00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Today I’m thrilled to have Phil Taylor back on the show. And Phil is the founder of FinCon, which is the conference that literally launched my speaking career and allowed me to meet so many awesome entrepreneurs who I can now call my friends. And I’m actually speaking on the big stage at FinCon this year in New Orleans. So if you happen to be there, I’d love to hold a meetup. In any case,

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.

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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,

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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,

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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.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Today I’m thrilled to have Jody Cook back on the show. And this episode’s gonna be pretty cool because most of us would love to have some help with our everyday life. And in today’s podcast, Jody and I discuss ways to literally clone yourself using AI. But before we begin, I wanna give a quick shout out to Katita for sponsoring this episode.

00:28
Getita is a tool that basically gives you free money every single month when you sell on Amazon. I’m not even exaggerating. If you’ve been selling on Amazon for any length of time, you know that Amazon is horrible at managing your inventory and they lose or break your products all the time. In fact, I’m willing to bet that Amazon owes you money right now. But the problem is, is that in order to get your money back, you have to manually track your inventory and manually file for a reimbursement. Well, Getita handles all the paperwork for you and just takes a 25 % cut

00:56
of whatever you get back. So basically you only pay when Katita makes you money, which makes it a no brainer to sign up. Not only that, but Katita is giving away $400 in free reimbursements when you sign up over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Katita. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash G-E-T-I-D-A. I also want to thank Quiet Light for sponsoring this episode. If you are looking to buy or sell your business, Quiet Light Brokerage is my go-to firm to help you get top dollar for your company.

01:25
I’ve known Joe Valley and the guys over at Quiet Light for over 10 years now, and I trust and highly recommend their services. So if you’re looking to buy or sell a business, head on over to mywifequieterjob.com slash Quiet Light and get a free valuation of your business. Someone from Quiet Light will speak to you for free. And once again, that’s mywifequieterjob.com slash Q-U-I-E-T-L-I-G-H-T. Now onto the show.

01:55
Welcome to the My Wife, Quote, or Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Jodi Cook back on the show. Last time we had Jodi on, she had just sold her social media agency and published a book called The 10 Year Career. And the premise of that book was about how we can all retire within 10 years. let’s just say that I don’t think Jodi is gonna retire anytime soon because this woman is always up to something. This past year, she started a new company called CoachVox.ai.

02:21
which is a company that will allow you to clone yourself using AI. And in this episode, we’re talk about the power of AI, what AI tools that Jodi uses, and most importantly, how to make an AI copy of yourself. And with that, welcome back to the show, Jodi. How are you doing? Hello, thank you. I’m great, thank you. Jodi, catch me up. we didn’t talk that long ago. It was maybe five or six months ago or last year? Yes, we spoke. Yeah, five or six months ago.

02:49
and you had just finished your book or you had launched your book and I thought you were going to take it easy for a little bit. So tell me about how you came up with the idea and what happened. Like you were going to take it easy for a little bit but then you just had to start another company. Yeah so the actual length of time in between selling the old, selling the agency and starting this was two years which is quite a long time if you’re, if you just love running companies and so

03:19
Yeah, I spent that two years, I guess, running experiments, experiments in chilling out experiments in like teaching and writing and coaching and other little random things. And I did a bunch of powerlifting competitions and wrote a book and, and then I was like, I just really like owning a business and running a business. And so what I realized was the last business I was running wasn’t the one. And so I wanted to find the new one and the one that

03:45
You know what it’s like when you have one and you’re just like, oh my God, this is so much fun. And you just, you look forward to getting up each day. Like you’re so pumped to work on all of it. And I wanted to find that one to get that like passion for it again. So yeah, it started. No, I was just going to ask you, did you feel that way about your social media agency in the beginning? Yeah, yeah, for sure. In the, in the beginning. But when I started it, I was 22. And when I sold it, I was 32. And if you can imagine what a different person you are.

04:15
Yeah, between those two ages. It’s almost like I felt like I’d outgrown it. felt like it was a business of my former self. And the main question that lead to selling it actually was, if I was going to start a business from scratch today, would it be this one? And the answer was no. So that was partly how I knew it was time to sell that one. Okay. And then how did you come up with the idea for Coach Fox? So it was a summer of ideation where

04:45
my husband and I came up with a set of parameters for the business that we were going to start. And it was that it had to be location independent, it had to have the potential to be 100 million company, it had to be good for the world, it had to have an audience of entrepreneurs, and it had to there was a bunch of other different parameters, there’s about seven. And then we started thinking of ideas that had to fit those rules. And I’m so glad that we did that. Because if I didn’t have parameters, I think by now I would be a miserable gym owner.

05:14
because we would have just started a gym, not thought about it at all, not thought, hang on, is this really what we want? And that’s what we’d be doing right now. So we came up with, it was 30, it was 30 different ideas, because you know what it’s like, you think of an idea, and then you kind of, if you let yourself, you could buy the domain name, you could start it straight away, but we didn’t let ourselves do any of that. It was like, no domain names, nothing at all. Let’s only go ahead with the one when.

05:44
We just can’t stop thinking about it we’re absolutely sure it’s right. And we’ve talked to potential customers and we know that it could be the one. So Coachbox was actually idea 22 of 30. It wasn’t even like we kept going after we’d thought of it. Are you typically a husband wife team? Was your last business like that too or no? We didn’t start it together. He joined maybe three or four years in. Okay. And then you guys are in on this one together, right? Yes. Yeah. I’m like head of people. He’s head of product.

06:14
So we work in the same company, but we do very different roles. Nice. So walk me through this just in case people listening out there don’t really understand, you know, like the power AI. What does it really mean to clone yourself? Like, how does it work? So we were creating AI coaches. So a creator, so like it could be a coach, it could be an entrepreneur, it could be a content creator, someone who’s got content of some sort, whether that’s podcast episodes.

06:43
books, articles, know, anything. They can use that to make an AI version of them that’s formatted very much as a coach. So you might have seen things online where you can kind of Google someone’s content. So you could see what this podcast host has written about this subject and it would all come up. But this is more like an actual conversation with that person. And our creators are

07:12
training the AI version of them as a coach and then they’re seeing how it responds because they’re talking to it and they’re iterating it and they’re continuing to train it. So in theory, if you were to run a course for some reason, or could you train this AI to just literally answer the majority of the questions that your students have? Is that the idea? Pretty much, yeah.

07:42
one of the absolute enemies of all of this is just dusty content. So things that people have got that are hiding away on the computer, books that they’ve written that don’t get read, courses that they have produced that no one takes anymore. And it’s like, this is how you pretty much bring them to life. So one of the things that we found is really effective is when a coach has frameworks, or when they have these, the pillars of the things that they teach that fit into

08:13
like boxes or patterns or various different frameworks and they train their AI version with those and then they teach their AI version to walk their clients through that framework. So it’s very much like a coaching session. So I know when I work with my students, oftentimes what happens is I will ask them a series of questions before I can give an answer. Can you train the AI to

08:41
be like a human, not just be reactive, but proactive? Yeah, we how we created it is we’ve got different training rooms and there are seven of them. And in the first one, we’ve created some we’ve called them style sliders. And this is where someone gets their AI version to match their own style. And this has nothing to do with the content, just the style of them, like their tone, their voice. And there’s one slider that’s coach to mentor. And so if they are more like a coach, they’ll slide it up the coach end.

09:11
And this is how the AI will be asking questions and digging deeper and just digging, just asking a bit more to get to the root cause of something. Whereas if they are more on the mentor side, it’ll mean that it’s far less about, you know, tell me more about that or what do you think? And it’s more like, okay, here’s the answer. And so then they would, it would draw upon their content to then go and advise that person in the right way. so coaches can choose where they are on that scale.

09:39
And then there’s other things like formal to informal or serious to humorous or whether they want it to have quite short responses, so like more of a back and forth or whether it’s longer responses. So you can imagine some kind of creator who they have lots of information that they want to give people. And so they do want it to be big responses because they want it to be very considered and less of a back and forth. And so they can personalize it just absolutely loads with with training room one.

10:09
Interesting. Can you can you describe the training process? Let’s just take me for example, I’ve got maybe 400 lessons in my course, I’ve got 400 podcasts episodes, I got like a couple hundred YouTube videos. How does one train train the AI? So you would sign up login. Firstly, you would attack the style sliders. So you would really think, okay, who am I? How do I

10:36
how do I coach people, how do I mentor people and then match it up on those sliders, you would tell the training rooms about you. So you would give it an overview of you, who you are, your expertise, what lights you up, what makes you happy, what you’re motivated by. So it’s got this real nice kind of bio of you. And then after that, you would start to put in your language. So you will have your Steve-isms of how you say hi, how you say bye.

