through the years.

36:10
But my people are just financial nerds and they, they live and die by the price they’re paying for something. So, you know, and again, I told you, my main goal is to make it a place where everyone’s there. And so we, we, we make it accessible. Yeah, for sure. It’s, it’s actually, I mean, just look at all the events PT. I think yours is like one of the least expensive ones out there. It really is pretty ridiculous. Well, maybe I’ll raise the prices.

36:39
No, we but just for the other event owners out there, we do graduate our prices. So by the time the event gets there, I do believe it’s more than 300. And we had started at like 225 or something. So we graduate our prices gives us something to market off of, and also incentivizes people to join us really early. So I would definitely do that. mean, everyone needs a sense of urgency. So we always have a cutoff where I say, hey, prices are going to go up next month or, and every month or every two weeks from here on out.

37:09
That’s what I do. My next one is grow through a talented team. And so I’ve been able to do this by, you know, finding folks in my life who were specialists at event marketing, event organization, and event branding, as well as the AV side of things. So those four areas are so key when you want to have make an event attractive, but also make it financially successful. Having those team members is so important.

37:39
So someone to organize it, I’m more of a visionary community builder, but I need someone to sort of hold down the details. And that was Jessica. She was a college buddy who was actually my VA at the time with my other business. And I said, you’re perfect for this. know, you should help me organize this event. Now she’s the CEO of the event and runs it by herself. So she’s amazing. amazing. She is. She is amazing. And

38:07
The community is very lucky to have her kind of running things. So thanks for saying that. And, um, you’re right. She is. So, uh, for me with her, she wasn’t an experienced, big experience at event planner, but it was someone I could trust, you know, cause I, and I knew she was a detailed person. And so I think it’s important. Your first hire needs to be someone who compliments. You know, what, what skills you have. So I was good with the community. was good in sort of casting this vision, uh, wrangling the troops.

38:37
But she was so good with the details and filling in all that stuff. So recognize yourself. If you’re to bring someone on what you need there and someone you can trust is so important. We share a lot of values. And so that’s when that’s how I knew she’d be great for that role on the AV side with events. It’s so important. You need a bulldog, someone who can negotiate on your behalf with the hotels and the venues. And, uh, certainly had that in Jessica’s brother, Justin, who has come to the event every year. And at one point he was an employee.

39:06
He was a contractor, then he was employee. And then I fired him and said, you need to go start your own business and then I’ll be your biggest customer. So that’s kind of the situation we have now that he has his own AV company and, and, and I’m his big customer. So he fights for me every, every year with the hotel and with other AV companies to try to get those costs down. Cause he understands them. I don’t understand them. He does. He makes those negotiations, makes this be successful. Um,

39:35
Thirdly is on the, would say the third key there in terms of hiring with events is the look and feel of the event. And that’s been Libby who we brought on in year three, who’s fantastic and making the event look professional, feel like a fun event and just look. But very attractive to both partners and attendees. And you’ve got to do that. I mean, the first couple of iterations were me designing some things along with some buddies and you know, we tried our best, but it was a little janky, you know,

40:05
Uh, but once Libby came on board, she made us look professional. Um, and that goes so far with an event because people are spending time, money, travel to get to your event. They need to know that it’s going to be run well and they’re not coming into some fire festival type situation, you know? So yes, those are the, those are the three big hires for me. And I would encourage folks to do that. The visual piece, man, that skyrocketed the value and perception of our event. So I would go hard on that piece of the event.

40:34
If you want to grow, do notice you have all these displays out, you know, as you’re walking into the event itself, they’re pretty elaborate. Yeah, she did. Yeah. She does a great job. That’s what you’re talking about, right? Yep. That and just online visually. So if you look at all our social channels, and our website itself, she does a fantastic job. And so that means investing in a good photographer at the event and a videographer at the event. Those are two great investments for you. So those that’s that’s we’ve we’ve used hiring to grow it.

41:03
And then finally is our last point here is acquisition. So in the event industry, the fastest way you can grow is to buy other events. And that’s what you see the biggest event conglomerates doing is they don’t waste time on trying to like grow the particular event they’ve purchased themselves. They just go buy another one. That’s, that’s how they grow because you have to wait a whole year, typically for an annual conference or trade show to grow the darn thing. And so this is a slog. mean, I’ve spent 10 years.