11:06
what you say before you’re going to ask a question, what you say before you’re going to make a statement. And we want the model to know that stuff because we want that to build familiarity straight away so that as soon as an audience member logs on, starts talking to you, they’re like, Whoa, this is Steve. That’s the idea behind that. then training room three is onboarding questions. So if you were going to coach anyone through to solving their business problems, you’ve probably got five.

11:36
five or more questions that you ask them first before you know if you can help. And so that’s where we do that. So one of our coaches is a relationship counselor. And so he’s got a bunch of different questions in about, you married? you like, how long have you been together? How did you meet? Like all that kind of stuff, because that’s the stuff that he would just ask clients before he started working with them. And then they can decide if that’s absolutely essential to know or if it’s okay that like if they if it can work around it. And then after that,

12:06
you decide how much you do want to dig deeper. So one of our creators is a recipe site and she’s got a bunch of different recipes that are all based on her grandma’s cooking. And if someone said to her AI version, can you give me a chicken recipe? She would give them a chicken recipe. She wouldn’t be like, chicken, you sure you want chicken? You had chicken last night.

12:34
And whereas someone who was like a leadership coach, they might dig deeper. And if someone said, okay, I’m struggling to show up in my role, they might be like, well, why is that like what’s happened before? Or what have we tried before? And they keep digging to trying it to the root cause. And then so that’s a lot of the configuration. And then after that, it’s all about the content. So in in training before we’ve made it so that you can upload stuff, and it will turn it into the format required to train your AI. So

13:02
that bit’s pretty exciting because it takes a lot of the hard work out of it. You don’t have to format it yourself. It figures it all out. And then Training Room 6 is the one that’s probably the most exciting because that’s where you have a live conversation with your AI version. So you’re kind of talking to yourself in a way. And you would ask it questions that your clients and your audience members are going to ask you and you would have a conversation and see what it comes back with. And it’s all going to be based on what you’ve trained it with so far.

13:32
but this is where you get to see what it comes back with, rate it on a scale of one to five. And then if it’s five, great, goes back into training the model, reinforcing what it’s already said. And if it’s not very good or if it’s just not what you would say, then you’d rank it like one to two stars and then edit it. And then that new edited version of what you wanted to say goes back and it just carries on improving and being more like you. And then final training room is just kind of setting up.

14:01
what information you want to collect before someone talks to it. So if you want to someone’s name, email address, and where you want to put it. So about a third of our creators are putting it in a membership site that they’ve already got to field questions and to talk to people about any, like they kind of bring the content to life that’s already in the membership site without spending any more of their time. Another third are using it on their website as like a

14:31
lead generation building their database. And then they teach their AI to send people to various different places to book a call or to buy something else or to buy a course or something. And then we’ve got, we’ve got some who are charging for access. So they are literally just charging for access to an AI version of them because they know how much value their, their AI can bring to people. So they’re making their brain available all the time for

15:00
a small monthly fee. Nice. On the training side, and I’ve had some experience with this. It seems like formatting everything in question and answer on a spreadsheet is how a lot of people are doing this. Does your tool just literally take videos, videos, podcasts and everything? Can you just throw it at throw all that stuff at you? for now, we still want text based information.

15:30
But yeah, in the future, we want someone to be able to throw absolutely anything at it and for it to turn into something. The problem that sometimes people face or the creators face with some of the information they upload is that like books have a lot of fluff and podcasts have a lot of fluff. So it’s getting it down to the absolute, what did they mean here?

15:55
And what’s the lesson and what’s the framework and what’s something that is replicable to then go and coach other people with? That’s the challenging side, but that all happens behind the scenes. So our creators don’t have to think about it. Yeah, I guess you could have the AI transform a podcast into, you know, question answer or whatever, or have it highlight the key points, right? There are length limits though. How do you get around the length limits for

16:22
Like if you feed in like a three hour podcast episode transcript, for example, it’s a ton of words. Can you feed in any length of text into your tool or? Yeah, we have ways. We’re working a lot on making it as user-friendly as possible. If we hit limits in the Coachbox AI side and the kind of backend side, then we figure out how to make it work so that it works for our creators.

16:50
Would you say the greatest hurdle in this is actually feeding the information into the tool or is it the training part or is it all kind of, that’s a lot of work. Like I’m just thinking to myself right now, like I’m transcribing the podcast, transcribing the videos and then organizing all this information. Is that the bulk of the work you think in getting set up? Yeah, I mean what I love about it is it’s very similar to writing a book. And I know that you’re familiar with this process of having just, just published yours and just hit the bestseller list.

17:20
It’s very front-end loaded. There’s a lot to do at the start. And then once that’s done, you’re doing the fun iteration stuff, but you’ve done the hard graft. So I feel like anything worthwhile has got that initial mountain at the start. then after that, as the technology builds, as our platform grows, it’s only going to get better. And everyone who’s been on board from now is going to just be able to benefit from that while they can put their feet up because they’ve already done the…

17:49
Yeah, just in your experience, how long has it taken for people to just kind of upload their stuff and train the AI? So we’ve been taking people through a six week program, week by week, showing them exactly how to do stuff. And they’re all, they’re all ready. Within that time, you could do it a lot faster, you could do a lot slower if you wanted to. And a lot of it depends on how much content someone has. But you don’t, someone doesn’t need

18:18
all their content, you don’t need to take everything that you’ve ever said and put it all in. We want someone to take the most relevant stuff and the stuff that you know, like they’re, they’re hard hitting frameworks, the information that they when they talk to people about, they’re like, Oh, my god, this is game changing. We want them to be we want them to almost do the editing beforehand before they put stuff in and just figure out what is actually relevant. Does the AI

18:46
grab knowledge outside of what you feed it. We have that as a setting. go back to the example of the lady who’s got the recipe site. She can decide whether someone asks a question about like a frog. I don’t know where frog popped into my head. So if someone asks for some certain beef recipe and she hasn’t got a certain beef recipe, she can decide whether she wants to say, no, I haven’t.

19:15
got that, but I can give you this one instead, but obviously in her very personable tone. Or she can decide whether she wants us to call upon the wider internet to provide a beef recipe. That’s everyone’s choice. And some of the people that we’ve got, they are using their AI as an internal tool for their team. So they’re, they’re the entrepreneur, they’ve got the knowledge, they know how their business works, and they know what decisions need to be made. So they give it to their team to make those decisions. But if there’s like a

19:44
fire in the building and their AI gets asked, okay, there’s the buildings on fire, what should we do? You don’t want them to make that up. You want it to come from the company handbook that they already uploaded. they can choose pretty much. Okay.

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21:17
I guess just some other concerns that people listening might have also is you’re feeding the AI all this information. And recently there was an article where Samsung used OpenAI to write some source code and they accidentally passed on some of their proprietary code over to OpenAI. Are there any protections in place in regards to the IP that you’re feeding it? Yeah, this is a massive topic. And especially because Apple banned their employees from using ChatGPT, I think it was the weak.

21:46
that ChatGPT got released on iPhone. And I think that’s quite funny because you can almost imagine like a junior Apple in the PR department types into ChatGPT, hey, write me a press release to tell you what’s gonna be announced at our next annual conference and put it in this style. It’s crazy. I think that there’s probably quite a low awareness of how much is just

22:15
like public. But yeah, we think about this a lot. And we’re we are thinking about this a lot because we want to be very much on the side of creators because without something like this, creators don’t really have control over their own work. So I don’t know if you’ve tried this, but if anyone out there has ever written an article, get the article’s title, go to chat GPT, type into chat GPT, write me an article with this exact title.

22:42
and then put the subheadings in as well and say, I want to have these subheadings, see what it comes out with and chances are some of the words it says will be your words. Yes. And it’s so horrible to see that because then you’re like, oh man, like someone else took me ages to write that a long time ago. Someone else could just write that now. So I don’t like the idea that creators don’t automatically have control over their own work and don’t automatically see the benefits. So a big part of the

23:12
I guess ethos behind Coachworks AI is that we think creators who’ve created, who’ve slaved away over their computers for years and years, we want them to have the proceeds, whether that is that they are charging for their AI version or whether it’s that they’re collecting the email addresses of the people who sign up. So yeah, we think about this a lot and we are very carefully on the side of creators. I think it’s nothing on your part, right?

23:40
Presumably you’re built on top of open AI or some framework, right? It’s not you that I’m concerned about. It’s passing it to open AI in the larger database. And that’s something you can’t prevent, right? There’s ways of ring-fencing stuff in such a way that there’s separate databases going on at any different time. Some stuff goes through open AI, some stuff doesn’t go through open AI. And I think like, well,

24:08
We’ll know more about this as we do more with it. Yeah, there’s kind of clever ways of creating your own databases and creating the things that you draw on without necessarily sharing stuff back. Since we’re on this subject, I just want to know your opinion. Right now, there’s all these content sites that are putting out great articles that are very helpful. And we’re getting traffic. Like I have a blog about e-commerce and people. I get a lot of traffic from Google.

24:38
But if people are just getting the answer, does what is your what are your views on just kind of like the end of search or content sites? Like are all we are all of us going to go out of business is our business model dead? What do you think? How do think it’s going to play out? I just don’t know. It’s fascinating because the ownership of content is a really interesting side of it. Because if yeah, if you if you type into

25:08
to ITPT or Google or anything, and you want an answer, and that answer has pretty much just come as an amalgamation of all the sites that were previously ranking, and now it’s just pulling off the top sentence and giving you that as the answer, then is that okay? It’s probably not okay, but then regulation feels like it’s so far off that it’s not about regulation. It’s about how entrepreneurs and writers and content creators adapt to mean that they don’t get left behind in that.

25:37
I honestly don’t know what the future is, I think I almost feel like that’s why it’s like, don’t think about, don’t think about using AI in terms of the content you can create. Think about using AI in terms of the tools you can build or how you can use it to ultimately deliver the same outcome to your customers, but in a different way. So one of our mutual friends actually is a personal style coach, guide.

26:07
And I love the idea that what he helps do is he helps men dress better, look better, feel better. But if you go back to like the platonic ideal of how he delivers that, it doesn’t have to be via a YouTube channel. It doesn’t have to be via content. It could be something else. It could be some kind of AI version of him that’s on everyone’s wardrobe so that you’re the person, he’s the person that everyone’s talking to when they’re actually getting dressed in the morning.

26:36
I think it brings loads of opportunities to just completely rethink how you do stuff, especially if all our websites are about to get taken out under our feet. Yeah, I was just thinking to myself, like, if I’m not getting traffic anymore from the content, I’m just not going to be putting out any more content publicly. And then that means like the AI will be starved of content. And I know you’re on the cutting edge of this stuff right now, you know, with the tools. Just curious.

27:04
where you see all that stuff going. Cause I know there’s a bunch of content creators that are up in arms and the flip side, there’s business owners like me and you, we’re great, right? Cause we see this as an opportunity to leverage this technology, to get more customers and to be more helpful. But at some point there’s this divide because content creators who are upset, they might be like, Hey, I just don’t want to have anything to do with this because, and I don’t want them crawling my content. And AI relies on the content.

27:33
Where do you see this going? I’m curious. mean, I see private membership groups as being a way bigger thing. And especially if there are, like, hopefully someone’s building some kind of private membership site where anything that you put on it isn’t crawled by various different AI tools. And that means that people who already have an audience and can get members of their private membership site are probably pretty well positioned to do that. And maybe that does replace the income of the website that is now being crawled. So

28:03
Yeah, I mean, one example. So you see a future of like siloed content, because I know, like Reddit no longer allows any crawling. And I think Stack Overflow doesn’t either. There’s a lot of sites that are closing themselves off. Is that is that what you foresee? Like your content siloed off and you sell access to it is what you foresee kind of? Possibly. mean, lot of our creators, especially the ones who are charging for access to their

28:32
AI, that’s pretty much what they’re doing. They’re saying, this is my content. This is my expertise. This is what I’ve written. I’m now putting it into an AI version of me that people have to pay to access. So it’s already happening in various different guises. And maybe what will happen more is that everything’s in membership sites of sorts that are protected, separate, ring fenced, and that’s just what people want. But maybe that I don’t know what the default will be.

29:00
I don’t know if the default will be that you publish a blog on the internet and you just assume it’s going to be crawled by AI sites. Or if the default will be that you have to like opt in because maybe that’s the problem at the moment. We haven’t opted into anything. We have to opt out somehow. That’s true. That’s true. I’m also curious of the customers of Coach Vox. Are they primarily coaches and trainers? what is like, who is this for? Who are your main clientele?

29:30
We have a meditation coach, we have a marketing podcast host, we have a productivity coach. They’re very much coaches, speakers, trainers, a lot of them are authors, people who have written books, made content, but don’t necessarily coach, don’t necessarily kind of have their…

29:56
have their client base, but somehow they’re using their knowledge to reach people for sure. So I would call them creators as a broad kind of headline. Interesting. So what I’m working on right now is like we get these questions for our online store about our products. And this is a easier problem to solve than what you’re trying to solve. But basically you feed in the items and then you feed in all your store policies, return policies and whatnot. And then the AI just basically answers all your customer service emails.

30:26
Yeah, has access to your database. Yeah. So like, I think stuff like that, like a kind of a chatbot kind of thing is super, is super useful for that kind of question. And the, yeah, the main, the main difference is it’s a create, we’re creating, we’re creating coaches and mentors, but yeah, for customer service, like you don’t, you don’t need a customer service person to hold your hand and

30:50
have empathy and really like want to look after you and want to help you through a challenge. You just need to know if you ship to Germany. So yeah, exactly. Yeah, your your problem is much harder to solve because you’re trying to replicate the personality of the person as well. Yes. Yeah. And that’s a really interesting side of it as well around the like, we’re thinking a lot about the human psychology of it. So if you speak to an AI coach who is based on a real person,

31:18
do you release the same hormones as you would if you were speaking with a real person? And so for now, maybe not, but there’s probably stuff that will change in the future as they get more sentient. And I almost feel like we’re just on the edge of what is normal, like how we’re letting robots into our lives and what right now is like, what? I would never do that. But in the future, it’s like, this is normal. So in the future, people are gonna have

31:48
boards of, they’re to have boards of AI coaches, you’re to have one for your marketing, you’re have one for your sales, you’re to have one for your relationship, one for your health, one for your fitness, everything else. And it’ll be, it’ll be just normal because you can access all of them at any given time. And it’ll be magic and you won’t care that they’re not real because they’re helping you and they’re cheaper and they’re available at all times. And so we want to be the people who build them and we want them to be based on real people, not just

32:17
generic kind of sources of knowledge from the random internet. I am curious and I’m not sure if you’re at liberty to share this stuff, but I’m just curious what the business models and the use cases of some of your clients are and how they are monetizing it. You mentioned earlier, one of your clients was selling access to their bot. Do you know how much they’re charging? Like this is all kind of new. So yeah, they’re charging $10 a month and they’ve got quite a few clients on it. So yeah, could be extra income stream.

32:46
If not, it’s if they’re not charging for it, it’s to collect email addresses and it’s to build familiarity with more people because they’ve all got because all the creators have got such good stuff that they do want to share out. So they kind of see it like the twenty twenty three version of writing a book or writing articles or doing a podcast. It’s like this is content that talks back. And then the other ones are.

33:12
Just curious for the $10 a month, do you guys handle the subscription part or does someone else have to build around it and just wall it off? Yeah, okay. So for now he is it’s in his own subscription. okay, our clients putting on their own subscription, and maybe something that we we take care of in the future. But for now, we don’t. And then yes, the third use case is the is the membership site is the I’m spending 10 hours a week in my Facebook group answering questions.

33:40
Can you, like, can my AI answer them instead?

33:46
Yeah, actually, are there connections to social media where you can have CoachFox.ai automatically respond? Yes. So at the moment, there are ways of embedding it in various different places. And then after that, it’s using API keys to put them in various different places. So yeah, like Slack, social media, et cetera. Right. Yeah, right. Through some glue logic, right?

34:16
It can access the coach. Okay, that’s kind of cool. So you’re saying that if I were to implement this, I could just invite people to a slack group. And then the slack is actually just like the front end for the AI. Yeah, 100%. What we’re not doing is we’re not getting anyone’s AI to pretend to be a human. When like it’s very transparent, you will know that you are speaking to an AI at all times. We’re not we’re not going down the route of saying, Oh, this is actually this is actually me. It’s all like this is an AI version of that person.

34:46
But yeah, in a stack group for sure. I’m just curious, has AI ever gone off the deep end? Because you’ve seen the articles where ChatGPT started getting like manic and depressive. Are those like switches that you can turn off? Are there safeguards against that? There are switches that we can turn off, there are safeguards against it. We’ve got people who have been representing CoachBox who we’ve got to talk to our AI coaches.