41:33
12 years now, you know, iterating 10%, 20 % growth, 10%, 20 % growth. And like, finally you get there, but if you want to do it faster, just acquire events, you know, I don’t have experience in that until now. I just actually made my first acquisition. I did not know that. event did you guys acquire? When’s this going to come out? Good question. Whenever you want it to come out, probably soon, probably within the next three weeks. I’ll go ahead and share it. We’ve purchased travel con. So

42:02
Oh, yeah. it’s another creator event, uh, outside of the finance space, obviously, but a creator event nonetheless, that’s very similarly modeled like FinCon. fact, Matt Kepnes, who created and runs that event, he and I, he and I go back a ways. We’ve chatted through the years and whenever he started his event, the first time he sort of leaned on me for advice and suggestions. And I actually kind of pushed him into that. Um, he has a successful business.

42:33
Uh, with travel business that he does the event for whatever reason didn’t work out for him. And so we are honored to take that event over, which I think he’s created an amazing brand loyalty and, um, just a great look and feel as well to his event. So we were going to get into the travel space with creators there. And so that’s kind of the next phase of growth for us, but I would encourage everyone to be looking in the event space for opportunities, especially right now.

43:02
Um, folks, it’s hard event. The event business is tough. And so there’s oftentimes people kind of coming out of it where it doesn’t make sense for them anymore. Um, and that might give you an opportunity to, grab up an event and, and try to make it, uh, make it better. I will say this. Uh, so the first year post pandemic, the, least for my event, it was just so, so people were just starting to come back. this last event that we had in May, full strength popped.

43:32
Uh, everyone’s just eager to get out and interact. good to hear. That’s good to hear. Yeah. We’re excited about this, this event too. And then we’re excited in general about the creator economy. Um, I think it’s only going to continue to grow. And with our experience with growing the community at FinCon, we know it can help grow the travel creator space as well and support those people and help them to make more deals with brands and just grow their businesses. So.

44:00
And I will say this for anyone listening, I am going to be speaking at FinCon and I will be trying to do a meetup of people in the class or, you know, if you just want to hang out. So definitely be there. As I mentioned before, the ticket price is very inexpensive for what you get. I guarantee you’ll meet a ton of cool people who might be members of your mastermind group someday like mine. And like I said, I’m just grateful for you, PT, for giving me my first speaking opportunity ever.

44:28
And I was shivering. was nervous, but then you asked me back and I spoke again. So started my speak. don’t want to say speaking career, but it sparked my love for speaking. thank you. welcome, man. You certainly, we were lucky to have you. I’ll just leave it at that. And we’ve always been blessed to be able to work with you, Steve and any event we put on. So thank you for being a part of this year as well. I look forward to seeing what you have to say on stage and, just.

44:56
having you and your folks there at the event. So, more importantly, where can people find out more about the event and all the different options and everything? What, the sessions are? Are they, are they all listed yet? The sessions are listed. We’ve got all our speakers up there with the exception of a few main stage folks like yourself who we haven’t announced yet. So some surprise, surprise announcements coming up, but you can go to finconnexpo.com and see the list of speakers, see the agenda.

45:24
sort of understand what the offering is and just get excited about, you know, being a part of this community. So love to have you join us. Cool. Hey, thanks PT for coming back on, man. You’ve been great.

45:40
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now like I mentioned earlier, I’m going to be speaking on the big stage at FinCon this year, so if you want to meet up, go to the FinCon website over at FinConExpo.com. For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeClooterJob.com slash episode 489. And once again, I want to thank Emerge Council for sponsoring this episode. Now if you sell on Amazon FBA or your own online store and you want to protect your intellectual property from theft and fraud, head on over to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

46:09
Just mention my name and you’ll get $100 off. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-C-L.com. I also want to thank Chase Diamond. Chase is my go-to guy when it comes to email marketing. And if you want to learn how to run your own successful email marketing campaigns, check out his course over at mywifequitterjob.com slash chase. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash C-H-A-S-E. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course.

46:38
Just tap in your email and ascended the course right away. Thanks for listening.