35:14
and try and get them to say something terrible. Try really hard, ask them, we actually, what did we call it? Questions to get me canceled. And it was like, let’s ask them ridiculously bad questions and see what happens. And they deal with them very well. They’re very pragmatic, they’re very reasonable. They’ve got boundaries. We encourage our creators to teach their AI boundaries. So if someone says to,

35:42
I made Jodi AI, that was our first prototype. turned my content into an AI version of me. And even if you ask it what its favorite ice cream flavor is, it’s like, let’s just get back to business. I don’t want to talk about ice cream. So you can, there’s ways of doing it. There’s ways of training it so that you don’t have to talk about what your favorite film is, what you’re wearing, what you’re, if you believe in God, et cetera, et cetera. Like there’s, yeah, they’ve got boundaries. Is there any danger of the AI?

36:10
pulling from someone else’s content by accident and being accused of plagiarism? Not in our systems. Not in your system, right? Because it’s just trained on your content, right? Yes. Okay. Do you guys have any examples just lying around? Like I know people in the audience want to see Jodi.ai. Is that public or? Yeah, course. Yeah, coachbox.ai. can sign up. You can get coached by Jodi.ai. You can chat to her about any business challenges that you’ve got. And yeah.

36:39
see what happens. We’re starting a challenge right now at the moment where because Jodi AI has got like 1000 clients. I’m not a coach and I’ve got 1000 coaching clients. It’s like it’s cool how much you can share your knowledge and help other people with their problems when you’re just not even there. But we’re starting a bit of a challenge at the moment with some more people around. They’re checking in, they’re having regular sessions with their AI coach, they’re checking in, they’re recording their metrics, they’re seeing how they get on with everything.

37:09
And I’m quite excited about the potential of AI coaching just in general. Walk me through Jodi AI. So you’re not charging for this, right? This is like a proof of concept or not charging for it. on the website. Okay. And then people just ask Jodi just business questions. Yeah. You said you have like a thousand people interacting with, with you or your AI version.

37:33
So you just go and go and say, hey, introduce yourself, talk about the kind of challenges that you’re going through. Bring up problems, you’ll get talked through my framework. yeah, it’s got I mean, it’s got areas that it’s trained in more than others, because ultimately, it’s a business coach, it talks about entrepreneurship, it talks about productivity, it talks about, like, how to get a lot of stuff done, and how to do like a sport and a business and stuff like that. So if you’re asking it about

38:01
you know, marriage counseling, meditation, the other things that some of our other coaches are trained in, then it wouldn’t be, it would just be like, this isn’t my area. But yeah, for sure. You’d be very welcome to. Nice. Does Jodi8.ai say something like suck it up and just go lift weights? Yes, probably, probably does. Can get a little bit satiated at times. Yeah. But yeah, it’s a very nice, it’s a very nice AI. Well, let’s set some expectations, right?

38:30
So let’s say someone were to sign up for Coach Vox. You say there’s a six week program. Does that imply that after six weeks you’ll have like this proof of concept down and working essentially? Yeah, so the six week program was something we started initially and that was to take a whole bunch of creators through and then we are opening up in about two weeks for a hundred more creators and then we’ll do a hundred at a time. But that will be the do it yourself kind of version.

38:58
A creator can log in, have access to all the training rooms at the same time. I mean, if you really, really worked on this, you could get this out in a, you could get your AI live in a couple of days. But we walk through people, we walk through every training room and a lot of detail with everyone, but we have all of the guidance from that program also available if you did need the extra help. I mean, walk me through like the minimum time commitment required to train an AI that that’s, realistically usable.

39:28
So the first three training rooms could take you a few hours. And then after that, it depends what content you’ve got available, where it is, where it is on your computer or like with your VA or wherever. And then after that, it’s a case of uploading it and going through what it comes out with and kind of, I’d say like, I don’t want to call it cleaning the data because that sounds a bit too technical, but working out if what it’s coming out with is actually like.

39:56
the stuff that you want to coach your clients through. But once you’ve done all that, which could be, I don’t know, another couple of hours, then the main part that we want our creators to hang out in is training room six, which is the fine tuning. And that’s where you are having the conversation back and forth with your AI. And that’s where you’re deciding if what it’s coming back with is akin to what you would have said and what you want it to talk to your clients about. And then you iterate from there. So if someone could upload all their stuff,

40:25
and then hang out loads in training room six, amazing, that would be really good. And they’ll know at that point, what level it’s at, they get a little score to say how client ready is your coach box AI so that we kind of recommend as well. And then they go from there. So the bulk of the work is not in uploading the content. And do you get better results just throwing all the transcripts at it or being more strategic?

40:53
with training the AI question answer style? Yeah, we’ve got a fair bit of guidance on this and you get better results being more strategic because you don’t want to just feed it with the fluff that happens. want it to… If you have got question and answer style stuff, then amazing because that’s exactly right. One of our creators has been writing books for the last 10 years and each paragraph has a headline.

41:22
So it’s almost like she’s been writing for 10 years with a view to training an AI model. It’s absolutely magical. So you might find that some of your content is more akin to that. So FAQs, for example, or if you have got questions that you’ve answered in membership group before, some of it will be question answer style. But if it’s not, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it. It just means that you might need to get rid of a lot of the fluff first. Got it.

41:49
Got it. And that stuff is probably what takes the most amount of time, right? Yeah. Even more so than the training and the fine-tuning. That sounds like the fun part, actually. The training and the fine-tuning. much fun. Yeah, it’s so much fun. And I think we start to realize that all of our creators, they start to think in terms of training their AI. So some of them have said to us, OK, now I’ve got an email and I’m just seeing this is information that I can use to train the model. And then they’re getting really excited because

42:16
they answer that email, but now they know that they never have to answer that question ever again, because people are going to talk to their AI and they’re going to get that same thing over and over again. So yeah, it’s exciting. I think the training the models absolutely fascinating to have a conversation with the version of yourself that exists, that’s going to go help other people while you’re not even there. It’s like, what, what world is this? Yeah, this sounds really exciting, Jodi. So if anyone listening wants to try this out and maybe

42:46
talk to the cloned version of yourself, where can they go? Everything is at coachbox.ai. So it’s C-O-A-C-H-B-O-X dot AI. And then you sign up and then you’re greeted with with Jodie.ai. You are. And then you can just ask Jodie anything. Ask anything. Ask anything. Talk about challenges. That’s that’s a really big thing. So kind of on the subject of

43:12
is AI coaching a thing that’s going to be really big in the future and you’ve got pros and cons. But some of the pros are like, it’s available all the time. It doesn’t cost anything to talk to that version of it. You can say really stupid stuff. Like you can say stuff that you wouldn’t want to waste someone’s time with if you were paying for a real coaching session. You can just go crazy. You can find out anything. That’s amazing. I can’t wait to go try it. Yeah. Well, hey, Jodi, thank you so much for just introducing everyone to this concept.

43:42
I really see this taking off. Anyone who’s in the coaching space, I was thinking like at a base level e-commerce, like if someone wants product recommendations, that can probably be something easily done by an AI, right? Based on the product description and maybe what you feed it as what your best sellers are, for example, or your highest margin products. You can just have your AI automatically lead people over there. So I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Jodi. Thank you so much for having me.

44:11
Hope you enjoyed that episode and I’m actually working on SteveBot as we speak. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 42. And once again, I want to thank Katita for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you sell on Amazon FBA and you like free money, you can get over $400 in free reimbursements when you sign up for Katita over at mywifequitterjob.com slash Katita. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash G-E-T-I-D-A.

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I also want to thank Quiet Light Brokerage for sponsoring this episode. Quiet Light Brokerage is my go-to place when I want to buy or sell a business. And I’ve them for over 10 years, recently sold a company through them, and I trust them 100%. So if you want a free valuation for your business, or if you just want to get some free advice, head on over to mywifequietlight.com. That’s mywifequietlight.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

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head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now today I’m thrilled to have Ryan Pineda on the show. And if you’re on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, you probably already know who Ryan is because he has a huge social media following. Back in 2015, with only $10,000 in the bank, he started his entrepreneurship journey by flipping houses. And since then he started six businesses generating over $10 million in revenue.

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working less than 30 hours per week. And in this episode, we’re going to break down how he did it. But before we begin, I want to give a quick shout out to Getita for sponsoring this episode. Getita is a tool that basically gives you free money every single month when you sell on Amazon. And I’m not even exaggerating. If you’ve been selling on Amazon FBA for any length of time, you know that Amazon is horrible at managing your inventory and they lose or break your products all the time. In fact, I’m to bet that Amazon owes you a ton of money right now. The problem though, is that in order to get your money back,

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If you’re looking to buy or sell your business, Quietlight Brokerage is my go-to firm to help you get top dollar for your company. I’ve known Joe Valley and the guys over at Quietlight for over 10 years now and I trust and highly recommend their services. So if you’re looking to buy or sell a business, head on over to mywifecoupterjob.com slash quietlight and get a free valuation of your business. Someone from Quietlight will speak to you for free. Once again, that’s mywifecoupterjob.com slash Q-U-I-E-T-L-I-G-H-T.

01:56
Now onto the show.

02:03
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Ryan Pineda on the show. Now, Ryan started his journey in the real estate industry back in 2010, only to discover that it wasn’t what he wanted to do. So in 2015, he took 10K from his bank account and started flipping houses and made millions of dollars. But that was just the beginning. Since then, he started six separate businesses that generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue. And he works less than 30 hours a week running them.

02:33
He’s also amassed over a million followers on social media where he teaches others how to achieve financial freedom. So in this episode, we’re going to break down what some of these businesses are and how he’s able to manage all of them in such a short period of time. And with that, welcome to show, Ryan. How are you doing today, man? What’s up, Steve? Happy to be here, man. Yeah. So I was looking on your website and I think you got more than six things. In fact, it kind of makes me a little dizzy.

02:58
You got a real estate investing course. I think you got an NFT project. Yeah, your own coin called tycoin. think business building class and agency and accounting agency. You even do a little bit of e commerce wholesale and investment group and a media company and 30 hours a week. How big is your team? Like how are you able to do all this stuff? Yeah, I think across all the companies we’re close to you know, 80 to 100 employees. Ah, okay. Yeah. Okay. So we got a lot of people.

03:27
I was just gonna say I have problems keeping up with two seven figure businesses, let alone the eight that you have. Are you particularly passionate about one over the other? Or do you just kind of like, how does one end up with eight? Especially when I’m asking? Yeah, to back up a little bit, I mean, I never considered myself to be an entrepreneur. You know, in my former life, I was a baseball player. You know, I got drafted by the Oakland A’s back in 2010. So

03:56
Oh, I was mainly just focused on being a great baseball player. And I kind of fell into entrepreneurship out of necessity because I had to work during the off seasons, you know, I was in the minor leagues, making 1200 bucks a month, like it was no money. So nobody was gonna give me a job either because I was leaving six months every year and I had to practice and all this stuff. So I had to become an entrepreneur. So, you know, long story short, I get my real estate license in 2010. Absolutely hate it.

04:26
because I just didn’t like working with clients. The commission sucked at that time, prices were low. It was just tough. So eventually gave that up. I started doing other side hustle stuff. Like I was a substitute teacher. I had my real first business success flipping couches actually. know, just like sofas you mean? Yeah, just just buying and selling couches. was like, okay, it was a thing that I just stumbled upon that, you know, at the peak, I was making about eight grand a month net doing that. And I was like, dude, this is a great business.

04:56
So, you know, after doing that for a little bit, I realized like, okay, I’m not gonna flip furniture the rest of my life. Let me find something new. And so I came back to real estate after quitting. And I was like, you know what, instead of being the agent, what if I was the buyer? Like I’ve always been good at finding deals. And so, you know, I started flipping houses, you know, and there’s a lot that goes into that. had to max out my credit cards and all this other stuff. I had to take hard money loans and just really go all in to,

05:25
buy my first deal. And thankfully, it worked out, even with all that risk. And, you know, I made 25 grand and, you know, from there, I just kept buying more and more houses. And that was how I first became successful tie became a millionaire. And it’s what led to all the other stuff because, you know, truthfully, I didn’t really want to do I’m like, you know what, I can flip out the rest of my life like this pretty easy. And, you know, it makes great money. It’s it’s it’s an industry that’s always going to be around. I’m like,

05:54
I could do this. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed deal making and other stuff. But, you know, during that time, now I started to get more questions of like people wanting to work with me, you know, success attracts success. And so, you know, we started a brokerage for agents, even though I didn’t like being an agent, because I’m like, look, if we’re going to fill up all these houses, we might as well like be the brand behind it. And like, all these people are going to want to join. So we ended up starting a brokerage called forever home realty that

06:23
we scaled to 200 agents before I got rid of it. Then a lot of people were asking me about, hey, how do you flip? Can you train me? And I’m like, dude, I do not want to do education, but let me write this book. So I wrote my first book called Flip Your Future back in 2018. And I created my first course and education company and threw an event and it was like, all right, this is like, it’s fun. But like my bread and butter’s actually flipping the homes.

06:53
So, you do that. And then eventually, you know, I’m still having success and people are like, who’s your CPA? Who’s your accountant? And I’m like, all right, let me, let me go to my guy and see if he wants to start a business. So we start an accounting firm called TrueBooks. And, know, so like those were like the first core businesses, like they just kind of were out of the success from my main business. And then, you know, as I got into social media, I started doing content in 2020.

07:22
more on more opportunities started to come about, you know, from from influence. And so I started a fund and we started buying big apartment buildings, then, you know, I started doing, you know, the NFT project, and it became the number one traded open sea or NFT on open sea, like it was crazy. You know, and I’ve just done a lot of different businesses at this point. And now we train people on, you know, other elements to general business, we train people how to create content.

07:48
You know, we just started the media company you were talking about where we produce content for entrepreneurs like so, you know, basically every business I’ve ever started came from demand that I already knew existed. Like people kept asking me for it. It’s like, dude, when people keep telling you they want to give you money, you’re just like, all right, fine. Let me let me build this.

08:14
You know what’s funny is you originally didn’t like being a real estate agent because you hated clients and it seems like almost all the things that you do involve client work, right? But there’s a big difference. So let me say I still don’t like working with clients. I like doing my own thing. Being like so my problem with being a realtor was like they owned you like you’re a slave to like them. You know, whatever. Right. And you still see it in industries like where that becomes the case. But

08:43
you know, in like our coaching programs now, yeah, we have students and clients, but I don’t have to like hold their hand and I’m not their accountability coach, like, you know, I hop on a call and like they can choose to listen or not. If they don’t want to listen, then whatever, I don’t care. It’s like, you have to be receptive to the information. Now, we do want them to have success because you know, we understand people do need their hands held, they do need accountability. I’m just not the guy doing it. I have coaches who will do that. So got it.

09:13
Okay, you know, it goes back to the real estate brokerage, you know, I built it to 200 agents, I didn’t mind owning the real estate brokerage, because I wasn’t the broker, you know, holding all these agents hands, I didn’t have to go show houses, if I got a lead, I just go give it to an agent, let him deal with it and make some money. You know, like, so, you know, I focus on the things I like to do, which are not usually like one one on one things. And I focus on

09:41
creating the solutions because those things are needed. I just don’t have to be the one to do them. It seems like in some of the businesses that you mentioned, it was all about finding the right partner, right? So you had people requesting accounting services. So you went up to your accountant and said, Hey, you want to start a business essentially? Yeah. Right. So we start, is that generally how you operate? Pretty much. I won’t start a business at this point unless we have an operator in place, right? So we got to have an op

10:09
because I’m not going to be in the day to day period, right? So it’s like when I look at the tax business, I’ve never done someone’s tax returns. Like I’m not sitting on these tax strategy calls, but I own the business, you know, and people trust it because of the brand, you know, that we’ve built, you know, with Pineda Media, the newest one, that one’s a very hands on thing for the entrepreneurs that we manage for their social media, like we hop on a zoom call with them for three hours at a time and pepper them with questions and try to coach them through

10:38
speaking and creating great content, and then we edit it for them and, you all this stuff. And it’s very, I would say it’s probably one of the more high maintenance things because like, this is their social media, this is their like personal brand and how they’re, you know, appearing to the world. So I think people are even more nitpicky with something like this. Yeah. And we’ve got people who are like, they like to help them. And they like doing that stuff. But it ain’t me. So let me ask you this. So if you’re starting these businesses,

11:08
and you’re not the operator, presumably your main value add is the lead flow, right? Coming into business. Yeah, I think I have probably I would say there are three elements that are why people want to partner with me, right? So number one, yeah, the marketing side of things like my, my own organic reach, like, or funneling them in from my other businesses, right? Because if somebody joins my education business, they need tax either way, right? So the fact that I own this business,

11:37
is a funnel to that business. And then my organic marketing will get trafficked. So like that, that’s obviously a huge thing. But you know, as I’m like starting to grow more in business, I’m starting to like, try and get away from that because I can only promote so many things. Yeah. So, you know, when people come to me now about partnership, I’m really not trying to be the promoter or the face, you know, the second way that we really add value is just through like the actual strategy and consulting and the resources like

12:07
the fact that we know how to build funnels and websites and ads and sales teams and hire like we know all of that at a very high level. We know how to scale companies, right? So if you come to us, we’re gonna put the pieces in place to build machines really, right? Like that’s what I’ve built is a bunch of machines. And so we’re gonna turn your business into a machine. And, you know, it’s gonna be a machine that doesn’t need my face on it. Like it can be a machine without me.

12:36
So like people partner up for that reason. You know, and then the third reason I would say is just capital, right? Like, I mean, we have capital if like, somebody’s looking for an investment, you know, and it makes sense. We’ll do that, right? Like our newest thing is called Panada Partners because it’s like, we want to partner up with more businesses at this point. Like I don’t want to necessarily start, like everything that I own to this point, I’ve started from zero. And you know, it’s like, we can do it. We’ve proved it time and time again, but it’s hard.

13:06
You know, like it’s easier to go take something established and blow it up. Yeah. Interesting. So for the people listening to my podcast, some of them probably haven’t started anything yet. So out of all the businesses that you’ve started and run, let’s say you were to start over from complete scratch. What would be attractive to you today and something that you’d stick with for at least, let’s say, three to five years? I mean, I love real estate. Look, as much as I said, I didn’t like it.

13:34
I didn’t like it as an agent, but I love it as an investor. It’s an industry that anyone can get started on today. You don’t need any kind of special skills or experience. You don’t even need a lot of money. Like there are ways to do real estate without using any of your own money. And it’s a skill that builds wealth. Like at the end of the day, you are going to build wealth through real estate if you hold it for the long haul, right? So to me, what I teach is there are really three pillars that you can build your wealth on.

14:03
Number one is business, right? You could start a business and build it up and like, that’s gonna make you money, okay? Number two is investments, okay? You can just become a very good investor, somebody who’s savvy and like, you make great deals and that’s how you grow your wealth. The third is influence. So if you become great on social media and you have influence, you’re gonna build a ton of wealth. You’re gonna get opportunities, you’re going to get just money flowing to you because attention is currency.

14:33
So, you know, at the end of the day, like, if you can do just one of those, you’ll become really wealthy. But if you could do a mix of those, you’re gonna, you’re just gonna kill it. Let’s talk about the influence factor, because I’ve seen you in a lot of places. I think you’re on YouTube, I see you on TikTok all over the place. And you’re pretty prolific. It’s it looks like you’re putting out multiple pieces of content per day. Is that accurate? We put out about 40 to 50 pieces per day. Okay, that’s nuts. Let’s talk about that.

15:03
So that sounds like a lot of time, but I presumably you probably produce one thing and you break it up into multiple pieces. So let’s talk about your process. Yeah, I mean, I probably spend 10 hours a week filming. that it’s not a ton. You know, that’s that kind of output or input creates the output I’m talking about. mean, because, you know, if you think about it, right, like podcasts are like kind of my favorite thing to do. And I like it because it’s informal. I don’t have to prepare. I just talk and it’s great.

15:32
And then we cut those up into different clips and we post those across all the different platforms. They then take what I say and they turn them into tweets, you know, they turn them into blog posts. Everything’s coming from my mouth. It’s just, you know, they’re taking what they think is great. And it’s a machine. It’s a machine like any other business of like, yo, I put in what I got to put in and they do the rest. if you were starting out like you were before when you were

16:01
kind of in debt and you had to borrow money and max out your credit cards. Just walk me through the process from scratch. So let’s say, would you start with a podcast? So if you’re broke and you’re trying to gain influence or make money, like what’s your goal? Well, I think influence leads to money, right? So the first step would be to build that influence, right? You know, I’ve debated about this, you know, because when I was broke 10 years ago, influence wasn’t

16:28
what it is today, right? right influencers are getting, you know, a lot more powerful than even most. So obviously, I think it’s a great tool. But what I would probably tell somebody who’s broke is, pick a tool that you’re naturally good at, right? So, you know, if you’re a great deal maker, and you’re a great salesperson, like I think business is an amazing thing, you should start a business. If you’re

16:56
great crunching numbers and investments, everything else, maybe you should try and get in the investment world of real estate or stocks or whatever. If you’re great on camera, you’re charismatic and you’ve got some interesting things to say, I would say the number one thing in influence is being creative. Like if you’re a creative person, then, you know, influence is the route. You know, I didn’t start with influence. I started with just investing. just bought real estate and that was how I, you know, whatever. And then I started to learn how to run a business.

17:24
because of real estate. And then I started other businesses. And then I got into influence later. And, you know, it made influence so much easier because I had things to talk about. You know, I had credibility at that point. So sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. You know, it doesn’t mean you can’t start from zero and just start making videos. You absolutely can people there are people who, you know, crush it who have no like, credibility yet. They’re just great content creators.

17:52
there’s nothing wrong with that. You just got to own it. You just got to be like, yeah, you know, like this is my journey. Like, and I’m trying these new things and I’m trying to make it and I’m documenting the journey. I think that’s amazing. So, you know, if I was broke, I would probably be doing a hybrid of trying to build a business, but I’m also going to document myself trying to build the business.

18:15
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18:45
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19:31
Your path you mentioned you maxed out credit cards and you had to get some hard money loans. Would you have taken that path again? Like you mentioned investing and that requires capital, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, 100%. I mean, I like where it turned out, right? But yeah, it turned out great, but it’s risky, right? I mean, let’s say the downturn happened right after you did that. It would have been tough.

19:55
I actually don’t think it was risky at all. And here’s why. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. This was my mindset going into it. Right. And I think a lot of young people struggle with this. So Steve, how old are you? I’m 48. You’re 48. And you got wife, kids. Yep. Yeah. So like, if you were to lose it all today, it’d be very like catastrophic. And so you know, as you get I don’t think so, actually, because once you know how to make money, it’s not a big deal. Yeah. But yeah, you’ll remake it and you’ll be fine. Right.

20:25
Yeah, but you know, whatever, it’ll suck for a period of Yeah, and yes, whatever. The thing is, like, as you get older, and you you make more money, and you have more to lose, then yes, things get riskier, because you have more to lose, even though your skills are so much better. Right. And also to the value of whatever you’re investing in or putting your times towards, like every dollar you build has least it has less value to you.

20:53
know, your first million dollars is so important, compared to if you’ve made 100 million, what’s another million, it doesn’t really matter. So, you know, it’s just this kind of weird thing where money is very important to you early on, and it becomes less important to you later. And therefore, you shouldn’t try to maximize return later, you should maximize risk. And you know, it’s like, man, adding another dollar doesn’t really matter. I’d rather just make sure I don’t lose this money. Right? That’s something to think about. But

21:23
When I was starting out, I was young, I was 24 years old, my wife was 21. And that’s when we got married. And, you know, we’re broke, right? And so for me, it’s like, all right, well, we’re broke. Let’s, let’s look at the scenarios here, we, we can continue on the path we are currently on, which will lead to continuing being broke. So like, that’s 100 % certainty, or we take a risk.

21:52
and we try this house flipping thing. Now what happens if we try this house flipping thing? Well, there’s lots of scenarios that can happen. You know, as an optimist, the best case scenario is we flip it, we go make 25 grand and it’s gonna be great, right? That’s the best case. What’s the, maybe likely case what could happen? Well, maybe we buy it and we realize like we screwed up on some things and we break even or we lose a little bit of money, right? And so it’s like, all right, there’s probably like a…

22:20
70 80 chance that I’m either breaking even or doing good like that’s probably what it is and Remember I was a realtor before so I still had real estate experience like I understood values then there’s probably a 20 % chance of like catastrophe Where things that the fan I totally bought wrong I can’t sell the house and I’m gonna go lose 20 grand or I’m gonna get foreclosed on or

22:47
you I’m gonna lose the house and now I’m 50 grand in debt and like, that is what it is. All right, well, let’s just think what happens at this worst case scenario at 24 years old, I just freaking declare bankruptcy. And I start fresh in two years, whoop dee doo, you know, right. So to me, I had nothing to lose at that point. That makes sense. I everything to gain. And this is what I try to tell young entrepreneurs all the time. Like, dude, I cannot afford to

23:16
buy your coaching program or somebody else’s I don’t have the money. And I’m like, you have credit cards? Can you get debt? They’re like, Oh, well, yeah, but I’m not gonna I can’t go into debt. And I’m like, dude, what do you think real estate is? Yeah, real estate, you’re going into debt. A credit card is no different than a mortgage or student debt is debt. It’s just a matter of how you use the debt. If you use the debt to go make more money, whether it’s through education or an investment or a business, then it’s not debt. It’s just it’s

23:46
it’s a tool. And so, you know, I tell them, I’m like, Well, you know, what’s the worst that happens? You’re in debt, and you didn’t get what you needed to get done. Like, I know what we teach is legit. So it’s on you if you don’t do it, right. But yeah, if you make a mistake, at least you’ll have made a mistake. And you’ll have learned from it. And then you’ll be able to go do it better the next time, right? Like, you will now have experience and you’ll be able to

24:14
to figure it out again. And we’ve had students who do that. Like not everyone makes money their first deal, right? Like they make mistakes. And they’re totally like the most successful people are like, dude, this is great. Like, I’m glad I went through that. Now I know. And so yeah, when you’re young and you’re broke, you should go into debt. You have nothing to lose. Zero is the same as negative 10,000 or negative. I agree with that. Actually. I agree with that. Do you have kids, Ryan? Yeah, I have a third on the way. Okay. Wow. All right. So

24:43
Just by nature of the content that I put out and the fact that my blog and podcast is called My Wife Quit Her Job, I actually attract a lot of females over the age of 35 who have kids. So that advice is great for someone young. Let’s say you’re broke and you have kids and responsibilities. How would your advice change? Yeah, and this is what I wanted to bring up as you get older, you your risk tolerance becomes more strict, right? That’s just natural.

25:10
when you have more responsibility with kids and a spouse and everything else, like you can’t make the same reckless decisions that you would make when you’re single or when you’re you don’t have kids and you’re you’re not young. So in my particular situation, I felt like I had no risk even though most people wouldn’t have did that. Yep. Yep. Now when you’re talking about a, you know, 35 year old woman who’s got a few kids and I you know,

25:37
does her husband work? Like, I mean, there’s context to every situation. Sure. don’t Yeah, of course. Right. Yeah. But I would think, you know, if you’re married, and your husband’s working, and you’re staying at home, because that’s the title of the podcast, my wife’s a stay at home mom, too. You know, you trying a side hustle, I think has no risk, right? Like, I agree. Why are you not if money is tight for the family, and your husband works a normal W two that it is what it is, then I

26:06
There’s so many ways to make money online and still be a stay at home mom. Like I don’t think there’s any reason you can’t try and put some effort into a side hustle. And I think it has very little risk. So the question is, what would you try? Cause you’ve done a lot of things, right? It goes back to all those three pillars, right? It’s like, okay, you’re either going for influence. You’re going to start a business or you’re going to start investing. But presumably you wouldn’t have taken that hard money loan now with three kids, right? And you didn’t.

26:35
and you just had a regular job? I mean, I’m a risky person by nature. I’ve, I’ve, okay, well, also, too. I’ve never had a job. So I don’t even know. Like, it’s just an, it’s just an area that would never play out. The only job I ever had was with the Oakland A’s when they signed me. And that was it. Everything else, like, I was hustling. But look, if I had a job, and three kids, and, you know, we are living paycheck to paycheck, my wife wasn’t working, let’s like put myself in like the

27:05
maybe a standard situation that people have to make a decision on. For me personally, okay, I always look at the future. I’m very like, man, where am I going? If I’m not on the path of where I want to be, and I know that this current path I’m on is going to lead me to something I don’t want to be, then I cannot stay on this path. There’s no there’s no reason to stay on this path. And so if you’re at a job, and I want to say a dead end job, but like if you’re at a job that’s like,

27:35
you know, this is not going to be the path for where you want your family to be, then it is your obligation to switch the path. Now, you don’t have to switch and just like, quit your job tomorrow. I’m not saying that. But I am saying you need to start forging a new path as you start to transition because your current path is wrong. So, you know, if I was this guy who was working a job and paycheck to paycheck, I didn’t want my wife to work because I wanted her to take care of the kids and everything else.

28:05
then I would be spending every waking moment that I had available to me like learning a new skill. Okay. And whatever that skill was content, real estate, side hustle, online business. I don’t give a crap. You want to flip couches. Cool. But you know, you got to want it bad enough. I don’t care who you are today. I mean, if you work 60 hours a week at your current job, I mean, cool. You can still learn skills. How many hours are in a week? I don’t know.

28:33
but you got time to go learn new skills. And so that’s what it’s gonna take. You’re gonna have to learn a new skill one way or the other if you wanna get out of your situation. It’s not gonna magically change. You can’t just hope for a raise. You you can’t just, you gotta forge a path and there’s lots of tools available. Yeah, the reason why I’m asking all these questions is I get them all the time. So I run a podcast, I have a YouTube channel, blog, and I also run an e-commerce store with my wife that sells handkerchiefs. And I’m always asked,

29:01
You know, out of all the things, I also run an event. So out of all the things that you do, you know, which one would you do in this certain situation? And my answer usually is like the content side can take a while. Yep. Right. I say maybe two or three years if you want to go down that path. If you need money sooner than that, then just selling something like you mentioned, deal flow, whatever it is, will make you money sooner or even just freelancing or stuff like that. Yep. So that’s what I was trying to get out of you is like, you’ve done a lot of different things. Like they’re all pretty disparate. Yeah.

29:32
And the question is, like, if someone came to you and asked that exact question, yeah, what would you have done? What would you advise them? Yeah, yeah. It’s, mean, it’s funny, because like, I’m not a one size fits all guy. That’s like you say, Yeah, well, hey, I mean, look, if you’re good looking, and you’re charismatic, and whatever, like contents, you’re gonna do better at content than the guy who’s not. Right? So it’s like, absolutely true. Everyone has a unique skill set. If you’re introverted, and you hate sales, you’re not going to be a dealmaker. Probably.

30:01
Like, so you shouldn’t be thinking about deal making. You should be thinking about freelancing and doing back end stuff for people. So like, it’s so hard, but you I forgot you asked me the question of what I have maxed out my credit cards in that hypothetical situation. And the answer is yes. I mean, the answer is like, I got to forge a new path. Let’s say I learned the skill of flipping houses. I’m confident in my ability, even though I’ve never done it. I think I know enough. I mean, I have to take the risk at this point. And the reality is if

30:30
If I fail, I’m going to learn something and yeah, I might, you know, put us in huge credit card debt and whatever, but go bankrupt. Like two years from now, you’ll be back. Fine. The same. You’re all right. Once again, I don’t think they’re in much of a different situation. You’re still, you know, paycheck to paycheck, you know, you probably already have some current debt anyways. Like it’s, really not that big of a difference. Like I said, zero is the same as negative 50,000. Like they’re the same.

30:59
So it’s so interesting, Ryan, like we’re pretty different personality wise. Maybe it’s just because the way I was brought up just more conservative use, you have a lot more risk tolerance than I do, which is which is really interesting. Actually, I find it pretty fascinating. Yeah, let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about automation. So you’re able to do all of these things in a short period of time, because you have these systems in place. Yeah. What are these systems, for example, that you have? And what are some of your philosophies on that on that matter? Hmm. I mean, we got a lot of systems in place. Yeah. And also,

31:28
Speaking of risk tolerance, too, you know, my family lost everything. You know, my mom was a realtor. She, you know, got killed and or not killed, but like, you know, her business got destroyed in 2008 when Oh, yeah, I remember that. And so like, she never recovered. My dad had a convenience store. You know, and I think he had like two or three and then lost them all. Never recovered. Thankfully, you know, my dad works for me now as a project manager and

31:58
You know, I’ve been able to retire him. He likes to work, so it’s fine. But they were always anti-risk because they had been burned so bad. And so my mom never wanted me to get into real estate. She was like, go get a safe government job. Like do those things and whatever. So my parents said too. Yeah. I’m like, no, I’m good. Like I’m not going to do that. And so yeah, I’ve always been a risk taker, not from influence or any, but just like, bro, if you want to accomplish anything big.

32:27
you got to take risk. And if you choose not to take risk, you’re taking a risk that you think everything will stay status quo, which is not going to happen. AI is going to take a job before status quo stays the same, right? So you should be always on like the innovation side. But anyways, you know, how do we handle everything today? I mean, just great people, man. I mean, at the end of the day, I am just very trusting.

32:55
of my staff and team, like I believe they’re going to get things done. I believe that, you know, we’ve got good processes to make sure they’re doing their jobs. And I believe they’re smart enough to fix processes when they’re, you know, not working the right way. And so, you know, it takes a lot of trust to have the right systems in place. But you know, every business has like, SOPs and everything else that you need for anybody to come in and do the job. You know, what’s funny is,

33:24
And the way I operate is I’m a little anti employee kind of kind of like the opposite of you actually, I used to be an engineering director guy, and I had a lot of people under me. And like they were great workers. But I remember I hated dealing with like the emotional side. She was management. Yeah, you know what I mean? Yep. So that’s why I’ve run all my stuff with as few employees as possible. And I used to be an engineer. So I code up all my own stuff. And most of my stuff is automated with machines and code got it and

33:51
We’re living in a golden age, right, of AI. You should be able to, in theory, the next few years, automate even more stuff. What is your philosophy on those things? are you, you mentioned you’re very trusting. Have you ever been burned before? Can you talk about like the overhead of managing so many people? You said there’s what, 90 people in your organization? Yeah, so I think a few things, right? So one is, have I been burned before? Oh yeah, freaking every week, some stupid happens, right? Somebody,

34:20
doesn’t close a deal, they should have closed somebody pisses off a customer somebody. I mean, that’s that’s what running a business is, you know? Yeah. McDonald’s screws up every freaking day, right? But they’re still McDonald’s. And, you know, they’re good. So look, at the end of the day, no big thing has ever been done by a small, small team or just one person, right? Like you want to create big, you need a lot of people. That’s just what it comes down to. And so

34:48
you know, and especially with any business like with scale just comes just doing more of what you currently do. So it’s like, if I want to sell more, I need more sales guys. It’s not like I have to reinvent the script or anything. I just got to increase the inputs of, how do we get more leads? And then now that we have more leads, how do we handle those leads? Well, I need more sales guys, right? So, you know, in order to scale, it always requires more human capital. know, let me ask you this.

35:18
What is your reason for wanting to scale so large? What is your reason to be in business in the first place? What do you value the most? So there’s a lot of philosophy behind everything. there’s three stages to making money. The first is you’re just trying to provide for yourself. And that’s where most people are, unfortunately. The second is once you’ve provided for yourself, it’s, man, how do I provide for those who are close to me? My parents, my whatever, right?

35:47
And then once you’ve done that, the third is, man, all right, well, how do I really just add value to the world, you know, at this point, because everything else that’s close to me is done. So, you know, for me, you know, I’m in that stage three. And, you know, you’re asking me about my book and the everything behind them, like, I’m just giving it away for free. Basically, like, I don’t, it doesn’t matter to me. Like, it’s really a here, let me help the world type play. Sure. And when I think about

36:15
social media and the businesses I’m building, you know, the one thing we teach is like reverse engineering from the big goal to figuring out what you should be doing on day-to-day basis. So like, for me, as a Christian, my big goal is just bringing more people to Jesus. And so like, when you read The Wealthy Way, there’s so many elements of faith in there. You know, we just started a new company called Wealthy Kingdom for Christian entrepreneurs. You know, my content has a lot of faith-based elements in it.

36:45
And for me, I just realized like, you know, there’s not a lot of Christian entrepreneurs out there that are like have influence and many are actually anti Christian, you know, there’s lots of atheists, there’s Scientology, there’s like, just people who, whatever, right. And so I’m looking at this and I’m like, man, if this is what every young entrepreneur is watching, and yeah, they’re learning great business tactics and all this, but they’re going to be screwed for eternity because nobody’s telling him the truth.

37:14
That’s a huge problem. And so, you know, I’ve kind of taken on myself of like, look, you know, the more successful I become in business, the more that more people are going to listen to me because of the success, then I can tell them the truth of what’s actually important. And I can have authority to say it because it’s not like I’m some broke guy telling you that you should do that. It’s like, no, dude, like I’ve done everything you want to do. It’s not as important as you think.

37:43
this is far more important. you know, social media is like the biggest way to get any message out today. That’s why influence is so important. You know, so business influence and then, you know, the more money you make, right, you can fund your initiatives that are important to you. So, you know, I’ve got enough crap for me. Okay. How do I, how do I fund, you know, building churches and mission trips and all these other things that need funding? Because like, I believe

38:12
you know, as a Christian, we’re all part of the body, meaning we all have a separate role to play. And so it’s like, my role may not be to be the pastor, my role may not be to be the missionary, but somebody’s got to finance those people because that is their role. And so if like, I have this skill set, once again, goes back to skill set. such a big proponent of understanding who you are and what your skill set is and what your natural God given gifts are. If you can know those, then you can understand what your purpose is for

38:42
using those skills. you know, if you’re a freaking rock star salesperson, be a rock star salesperson. Don’t try to be an accountant, you know, so yeah, everything stems back to the end goal of why I’m on this earth and you know what God’s calling me to do. And right now it’s like, dude, it to me, it would be disobedient to just take it easy and chill. Like that’s why you’ll never hear me talk about retirement. It’s like,

39:11
There’s nowhere in the Bible that retirement is like discussed. It’s not a thing, right? We’re meant to work. And if I was just to be like, yeah, you know, I got enough passive income now that I can go live on the beach and drink pina coladas the rest of my days and play golf. What a waste of talent, you know, and like, that is not what God called us to do. So I’m motivated every day to, go do things and use the gifts.

39:37
Yeah, I agree with you. I’m never retiring either. The only thing that I’ve been running into problems with is, I don’t know how old your kids are. My kids are teenagers now. And there’s a lot of stuff. You know, so I find myself like, they’re always my top priority. And it, you know, it takes a lot of time and you just can’t do everything. Yeah. And on the flip side, also just, I don’t like dealing with like the emotional headaches of

40:01
Managing. I like I don’t know how you do it. I’m just trying to learn how you’re doing it. Yeah, because I don’t want 80 people. Yeah, I definitely don’t need people. Yeah, that was the first half of your question. So like, here’s the thing. I don’t want to manage 80 people either did like, so, you know, it goes back to the visionary integrator role. like, it just became famous in EOS. And, you know, at the end of the day, I’m a visionary through and through, I am not a manager, which is like why I didn’t want to be a realtor like that. That’s being a manager. So I’m not at the office right now.

40:31
I am not managing the people working on a day to day basis. I don’t run meetings. I’m not sitting in any of this stuff. I’m out here creating inspiring, you know, thinking of big ideas and vision. And that’s what pushes the company to be as because basically the company can only be as big as I envision it, right? Like nobody else is going to, you know, push forward, right? But there’s lots of people who can, I can find to help execute my vision and manage the day to day. And so, you know, I don’t manage anyone truthfully.

41:00
the way we’re structured right now is I have a parent company called the Panada company. And we have a C suite. So I have a CEO, CFO, CTO, all that. And their job is to support all the sister companies in the portfolio. And so my COO checks in with the COO of, you know, wealthy investor. And he says, Hey, how’s everything going? Are we hitting our numbers like

41:26
Do we got to make any adjustments? Do we got to hire somebody? Do we got to fire somebody? Like he’s doing all that stuff. I don’t have those conversations. Like I truthfully, I walk in the office and there’s new people there every week. I’m like, Oh, who are you? You know, like, don’t know. And then I’ve never talked to him. And then, you know, I meet him because it’s the COOs job to go hire them and manage them and fire them and, you know, like it’s not working out. So I don’t do any management at all, really. Nice. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, Ryan.

41:56
Hey, I want to be respectful of your time. Where can people find more about your book and all the different things that you do? Yeah, I would say go to wealthyway.com to go get access to my book and a bunch of free courses and resources. You know, that’s kind of like one of my biggest givebacks to the world. So definitely check that out. And then, you know, for finding me, I’m everywhere on social media. So if you just search Ryan Panetta, you’ll find me and, know, hopefully you like the content and it’s valuable. Cool.

42:25
Well, Ryan, really appreciate your time, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me.

42:32
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you want to learn more about Ryan, head on over to his website over at RyanPanetta.com. For more information about this episode, go to MyWifeCouterJob.com slash episode 480. And once again, I want to thank Getita for sponsoring this episode. If you sell on Amazon FBA and you like free money, you can get over $400 in free reimbursements when you sign up for Getita over at MyWifeCouterJob.com slash Getita. That’s MyWifeCouterJob.com slash getida. I also want to thank Quiet Light Brokerage.

43:02
Quiet Light Brokerage is my go-to place when I want to buy or sell a business and I’ve known them for over 10 years, recently sold a company through them and I trust them 100%. If you want a free valuation for your business or if you just want to get some free advice, head on over to mywifequietlight.com. That’s mywifequietlight.com. if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequietlight.com and sign up for my free six day mini course.

43:31
Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.